The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (14 page)

The ugly facts of racism in America undermined the values the country stood for. “We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home. But are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or cast system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?”

These were sentiments drawn straight from the movement he had kept at arm’s length for so long, and from a vice president he had so often relegated, on purpose or not, to an embarrassingly marginal role in the administration. More than that, it was an expression of not just sympathy with the movement, but empathy for black Americans as Americans—not as charity cases, or as political problems, but as fellow citizens. “The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. Redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades, and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.”

The answer, he said, could no longer come through repression—nor could it come through demonstrations alone. It must come through legislative action, first and foremost in the United States Congress. “I am, therefore, asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments,” he said. “This seems to me to be an elementary right. Its denial is an arbitrary indignity that no American in 1963 should have to endure, but many do.”

The last four minutes of Kennedy’s speech were completely unscripted, and it showed. He repeated himself, circled back. “As I have said before, not every child has an equal talent or an equal ability or an equal motivation, but they should have the equal right to develop their talent and their ability and their motivation, to make something of themselves,” he said. At the point where he should have been plumbing his oratorical depths for a moving conclusion, he tossed a bone to the moderates and conservatives, who feared black violence was the driving force behind Washington’s sudden attention to civil rights. “We have a right to expect that the Negro community will be responsible, will uphold the law,” he said—but then added, “but they have a right to expect that the law will be fair, that the Constitution will be color blind, as Justice Harlan said at the turn of the century. This is what we are talking about and this is a matter which concerns this country and what it stands for, and in meeting it I ask the support of all our citizens.”

Rhetorically, it was not Kennedy’s best speech; his delivery was awkward at times, rushed, halting, his peroration rambling. But in its content, it rivaled his most historic addresses. No president had ever taken on race as squarely as he did in those fifteen minutes. He both accused the country of moral hypocrisy and gave a rousing call to unity. He put himself behind transformative legislation, but also challenged the country to effect the sort of moral change that government action alone cannot realize.

Millions watched the speech. From Atlanta, King sent a telegram to the president lauding it as “one of the most eloquent, profound and unequivocal pleas for justice and freedom by any President.” Wilkins did likewise, calling it “a clear, resolute exposition of basic Americanism.”
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The Southern Democrats, naturally, were none too happy with it. In a statement the next day, Richard Russell attacked the bill, saying if passed it would usher in “a socialistic or communist state.” Strom Thurmond proposed a general strike among Southern Democrats in order to block all of Kennedy’s agenda unless he gave up on civil rights.
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Historians would later call Kennedy’s June 11 speech the beginning of the “Second Reconstruction.” At least within Congress, it certainly unleashed forces that Kennedy had a hard time controlling, let alone comprehending. Though the Southern Democrats declined to go in with Thurmond on a general strike, they did put the president on notice by defeating a routine bill to finance the Area Redevelopment Administration, which many of the House Southerners had backed when it passed in 1961. Later that day, Kennedy commiserated over the loss with House Majority Leader Carl Albert. “It’s just in everything, I mean, this has become everything.”

“It’s overwhelming the whole, the whole program,’’ Albert said. “I couldn’t do a damn thing with them, you know.”

“Civil rights did it,” the president sighed.
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In Jackson, Medgar
Evers
had been
at an NAACP meeting and had missed the speech, but his wife, Myrlie, had stayed up with their children to watch it. They were still awake at midnight when their father pulled into the driveway, his Oldsmobile packed with T-shirts reading “Jim Crow Must Go.”
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As Evers mounted the porch, a shot rang out. Hit in the back, Evers crumpled. “Turn me loose!” Evers cried. He died less than an hour later.
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The impact of Kennedy’s speech cannot be separated from the national shock at Evers’s murder. Though he was hardly a household name, the assassination of the highest-ranking NAACP official in Mississippi brought the urgency of the civil rights question into a focus that no presidential speech could ever achieve.

The ripples from Evers’s death even reached the White House. A few days later, Kennedy was talking with Schlesinger, his in-house intellectual and an on-again, off-again professor in Harvard’s history department, where Kennedy had first developed the anti-Reconstruction, anti–Radical Republican views that permeated his Pulitzer Prize–winning book
Profiles in Courage
. The South, he had believed and written, was at war with itself and best left alone, so that in time men of wisdom and honor could bring their homeland into the modern era. The worst thing that could happen would be for intolerant moralists to force change upon the region.

Now, finally—after Oxford, after Birmingham, after Tuscaloosa, and now Jackson—he told Schlesinger that his old views were crumbling. “I don’t understand the South,” he confided. “I’m coming to believe that Thaddeus Stevens”—a hardline abolitionist and architect of Reconstruction—“was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias. But when I see this sort of thing, I begin to wonder how else you can treat them.”
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Chapter 3

An Idea Becomes a Bill

The eight days between Kennedy’s speech and his submission of the civil rights bill to Congress on June 19 was an almost constant blur of activity at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, with frequent stops midway at the Department of Justice. On June 12, the day after the president’s speech, three aides to Senate Majority Leader Mansfield—Harry McPherson, Bobby Baker, and Ken Teasdale—sat down to think through the first of many conundrums facing the bill’s supporters: how to introduce it.
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The trio knew that White House strategists had already decided that the inevitability of a long filibuster by Southern senators meant the bill should start out in the more liberal House of Representatives, where it could gather momentum before hitting the Senate. But there was no guarantee the bill would emerge from the House, let alone emerge in an acceptable shape—liberals might overload it with politically untenable planks, like a universal Title III, or Southern Democrats might find a way to gut it. As a backup, McPherson, Baker, and Teasdale decided Mansfield should introduce the bill simultaneously in the Senate.

But here was another problem. On an uncontroversial matter, the process would be fairly straightforward: assuming the president’s party is in control of Congress, he would get the chairman of the relevant committee to sponsor the bill. But in this case, that man was James Eastland of Mississippi, the head of the Judiciary Committee and an implacable segregationist. So Mansfield would have to do it himself.

Mansfield, however, had already decided that his best position was one of nonpartisan impartiality, the better to win over Republicans and, perhaps, a bravely errant Southerner (Ted Sorensen, in a June 14 memo to the president, had wondered if “any Southerner be persuaded to be a ‘Vandenberg’?”—a reference to the Michigan Republican senator who had broken ranks with his party’s isolationist wing to help create the United Nations). Therefore, Mansfield, through McPherson, insisted that he introduce the bill in conjunction with Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader.
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This presented a third problem. Dirksen supported civil rights legislation—except Title II, the public accommodations provision and the heart of the bill. He had said as much at a bipartisan leadership meeting at the White House on June 13.

The solution, Mansfield and his lieutenants decided, was to split the bill into two parts, one containing everything except Title II and another comprised solely of Title II. Mansfield was so sensitive to Dirksen’s position, and so convinced that Dirksen held the key to the bill’s success, that he refused White House entreaties to sponsor the Title II bill himself. “My sponsorship of the public accommodations portion of the legislation may well jeopardize passage of the remainder of the legislation, which, even in itself, is not by any means assured of 67 votes at this point,” Mansfield wrote in a pointed memo to the president. In the end, the majority leader and the president compromised. Mansfield introduced the administration’s bill, then cosponsored a version of the same bill, minus Title II, with Dirksen. Finally, Mansfield enlisted Washington’s Warren Magnuson, who had risen from an itinerant farmhand to become one of the Senate’s most respected liberals, to introduce the Title II–only bill.
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While the three Senate staffers hashed out Mansfield’s strategy, a mile away at the White House the Kennedy team kept busy with the president’s interminable series of interest group meetings. On June 13 he met with some two hundred labor leaders. On June 17 he met with an equally large number of religious leaders, drawn from an ecumenical roster—rabbis, Catholic priests, Southern Baptists, black preachers. The latter meeting took an awkward turn when Kennedy asked for comments and was confronted by the Reverend Albert Garner of Lakeland, Florida, the president of the ultraconservative American Baptist Association. “Our people religiously feel with moral convictions that racial integration that would lead to intermarriage is against the will of their creator,” Garner said. Kennedy was caught by surprise; rather than push back, he dodged, saying, “I think the question of intermarriage is really a question removed from what we are concerned with. That is a matter for the individuals involved.” Still, the meeting was a success, if only because Kennedy used the occasion to announce the creation of a religious advisory committee, under the leadership of J. Irwin Miller, the Indiana industrialist and National Council of Churches chairman.
4

Meanwhile, halfway between the White House and Capitol Hill, the Justice Department drafting team was continuing to rework the bill. Though its core parts were in place, two more titles were added after Kennedy’s June 11 speech. The first was an idea that had been floating around Congress since the late 1950s: a federal civil rights mediation service, which would parachute into nascent trouble spots before they got out of hand. The addition was partly political. It was thought that Southern Democrats would support a plank that put voluntary, nonbinding mediation between Jim Crow businesses and the hard force of federal law.
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The other plank was equally political but aimed at the other end of the spectrum. For years now, Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem, a fiery and controversial black politician, had appended “Powell amendments”—requirements that whatever the program was, it could not be implemented in a discriminatory manner—to various pieces of domestic legislation, in essence turning otherwise innocuous bills into civil rights proposals, which Southern Democrats would then turn on. The amendments made for good protest theater, but the consequence was a lot of very angry, otherwise pro-civil-rights legislators, who saw their bills sandbagged—and there was little they could say in response, lest they be tarred as anti-civil-rights. Several of them came to Robert Kennedy and Norbert Schlei demanding that they add a universal Powell amendment to the bill, applying a nondiscrimination requirement to all federal programs, so that Powell would finally shut up.
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At first Kennedy, afraid of overloading the bill, was resistant, even when Representative James O’Hara of Missouri, a liberal ally, passed him a bill that he had already drafted to create just such a requirement. But on the weekend before the bill was introduced, Kennedy called O’Hara at home and asked him to draft a Powell plank to add to the bill. O’Hara called his secretary and had her meet him at his office, where he dictated a new version and had it in the attorney general’s hands by 1:00
p.m.
This new plank, which came to be known as Title VI, gave the president the power to cut off funds to a state or local program that used them in a discriminatory manner.
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There was also an extensive discussion over whether to add something about jobs—an FEPC, or else a training and public works title. But the sense inside the drafting room was that such a title would be a step too far for a bill that was already an enormous gamble. If the Republicans were wary of a bill banning discrimination in public accommodations—a law that was limited to the South, where the Democrats held sway—how would they feel about a bill that reached into the offices of their corporate allies and told them how to run their hiring practices? And yet fair employment had been a central demand of the civil rights movement for decades; it was impossible not to do
something
. “We were all conscious of the fact that some kind of provisions with respect to fair employment were terribly important and also in the almost, I think actually unanimous opinion of everyone who was involved in this, impossible to enact,” recalled Nicholas Katzenbach. And so, at the last minute, another compromise was reached: Kennedy would explicitly endorse FEPC legislation that was about to be taken up by the House Education and Labor Committee and sponsored by James Roosevelt, a liberal California representative (and son of Franklin Roosevelt). The drafters hoped such a gesture would pacify civil rights groups, though as Katzenbach admitted, “it was window dressing.”
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