The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act Read online

  To Elliot and Talia

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Bad Beginnings to a Big Year

  2 “A National Movement” to Enforce National Laws”

  3 An Idea Becomes a Bill

  4 The October Crisis

  5 “Let Us Continue”

  6 A Battle Is Lost

  7 The South Takes Its Stand

  8 Breaking the Filibuster

  9 A Bill Becomes a Law

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Plate Section

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Introduction

  At 8:00 a.m. on July 3, 1964, a thirteen-year-old boy in Kansas City, Missouri, named Eugene Young went into the barbershop at the historic Muehlebach Hotel to get a haircut. He hopped into the chair of Lloyd Soper, one of the barbers, and gave him two dollars. A few minutes later, Young left, another satisfied customer. Young’s satisfaction went beyond the mere follicular: he was black, and the day before he had been refused service at the same shop.

  In the intervening hours and a thousand miles away, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which among other things forbade places of public accommodation—including restaurants, hotels, theaters, and barbershops—from discriminating on the basis of race. Who knows how many countless black men had been denied service at the Muehlebach since it opened in 1915. And now, suddenly, the doors were opened, as if they had never been closed. “I didn’t mind cutting that little boy’s hair,” Soper said.1

  Young’s story was repeated across the country that day, and in the weeks that followed. An entire social system built on oppressing and excluding blacks had been outlawed with the stroke of a pen, and blacks were amazed to find how easy it fell apart. A black civil rights leader in Atlanta walked into the restaurant at the Henry Grady, an exclusive downtown hotel formerly the segregated terrain of the city’s white elite, and was served like he had been coming there for years. In Birmingham an aging black chauffeur went for dinner at the Dinkle-Tutweiler Hotel, where he had driven white customers for more than three decades but never himself been allowed to eat.2

  There were pockets of resistance: a few hours after Johnson signed the bill, an Atlanta motel filed a suit against the Department of Justice, claiming the new law was unconstitutional. In Greenwood, Mississippi, officials drained a formerly whites-only public pool rather than open it to black children. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a mob of whites chased the actor Jack Palance from a movie theater because they thought he had been sitting with a black man. And an Atlanta restaurant owner named Lester Maddox vaulted himself into the national spotlight by not only refusing to serve blacks, but chasing them away, in front of photographers, with a gun. Yet overall the fall of Jim Crow was rapid and peaceful. As a Department of Justice report concluded at the end of the month, “The general picture is one of large-scale compliance.”3

  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most important piece of legislation passed by Congress in the twentieth century. It reached deep into the social fabric of the nation to refashion structures of racial order and domination that had held for almost a century—and it worked. Along with banning segregation in public accommodations, it banned discrimination in the workplace—and not only on the basis of race, but sex, religion, and national origin as well. It permitted the attorney general to sue school districts that failed to integrate, finally giving teeth to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ruling. And it barred federal funds from going to state or local programs that practiced discrimination—effectively withholding billions of dollars from the Jim Crow South, until the South got rid of Jim Crow. The act put the political, economic, and moral power of the federal government firmly behind black America, in a single step demolishing white supremacy’s stranglehold on public policy.

  While racism and discrimination are still facts of American life, the profound effects of the Civil Rights Act are evident in every facet of contemporary society, from the expansion of the black middle class to the election of black officials to the highest offices in the land. Less well known is the full story behind the act’s passage.

  The basic outlines of the bill’s biography are of course familiar. President John F. Kennedy introduced it in June 1963 in response to growing racial tension across the South, in particular the violent crackdown against black protesters in Birmingham. As the bill moved through the House that year, it was spurred along by events like the March on Washington in August, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in September, and the assassination of President Kennedy in November. Once the House passed the bill the next February, Southern Democrats in the Senate tried to kill it by refusing to allow a vote on it, also known as filibustering. Despite sinking dozens of bills before, this time the Southerners failed, and the bill became law.

  We think we know this story, because we know so well the two men most often associated with it: the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Every biography of King and Johnson tells how one or the other, or sometimes both, made the bill a reality—King with his moral force on the streets of Birmingham and before the Lincoln Memorial, Johnson with his political lever-pulling behind the scenes on Capitol Hill. Their combined efforts overcame the Southerners’ historic filibuster and demonstrated what great men can achieve when the stars align, as they did in Washington that year.

  This story, however, is in need of significant updating. King and Johnson were great men, and they played critical roles in the bill’s passage. But neither deserves all the credit, or even the bulk of it. On the contrary, the bill came to pass thanks to a long list of starring and supporting players: men like Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, and Republican representatives William McCulloch and John Lindsay. Outside Congress and the White House, dozens of civil rights, labor, and religious groups brought enormous pressure on the government to create and then strengthen the bill, and later provided the manpower and coordination to pull the bill through the record-breaking filibuster it faced in the Senate—led by men like labor leader Walter Reuther, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)’s Clarence Mitchell and Roy Wilkins, and the National Council of Churches president, J. Irwin Miller. The Civil Rights Act is often explained like a one-man play, when in fact it had a cast of thousands.

  The idea that either King or Johnson was the dominant figure behind the Civil Rights Act distorts not only the history of the act but the process of American legislative policymaking in general. The purpose of this book is to correct that distortion.

  Again, King and Johnson played important roles. Without King’s Birmingham protest campaign in the spring of 1963, in which the city’s police were goaded into siccing dogs on schoolchildren, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his Justice Department advisers could not have persuaded President John F. Kennedy to submit the original civil rights bill to Congress. And King’s magnificent “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington helped persuade white America that the time had come for federal action on civil rights. But King did not plan the march, and the speech itself had little direct impact on Congress. And King played no role whatsoever in the writing of or lobbying for the bill. Instead, that work was done by men like Mitchell, the head lobbyist for the NAACP, and Whitney Young, the head of the Urban League, both of whom had deep contacts in Congress and quietly but forcefully worked for the bill’s passage. />
  Likewise, Johnson’s repeated public demands that Congress pass the entire bill were vital. Had he even once called on the bill’s backers to compromise, the fragile edifice of support for the legislation might well have crumbled. But Johnson’s role has been greatly exaggerated, while the momentum generated by his predecessor, and the tireless work done by Justice Department officials and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, has been ignored. Johnson was not, in this instance, the “master of the Senate”: he persuaded exactly one senator, Carl Hayden of Arizona, to switch his vote on the filibuster, and in that case Hayden simply moved from a “nay” to being conspicuously absent during the first roll call. Meanwhile, Johnson tried and failed to win over several members of the Southern Democratic bloc, including Al Gore Sr. of Tennessee and J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. And the Senate leadership behind the bill, under Mike Mansfield of Montana, stubbornly rejected Johnson’s demand to play hardball against the filibusterers by forcing the Senate into round-the-clock sessions. Rather than directing the bill from on high, Johnson, like everyone else, was trying to make sense of a fluid situation, and was often reacting to and channeling—and being channeled himself by—the many different figures and forces arrayed for and against the bill.

  Rather than focusing on King and/or Johnson as the prime movers behind the bill, this book emphasizes the pluralism of the process, the complex and contradictory cast of characters who pushed and pulled the bill toward (or away from) the president’s desk. There was the Republican representative William McCulloch, the deeply conservative small-town Ohio lawyer whose quiet passion for civil rights helped save the bill from being derailed in the House Judiciary Committee. There was Everett Dirksen, whose support for the bill brought over enough Republicans to defeat the filibuster. And there was Representative Howard Smith, the archsegregationist from Virginia who amended the bill so that it banned sex discrimination—a move that he hoped would turn off congressional male chauvinists but that actually opened the door to equality for millions of American women. It was the varied efforts of these and other men, not the genius of a single historical actor, that made the Civil Rights Act.

  An exclusive focus on King and Johnson also marginalizes the important efforts of thousands of labor, civil rights, and religious activists to win passage. One of the central but often forgotten stories behind the bill is how it catalyzed a nationwide movement behind black equality, drawing in retired white parishioners in Iowa, auto workers in Detroit, black college students in South Carolina, and Jewish seminarians in New York City. In many cases, particularly among whites outside the South, lobbying for the bill—either through letter writing, or local demonstrations, or trips to Washington—was their first involvement with civil rights, and with social activism (as the rest of the 1960s and later decades can attest, for many it would not be their last). Yet the bill could not have passed without their sheer numbers and relentless effort. As Georgia senator Richard Russell, the leader of the filibuster, wrote to a friend after the bill passed, “We had been able to hold the line until all the churches joined the civil rights lobby in 1964.”4

  Finally, because neither King nor Johnson played much of a role in writing or negotiating the bill, telling the story of the Civil Rights Act through them obscures the significant ways in which the bill changed over the year between its submission by Kennedy and its signature by Johnson. In a March 1964 article in the Nation, Martin Luther King Jr. called the civil rights bill “the child of a storm, the product of the most turbulent motion the nation has ever known in peacetime.” Kennedy did not want a ban on employment discrimination in the bill at all, and his initial version did not include Title VII. But civil rights lobbyists persuaded House Judiciary Committee chairman Emanuel Celler to add it. After that, though, the means of enforcing the ban were whittled back by the administration and congressional Republicans. Separately, the idea of adding significant federal spending on jobs and worker training to help poor blacks was heavily debated during the early months of the bill, but it was left on the drafting room floor. Why? Only a history that focuses on the bill itself, and not merely on one of the people involved in it, can give the whole picture in all its complexity.5

  At the outset of 1963, few expected anything more than token federal action on civil rights, and even then no one expected it to pass. Civil rights supporters had seen too many promising advances—the 1954 Brown decision to end school segregation, the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts—fail to deliver. President Kennedy had paid scant attention to civil rights as a domestic policy issue, and he was expected to do the bare minimum necessary to secure the black vote before the 1964 election. Just over a year later, President Johnson sat down in the East Room of the White House and signed the most sweeping single piece of legislation passed by Congress since the end of the Civil War.

  The bill did have its shortcomings—it left alone things like de facto school and housing segregation, and it paid short shrift to voting discrimination; in fact, less than nine months after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, he and the Senate Democrats introduced a separate bill to address voting discrimination more fully, culminating in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Nor did it address the problems facing blacks aside from discrimination, like the lack of well-paying jobs in urban areas or the low levels of educational attainment in African American communities, problems that may have been rooted in racism but would not be solved simply by its eradication.

  Nevertheless, the Civil Rights Act is a monument to the capacity of American democracy to tackle knotty, long-standing social and political problems through peaceful, reasonable means. Particularly at a time when, in the early twenty-first century, Americans despair over partisan gridlock and uncompromising political positions, the passage of the act offers an example of what the country’s legislative machinery was once capable of, and what it may well be able to achieve again. The act did not solve American racism, something the country is still dealing with—and may never fully overcome. But it moved America forward to an extent that no one, at its outset, could have expected. How that happened is the subject of this book.

  Chapter 1

  Bad Beginnings to a Big Year

  The guests began to line up outside the Southwest Gate of the White House in the early evening of February 12, 1963. The temperature, barely above zero all day, was dropping fast. The queue, eleven hundred invitees long, moved slowly; women shivered in their cocktail dresses, men popped their suit collars. They had come from all corners of the country—Atlanta, Chicago, Texas—but few grumbled at the inconvenience. They were about to be received by President and Mrs. Kennedy themselves before proceeding to a lavish reception in the East Wing.1

  The event, an hour-long reception to mark Lincoln’s birthday during the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, had brought together a nearly comprehensive roster of the nation’s black leadership: college presidents, ministers, and civil rights leaders rubbed elbows with government officials and black entertainers. Howard University president James Nabrit was there; so was Sammy Davis Jr. The poet Langston Hughes filed in, as did NAACP president Roy Wilkins.2

  Well-stocked bars and an extensive buffet—shrimp creole, curried chicken, roast turkey, tongue—kept the guests occupied while they waited to have their photographs taken with the president. Others danced to the sounds of the Marine Corps band. “It would be impossible for any reporter to name all the ‘big shots’ who were there,” wrote an unnamed “special correspondent” for the New Journal and Guide, a black newspaper from Norfolk, Virginia, “simply because he could not possibly have seen them all in the mass of humanity that flowed in and out of a dozen corridors and ballrooms.”3

  To many observers, the function was a blatant, brilliant attempt by Kennedy’s Democrats to co-opt the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s first Republican president and the man whose memory still brought millions of black voters to the GOP. Lincoln’s birthday had long been a high point in the party’s political cal
endar, a day when Republican legislators headed home to their states and districts to trumpet their successes and lambast their opponents. This year was no different: at a reception in Binghamton, New York, Senator Jacob Javits attacked the Kennedy administration as “stand pat” and “lacking in impulse and the momentum to innovate.” But while reports of similar criticism filtered back into the nation’s leading newspapers, they were drowned out by coverage of the White House event. “Pity the poor Republicans!” chided Jet magazine. “Once they had a day for themselves—Lincoln’s birthday. Now the Dems have snatched this away.”4

  But the real political theater—darker, cynical, less interested in the morality of civil rights than its political advantages and risks—played out behind the scenes. Kennedy, aware of how racial discrimination in America was hurting the country’s global image, had stormed into office promising to make real progress on civil rights, only to drop the issue before even taking office. But by late 1962, Kennedy’s inner circle had begun to take seriously the liberals’ warning that inaction on civil rights could hurt the president in the 1964 election. The black vote had arguably put him over the top in 1960, and he would need it again in his run for reelection, especially if he were pitted against a liberal Republican like New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. To win over blacks, his advisers said, the president had to do something high profile and substantive to show that he took civil rights seriously.

  Not everyone in the White House agreed. Kennedy had a broad agenda—tax cuts, space exploration, urban renewal, education—all of which, they calculated, could be derailed by a divisive campaign for civil rights legislation. So far, Kennedy, while sympathetic on civil rights, seemed to concur. He had offered a milquetoast voting rights bill in mid-1962 that had withered under a Southern filibuster, and he had signed a weak executive order banning discrimination in new homes built with federal subsidies—at the time a small fraction of the nation’s housing stock. Kennedy made clear that those measures were as far as he would go for the moment.