An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

by Todd S. Purdum

  “Oh, really?” Kennedy said.

  “They got the right answers, too,” the president replied.

  As evening came, Johnson touched base with George Reedy. The president was testy and full of complaints. He informed his press secretary that he did not intend to return to Washington the next day—Sunday—and would probably not return until Monday, July 6. But he did not want Reedy to alert the traveling press to these plans.

  Then he seized on a quote from Reedy in that day’s news reports—that the president had “been in touch with Martin Luther King continuously.”

  “No, that’s … that’s a mis … at the time … mistake,” Reedy harrumphed.

  “I haven’t been in touch with him at all,” Johnson spat back, “and don’t want to be. You know his record.”

  “Yeah, I know,” a sheepish Reedy replied.

  “It’s the last thing,” Johnson continued, seeming to quote from some invisible report: “‘The President has been in continual touch with Dr. King.’”

  “I said, ‘From time to time he has seen Martin Luther King,’ is what I said,” Reedy explained.

  “Well, why do you say that?” Johnson demanded.

  “Well,” Reedy said, “you saw him at the ceremony.”

  “Well,” Johnson snapped, “I say, why do you say it?”

  “Because I was asked, and because they’d seen you there,” Reedy said.

  “I’m sorry he was there,” Johnson said. “It was very unfortunate he was there, and don’t you get hung in on it. And then you get it in a transcript that he’s been in continual touch with him. That’s the last thing I want. They’re making an issue on you, and you’ll hear from King before this campaign’s over with. And then you go to making an explanation, it won’t do any good. So I’d just say … that you don’t know a damn thing about who I’ve seen. And you don’t. If they ask you if I’ve seen him you tell them you don’t know. Don’t get in there that I’m in continuous touch with him.”

  On the 188th anniversary of the first July 4th, those were the last recorded thoughts of the thirty-sixth president of the United States. And at the moment of Lyndon Johnson’s greatest triumph, those angry words were a prescient sign of an unfinished story: the half century of advancement and retreat, of progress and pain, of hope and despair that the brave men and women of both races and both parties who made H.R. 7152—and their sons and daughters—would yet live to see.

  Epilogue

  FOR ALL THE STORM over the passage of what had now officially become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, acceptance of the new law was swift and widespread. There were stubborn pockets of defiance, though, especially in Mississippi and Alabama. The Robert E. Lee Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi, closed its doors “in despair” on July 6, 1964, rather than accept integration. (It would reopen some months later as a private club before being sold to the state for use as an office building.) Far more typical was the experience of Captain Colin Powell, who in the summer of 1964 went back to the same Georgia drive-in that had refused to serve him just months before and ordered a hamburger without incident.

  “All across the South there was this sense of openness, the sense of ‘We can do it now,’” John Lewis would recall. In December 1964, the Supreme Court upheld Title II, the bill’s public accommodations section, assuring that its eventual enforcement would be in no doubt in every corner of the land. Scores, if not hundreds, of legal challenges to other sections of the bill would follow, but the essence of its constitutional validity had been swiftly upheld.

  Meantime, the balance that Dirksen had struck in Title VII in favor of court rulings—not enforcement action by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—gave rise to a robust wave of private class action employment discrimination lawsuits that effectively altered the composition of the workforce in ways that an administrative agency alone might not have managed (even if the agency itself did not open its doors for business until a full year after the bill was signed). The federal funds cutoff provision of Title VI revolutionized the enforcement of the Brown decision, as school districts around the country scrambled to end discriminatory programs or risk losing education aid from Washington.

  The bill inspired and emboldened not only the civil rights cause of black Americans, but also of Hispanic and Native Americans, of the women’s movement, and, later, of the gay rights movement as well. Howard Smith’s inclusion of the word “sex” in Title VII transformed the legal status of women, even if it did not end stubborn and enduring disparities in pay and respect. On the political fringe, some aspects of the bill continued to spark fierce debate half a century later. In his campaign for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky in 2010, the libertarian Republican Rand Paul seemed to suggest that the Civil Rights Act’s ban on discrimination in public accommodations was an unconstitutional overreach of government authority, despite the Supreme Court’s definitive ruling. But most Americans long ago subscribed to Richard Russell’s verdict when the bill was passed: “These statutes are now on the books and it becomes our duty as good citizens to live with them.”

  The Civil Rights Act by no means finished the job of assuring equality before the law. Less than a year after its passage, bloody protests in Selma, Alabama, demonstrated the enduring extent of blacks’ lack of access to the ballot box, and Lyndon Johnson and most of the same cast of congressmen and senators, chief among them Bill McCulloch and Everett Dirksen, responded with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which barred states and localities from imposing any “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting,” ended poll taxes and literacy tests in every jurisdiction in the country, and required most southern states and some northern counties to receive advance approval from the Justice Department before making any changes in voting laws.

  “What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America,” Johnson said in proposing the voting rights bill, adopting the rallying cry of the movement itself. “It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really, it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

  Together, the 1964 and 1965 acts were the most important laws of the twentieth century and a high-water mark of shared civic purpose, national unity, and hope that the nation might yet live up to its founding creed. In the ensuing decades, those laws would transform the South, gradually burning away the toxic air that had suffused and stifled the region for generations. By 1987, Mississippi would lead the nation in the total number of black elected officials, and Alabama would have the highest percentage of black officeholders of any state. Cities throughout the South elected black mayors and state legislators, even as blacks struggled to win statewide office in the region and as southern black representation in Congress continued to lag. Not until 2013, after Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina appointed Representative Tim Scott to fill a vacancy, was there an African American senator from the South since Reconstruction, and even then Scott was but the seventh black senator out of the more than 1,900 in American history. (A few weeks later, Mo Cowan of Massachusetts, also appointed to fill a vacancy, became the eighth, and in October Cory Booker of New Jersey won a special election to become the ninth.)

  By the late 1990s, with northern industrial cities crumbling in the wake of lost jobs in a rapidly changing economy, the South saw strong net gains of black migrants from all the other regions of the country, reversing a decades-long trend that had begun with the “Great Migration” from the South in the early twentieth century. Without the scourge of Jim Crow, long-standing cultural and kinship ties once again drew blacks to progressive southern cities like Atlanta and Charlotte.

  “Sometime I hear people saying nothing has changed, but for someone to grow up the way I grew up in the cotton fields of Alabama to now be serving in the United States Congress makes me want to tell them, ‘Come and walk in my sh
oes,’” John Lewis, the former leader of SNCC who was elected to the House of Representatives from Georgia in 1986, told thousands of people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington in 2013. “Fifty years later, we can ride anywhere we want to ride, we can stay where we want to stay. Those signs that said ‘white’ and ‘colored’ are gone. And you won’t see them any more—except in a museum, in a book, on a video.”

  But as Lewis was also quick to note, progress has not been unalloyed. In 1963, John Kennedy had soberly explained that “a Negro baby born in America” had just half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of embarking on a professional career, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy seven years shorter, and the prospect of earning only half as much.

  What are such a baby’s prospects today?

  As of 2010, according to the Department of Education, black high school freshmen graduate at about 80 percent the rate of their white counterparts, while about 50 percent of black students at four-year colleges complete their bachelor’s degrees within six years, compared to just over 60 percent of whites. Black life expectancy is now roughly four years shorter than that of whites.

  Equality of opportunity has improved markedly, but true equality lags. Black unemployment rates are still roughly twice those for whites, while the average per capita income for blacks is roughly half.

  Moreover, a darker, more divisive, more violent era followed the passage of the 1964 and 1965 civil rights laws. Just five days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles erupted in a bloody six-day riot, a portent of widespread unrest to come as the decade unfolded.

  Never again would the national consensus on civil rights be so strong, as controversies over affirmative action, busing, and black power splintered the movement and the broader society. Even as a new wave of state voter identification laws and other measures clearly aimed at suppressing minority voting turnout took effect around the country in the twenty-first century, the Supreme Court in 2013 rejected as outdated the formula in the Voting Rights Act that mandated advance approval for changes in voting laws in states with a history of discrimination. Partisan divisions in Congress were so sharp that no appropriate revision of the law seemed likely to pass. It was left to a new wave of lawsuits and intervention by the Justice Department in Washington to address the problem.

  Nor would mainstream religious groups ever again join in a crusade like the ones that made the 1964 and 1965 laws possible, though the religious right would later take a page from their playbook on the questions of abortion rights, gay rights, and other social issues that have divided the nation from the 1970s and 1980s on.

  * * *

  FOR MOST OF THOSE individuals who made the 1964 Civil Rights Act possible, the high hopes of that summer evening in the East Room would not last long. Exactly a month after the bill signing ceremony, on August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox engaged three North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, and five days later Lyndon Johnson won passage of an open-ended congressional resolution allowing the United States to come to the aid of any Southeast Asian nation threatened by Communist aggression. The path was laid for the “bitch of a war” that would destroy his presidency.

  Less than four years later, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy would both be dead by assassins’ bullets, both long since estranged from Johnson. Though Justice Department guidelines called for a periodic review of the department’s authority for the wiretap on King, Kennedy apparently never conducted one, and the taps continued for years. In October 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his civil rights work. He accepted the honor in Oslo two months later “on behalf of a civil rights movement which is moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice.” J. Edgar Hoover’s reaction was to brand King “the most notorious liar in the country.”

  Bob Kennedy learned of King’s death on April 4, 1968, just as he was about to address a large street rally in the heart of a black neighborhood in Indianapolis. Despite warnings from the police that they could not protect him if violence broke out, Kennedy spoke anyway, his journey to the side of the black cause now complete. “What we need in the United States,” he said, “is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.” America’s task, he continued, was to “dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” The crowd broke up quietly into the night, but barely two months later, Kennedy himself was murdered hours after winning the California presidential primary.

  In January 1965, Charles Halleck, his reputation with his Republican caucus never quite restored, was deposed as House minority leader by Gerald Ford of Michigan, in the first loss of his electoral career. He retired four years later and died in 1986.

  Hubert Humphrey’s son Robert recovered completely from his cancerous tumor. Humphrey himself was not so lucky. He won the vice presidency alongside Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and was to have been the Johnson administration’s point man in coordinating civil rights programs. But White House infighting and Lyndon Johnson’s ego made that impossible. Four years later, Humphrey’s failure to make a clear break with Johnson over the increasingly divisive Vietnam War made the man who was once seen as so far ahead of his time on issues like civil rights seem a tired establishment has-been by the time of his own 1968 presidential campaign. “Dump the Hump!” angry crowds cried all over the country. (When Humphrey’s press secretary, Norman Sherman, noticed his candidate smiling after a particularly brutal encounter with a group of protesters, Humphrey, ever the happy warrior, exulted, “I got one in the balls with my briefcase!”) After his defeat at the polls, he returned to the Senate, ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, flirted with the same idea in 1976, and died of bladder cancer in 1978.

  Everett Dirksen, whose role in passing the Civil Rights Act helped him to supplant Richard Russell as the single most influential senator of the 1960s, became a kind of folk hero. His spoken-word album, Gallant Men, in which he recited a collection of patriotic poems, songs, and stories, reached No. 16 on the Billboard charts and won a Grammy Award as Best Documentary Recording in 1968. On a 1967 episode of the television game show What’s My Line?, a blindfolded Tony Randall tried to guess the identity of Judy Garland, who had explained her bona fides with a tinkling bell and a disguised voice. “You sing, you dance, you’re funny, you’ve been around a long time,” Randall said, before guessing, “Senator Dirksen?” But the years of heavy smoking and drinking took their toll on Dirksen’s health, and he died of complications from lung cancer in 1969, just nine months after Richard Nixon’s election to the presidency ended Dirksen’s long run as the most important Republican in Washington. His fellow Republican senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who had long battled Dirksen’s nominee for national flower with her own candidate—the rose—placed a single long-stemmed marigold on his desk in the Senate chamber. Dirksen is remembered today for the marble Senate office building that was renamed for him in 1972 (as is Richard Russell, whose name is on the building next door). But schoolchildren do not think of Dirksen in the same breath with Lincoln, as Lyndon Johnson had insisted they would.

  Russell’s own friendship with Johnson survived their disputes on civil rights but foundered irrevocably in a disagreement over a nominee for a federal judgeship. Russell died of complications from emphysema in 1971.

  Despite his decades-long support for civil rights and li
beral causes, the aging Emanuel Celler was defeated in a primary for reelection in 1972 by Elizabeth Holtzman, in part because of his failure to keep pace with the times, as exemplified by his implacable opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment for women. He died in 1981 and is anything but a household name, even in Brooklyn.

  Clarence Mitchell remained a dogged crusader for civil rights all through the 1960s and 1970s, enduring the frustrations of the Nixon years and continuing well into the administration of Jimmy Carter, who awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But his departure from the NAACP in 1978 was unhappy. Passed over to succeed the retiring Roy Wilkins as executive director, he went into private law practice and wrote a weekly column for the Baltimore Sun. When he died in 1984 in the midst of a presidential campaign, all the Democratic candidates in the race attended his funeral, where the eulogists included Lyndon Johnson’s daughter Lynda Robb.

  Gerri Whittington continued her career as a government secretary, even working briefly in the Nixon White House for Robert J. Brown, a special presidential assistant who was black and wanted an experienced hand to show him the ropes. But in 1970, at the age of thirty-eight, she suffered a massive and debilitating stroke from which she never fully recovered. She died in 1993, on the same day as the retired Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall.

  Representative Charles Weltner, the young Georgian who had changed his initial vote against H.R. 7152 to support its final passage in the House, won reelection in 1964 but declined to seek a third term in 1966, because the Georgia Democratic Party would have required him to sign a loyalty oath pledging to support the segregationist gubernatorial candidate Lester Maddox. “I love the Congress,” Weltner said, “but I will give up my office before I give up my principles.” He went on to a distinguished legal career, serving for more than a decade on the Georgia Supreme Court, winding up as its chief justice, the very job Richard Russell’s father had held sixty years before. In 1991, he became the second recipient of the John F. Kennedy Library’s “Profile in Courage” award, and he died the following year.