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

  At a meeting that December, when Roy Wilkins, the executive secretary of the NAACP, asked him why he was supporting civil rights legislation after so many years of comparative indifference, Johnson paused before replying, in phrases made famous by Martin Luther King himself: “You will recognize the words I’m about to repeat,” the president said, “‘Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last.’”

  PART ONE

  THE ADMINISTRATION

  1

  A Century’s Unfinished Business

  TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1963

  IT WAS A PARADOX not lost on John F. Kennedy that even as the United States undertook to celebrate the centennial of the Civil War, it often seemed on the verge of a second one. In many ways, Kennedy’s America, like Abraham Lincoln’s, was two countries—North and South, black and white, still separate and unequal. In January 1961, Georgia’s Democratic governor, Ernest Vandiver, had avoided the awkwardness of having to attend the festivities marking the anniversary of his state’s secession from the union only by arranging to be in Washington for Kennedy’s own inauguration.

  Now, two years later, peaceful protests—and the violent backlash against them—had spread across the South, from lunch counter sit-ins and “Freedom Rides” aimed at desegregating public places and interstate buses, to firebombing mobs and defiant public school boards that had closed their districts’ doors rather than mix black and white students. Rigid racial segregation remained a fact of law and life in the states of the Old Confederacy nearly a century after the War Between the States had ended. And the federal government in Washington seemed just as unable—or at least as unwilling—to resolve the growing conflict over civil rights as it had been to grapple with the uproar over slavery in the 1850s.

  Nothing better exemplified Kennedy’s deep and abiding ambivalence about how to handle the uncomfortable politics of the issue than his indecision over how to mark the centennial of Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In September 1962, Kennedy had declined to attend a ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial commemorating the centenary of the proclamation’s first draft, instead sending a six-paragraph recorded statement to be broadcast over the public address system while he himself watched the America’s Cup yacht races off Newport, Rhode Island. “The best commemoration lies not in what we say today,” Kennedy had said, “but in what we do in the days and months ahead to complete the work begun by Abraham Lincoln a century ago.”

  Just what Kennedy himself would do was the dominant question of the day. The president may have been willing to skip the commemoration ceremony, but he was nevertheless chagrined to see that Nelson Rockefeller, the Republican governor of New York and a potential rival for the White House in 1964, had appeared at it, armed with one of the Empire State’s most precious archival possessions: the draft proclamation in Lincoln’s own hand. In his speech that day, Rockefeller urged the nation to rededicate itself to the “basic belief in the worth and dignity of the individual and the right of each to full and equal opportunity in sharing the American dream.”

  Rockefeller had the political standing to make such a plea. For much of the century since the Civil War, civil rights had been a Republican cause—to the degree that it had been a real cause for either major party at all. The 1960 Republican and Democratic platform planks on civil rights had been virtually identical and equally strong, if still mostly un-acted-on three years later. John Kennedy well knew that he could not take the black vote for granted, in part because of his own party’s powerful southern segregationist wing, and that the prospects in Congress for meaningful civil rights legislation were fraught at best.

  So the president was always on the lookout for ways to shore up black support without alienating the white legislators whose backing he needed for his administration’s broader program. And now, on Lincoln’s birthday, he had agreed to hold a White House reception for some eight hundred black Americans—by far the largest such assembly ever gathered under the president’s roof. At the last minute, the White House had notified all the guests to arrive via the Executive Mansion’s Southwest Gate (so as to avoid the press), and press secretary Pierre Salinger had assured white reporters that the gathering was only a minor social event. Some of the nation’s most prominent civil rights leaders—among them A. Philip Randolph, the godfather of the movement and the longtime leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Clarence Mitchell, of the NAACP—had declined to attend the party, in protest over Kennedy’s failure to propose new civil rights legislation. Still, the evening won wide and sympathetic coverage in the black press, while drawing little notice in mainstream newspapers.

  Kennedy’s principal personal reaction to the party was pique. He noticed his friend Sammy Davis Jr. and his white wife, the Swedish actress May Britt, among the throng of guests, mischievously invited by Louis Martin, a black former newspaper publisher who was the Democratic Party’s chief point man on civil rights. Davis’s interracial relationship with Britt had made him such an anathema to segregationists that Kennedy had banned him from performing at the inaugural gala organized by their mutual friend Frank Sinatra two years earlier, and now the president was so determined to avoid photographs of the two together in the White House that he urged his wife to pull Britt aside. Jacqueline Kennedy was so angry at her husband’s request that she soon left the formal reception in tears. The Davises’ presence “kind of really put a pall on the whole thing,” the president’s civil rights adviser Lee White would recall.

  On the very afternoon of the reception, the president had received a formal 246-page report from the United States Civil Rights Commission, an independent fact-finding body established by Congress in 1957, declaring that black Americans in the twentieth century had experienced “a freedom more fictional than real,” and adding, “The final chapter in the struggle for equality has yet to be written.” The nation’s single most prominent civil rights figure, Martin Luther King Jr., offered an even sharper view. “The administration sought to demonstrate to Negroes that it has concern for them while at the same time it has striven to avoid inflaming the opposition,” King would write in The Nation. “The most cynical view holds that it wants the vote of both and is paralyzed by the conflicting needs of each.”

  * * *

  IN FACT, WHEN IT came to civil rights, much of America was paralyzed in 1963. For every glimmer of racial progress, there were shades of setbacks. The Supreme Court had outlawed segregation in public schools in 1954, but in much of the country, segregation was still the norm. In the South, just twelve thousand of the three million black students attended integrated schools. Martin Luther King’s 1955 boycott to desegregate public buses in Montgomery, Alabama, had succeeded (thanks to a parallel lawsuit financed by the NAACP), but his subsequent direct action campaigns—including a long desegregation crusade in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962—had fizzled.

  In the broader culture, the picture was also mixed. Jackie Robinson had broken Major League Baseball’s color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, and now black athletes such as Bill Russell in the National Basketball Association and Jim Brown of the National Football League had become stars in their own right. But not until 1959—three years after Robinson’s retirement—had the Boston Red Sox become the last big-league franchise to open its roster to black players, and black sports stars were still the exception, not the rule.

  As early as 1956, Harry Belafonte’s Calypso had become the first million-selling long-playing record in history, because of its crossover appeal to blacks and whites alike, and the same year, Nat King Cole became the first black entertainer to host his own network television program, on NBC. But Cole’s show never did manage to attract a national sponsor, so he had abandoned it after thirteen months, complaining, “Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark.” Even now, the favorite TV guest gig of Lena Horne, Hollywood’s first black female star and pinup girl, was appearing on Perry Como’s weekly variety show on NBC, because he wa
s one of the few hosts willing to violate the taboo against blacks and whites touching on the air. The 1962–63 television season’s sixth-rated entertainment program starred Andy Griffith as a sweet-reasoned southern sheriff dispensing justice in the idyllic town of Mayberry, North Carolina, in a “situation comedy” where no black characters ever entered the situation.

  The United States was already sending black troops to help the government of South Vietnam in its struggle against Communism, but it was not welcoming them home with a communitarian spirit. One black Army captain, just back from his first tour in Vietnam and stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, was tired and hungry one day after fixing up a modest rental house for his wife and baby son. He stopped at a local drive-in in hopes of ordering a hamburger to go. He knew he could not be served inside, but thought he might get curb service. “I pulled in and after a small eternity, a waitress came to my car,” he would recall.

  “Are you Puerto Rican?” the waitress asked.

  “No,” the soldier answered.

  “Are you an African student?” she wondered.

  “No,” the soldier replied. “I’m a Negro. I’m an American. And I’m an Army officer.”

  “Look, I’m from New Jersey,” the waitress said, “and I don’t understand any of this. But they won’t let me serve you. Why don’t you let me go behind the restaurant, and I’ll pass you a hamburger out the back window?”

  “I’m not that hungry,” snapped the captain, whose name was Colin Powell. “As I drove away,” he would recall years later, “I could see the faces of the owner and his customers in the restaurant windows enjoying this little exercise in humiliation.”

  Even in the highest councils of state, the segregationist South made no apologies for its defiant attitude. Indeed, many white southerners took pains to contend that it was they who had been humiliated. In one typically revealing exchange on the floor of the United States Senate in 1962, Paul Douglas of Illinois, one of the chamber’s most enthusiastic civil rights supporters, tried to ascertain whether Richard Russell, the powerful leader of the Senate’s southern caucus, actually supported the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which had prohibited denial of a citizen’s right to vote, based on his “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” “I am not enthusiastic about the amendment,” an indignant Russell replied. “That amendment was written in the blood of the Civil War and was inevitable after Appomattox and the South is reconciled to it, but it was written in blood … If the Senator is going to try to get me to apologize for the Civil War at this late date, or to get on my knees any further than was necessary at Appomattox, I shall not do it.”

  * * *

  THE CHALLENGE OF CIVIL rights as the 1960s dawned was simple yet profound: In the century since the Civil War, the nation had neither fully accepted the consequences of the conflict’s outcome nor enforced the provisions of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments passed in the war’s wake, guaranteeing full citizenship and the equal protection of the laws to all Americans, regardless of race—let alone the Fifteenth Amendment’s promise of voting rights. In the Reconstruction era, Congress had at least tried, passing the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which granted full and equal access to public accommodations—hotels, restaurants, trains, and so on—to blacks and whites alike. But in 1883, ruling in a group of consolidated cases, the Supreme Court of the United States had held that Congress lacked the power to outlaw discrimination by private individuals, a decision that had never been overturned. In 1896, in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the High Court had further enshrined segregation by ruling that “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites were compatible with the Constitution.

  For six decades following the Plessy decision, through two world wars, rapid technological innovation, and innumerable other changes in American life, rigid separation of the races was the legal and practical fact throughout the states of the Old South, while schools, transportation, and accommodations for blacks and whites remained far from equal. No significant civil rights bill had passed Congress in all that time, and perhaps only 20 percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote.

  Finally, in 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, a case involving the public schools of Topeka, Kansas (consolidated with several similar cases from other jurisdictions), the Supreme Court unanimously held that “separate” was inherently unequal, overturning Plessy and creating rising public pressure to make good at last on the full promise of emancipation. In 1957, the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed what would become the first major civil rights law since Reconstruction, aimed at guaranteeing access to the voting booth for America’s black citizens and giving the federal government sweeping powers to intervene in states and localities to force the desegregation of public schools. The bill would also create a six-member, bipartisan federal Commission on Civil Rights with power to investigate discriminatory practices, and would elevate the civil rights section of the Justice Department into a full-fledged division. Eisenhower’s personal support for civil rights had been notably weak, but his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, still took seriously the Republicans’ heritage as the Party of Lincoln, and he had a powerful and unlikely ally in the Democratic Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson. Throughout his career in Congress, Johnson had been a staunch New Deal liberal but also a loyal segregationist, voting with his southern colleagues to maintain the status quo. Now he had presidential ambitions of his own, and he knew that he could not win nationwide office on such a platform. So Johnson undertook the wheeling and dealing and watering down that made it possible to forestall a southern filibuster and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957, stripping it of enforcement powers and provisions to desegregate public places while retaining relatively weak provisions for voting rights.

  A similarly weak bill was passed by Congress in 1960 and it, too, did little to reverse the practical impacts of segregation. In Augusta, Georgia, there were five hotels and motels that would take dogs, and only one where blacks could go with confidence. A Senate Commerce Committee study found that a black family traveling from Washington, D.C., to Miami would have to drive an average distance of 141 miles between destinations to find overnight accommodations. And the United States Commission on Civil Rights judged 57 percent of housing for blacks to be substandard.

  The 1960 Democratic platform had included a sweeping civil rights plank, calling for an end to discrimination in voting, education, lunch counters, housing, and employment; promising to use the “full powers” of the 1957 Civil Rights Act to secure blacks the right to vote; pledging to “take whatever action is necessary” to eliminate literacy tests and poll taxes; supporting “peaceful demonstrations for first-class citizenship”; and demanding that every school district affected by the Brown decision submit at least preliminary plans for compliance by 1963. The Republicans—pressured by Nelson Rockefeller and others—had taken an almost equally strong stance. Both parties were officially committed to change, and both had raised expectations of action.

  Still, John Kennedy’s trusted counselor and speechwriter Ted Sorensen recalled that his boss privately worried that the Democrats had embraced “too many antagonistic specifics that could not be fulfilled, raising too many unwarranted hopes and unnecessary fears.” In fact, Richard Russell, the Senate’s most ardent defender of segregation, gloomily concluded that Kennedy would not only work to implement the platform but would actually “advocate civil rights legislation beyond” it.

  * * *

  BUT IN THE FIRST two years of the Kennedy administration, no such advocacy was forthcoming. Instead, the president temporized at every turn. The plain truth was that John Kennedy believed that strong civil rights legislation would be difficult if not impossible to pass, and that it could well jeopardize the rest of his legislative program. Yes, the president enjoyed large majorities in both houses of Congress, with a three-to-two Democratic advantage in the House and a two-to-one advantage in the Senate, where there were sixty-seven Demo
crats compared with just thirty-three Republicans. But eighteen of those Senate Democrats were implacable segregationists, which meant that the president’s party, by itself, could not muster a simple majority for civil rights legislation, much less the two-thirds vote that would be needed under the Senate’s rules to cut off debate and force a vote on any bill. Indeed, the internal North-South fissures in the Democratic Party were so pervasive, and so powerful, that Congressional Quarterly, the authoritative chronicler of legislative action on Capitol Hill, recorded the parties’ votes in those days not just two ways, as “R” and “D,” but three: as “R” and “ND” and “SD.” No civil rights bill could pass without substantial Republican support, and while many Republicans still liked to think of themselves as supporting civil rights, many also resisted the sort of government incursion into private property rights that they believed compulsory integration would entail.

  So Kennedy saw civil rights legislation as an ideal to aspire to—perhaps in a second term—and not a hill to die on. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Kennedy’s most likely Republican rival for the presidency in 1964, took note of the president’s perpetual hesitation on the issue at the 1962 Gridiron Club roast. “When my administration takes office in January 1965,” Goldwater teased, “I will use the full powers provided in the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 to secure for all Americans the right to vote. But, like your administration, Mr. President, I will not set any specific date for this action.”

  Yet it was Kennedy himself who had done so much to raise expectations of more meaningful action. In the 1960 campaign, he had asserted that an executive order barring discrimination in federally supported housing was a simple matter of the “stroke of a pen.” But he did not issue any such order until November 1962, and even then it applied only to housing built in the future. “It took a hell of a lot more struggle and examination than I think we realized, and I’m sure the candidate realized, when he uttered those famous words,” his adviser Lee White would recall. “Toward the end of ’61 and ’62, a lot of people began sending ink and pens for the president. To the extent that you can laugh about a joke when you’re the butt of it, he thought it was pretty damn funny. We sent the pens to some school for the retarded. We didn’t want them to go to waste.”