The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (41 page)

The 1964 World’s Fair, located in Flushing Meadows, Queens, was to be an extravaganza of high-tech utopianism, a “universal and international” exposition that promised “peace through understanding,” achieved by scores of corporate-sponsored pavilions hawking a future paved with punch cards, mainframe computers, and CRT displays. The government was there, too: NASA came with its latest experimental aircraft, the X-15; closer to earth, the Johnson administration had a pavilion showcasing the past and future achievements of the Great Society. Towering over it all was the Unisphere, a twelve-story stainless steel model of the earth. Organizers expected 70 million visitors over the fair’s six-month run.
51

Brooklyn CORE’s plan, distributed by leaflets in the week’s leading up to April 22, was simple: thousands of protesters were to drive their cars onto the highways leading to the fair, stop, take their keys, and walk away. They would turn the roads into parking lots. Those coming by train were told to pull the emergency brakes. Separate from the “stall-in,” people were told to turn on the taps in their apartments to drain the city’s water supply.
52

Mayor Robert Wagner accused the group of “holding a gun to the heart of the city.” On April 20, he held a four-hour meeting at Gracie Mansion, the mayoral residence, on how to deal with this cataclysmic showdown. The national CORE offices reacted as well; James Farmer suspended the Brooklyn chapter’s membership.
53

Just as worried were the stewards of the civil rights bill in Congress. By late April, there was a feeling on Capitol Hill that even a single incident could sway the Senate one way or the other, pushing the bill to victory or killing it outright. A massively disruptive protest on opening day at the World’s Fair would fall decidedly into the latter category—especially because President Johnson was planning to attend. In a joint statement issued April 15, Humphrey and Kuchel warned: “Unruly demonstrations and protests that bring hardship, and unnecessary inconvenience to others—even those who have long suffered indignities—are not helping the cause of civil rights. Indeed, they are hurting our efforts in Congress to pass an effective civil rights bill.”
54

On the morning of April 22, Police Chief Patrick V. Murphy, who would later serve as the Washington director of public safety during the riots that tore apart that city in 1968, put dozens of tow trucks along the Triborough Bridge leading from Manhattan and the Bronx into Queens; he set up three command posts around the city and had a small air wing of helicopters circling overhead, looking for trouble. Senator Jacob Javits himself boarded the 7 train in Manhattan, which went out to the Flushing Meadows site and was therefore a prime target for brake pullers.
55

The whole city, the whole country, braced for a confrontation.

And then, nothing. A few drivers ditched their cars on the way to the fair, but not enough to disrupt traffic. No one pulled a train emergency brake; even the city’s water supply remained at its normal level. A scrum of protesters did manage to slip into the fairgrounds and picket the president’s welcome speech, but otherwise, the stall-in was a bust.

What happened? Brooklyn CORE’s plan was not as simple as Brunson made it out to be. People did not in fact want to leave their cars by the side of the highway. Nor did it help that fair attendance was low that first day, around twenty thousand, thanks to both the weather and the fear of protesters.

When asked how he felt about the desultory scattering of protesters who showed up, President Johnson could afford to be magnanimous. What was his reaction? “Frankly, one of compassion,” he said. “Somehow I think all of us must learn understanding. It is ideal, I think, for us to contemplate that it is easy. But even though it is difficult it is still possible.”
56

Back on the Senate floor, the debate had proceeded at its newsless, lackadaisical pace until April 20, when Dirksen offered his latest amendment, a statute of limitations for how long the attorney general could wait before filing an employment discrimination suit under Title VII. As he did with his other amendments—and as other senators had done with twenty-four others—Dirksen simply presented the amendment to Humphrey and Kuchel, who accepted it and promised to “call it up” for a vote after cloture.
57

They did this because, since there could be no debate on an amendment until it was called up, they could maintain control over the proceedings. But that calculus changed a few minutes after Dirksen finished his speech. Most of the other amendments had been beyond-the-pale proposals by Southerners to lop off entire titles. But that day, Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia rose and presented an amendment that recast the entire debate. Asking that his proposal “be read and made the pending business”—that is, not placed in the sheaf of other amendments on Humphrey’s desk—he suggested that anyone charged with violating a court decree to enforce the bill’s antidiscrimination titles could demand a jury trial. If, say, a restaurant owner refused to allow blacks to dine at his establishment, even in the face of a judge’s order to do so, he could not be punished until a jury had declared him guilty.
58

On its surface, the idea of a jury trial made perfect sense: Why shouldn’t people facing jail time be allowed a trial by their peers? After all, said Talmadge, jury trials are a “fundamental civil right” that “has been held to be a sacred privilege of personal liberty” since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. In the face of a sizable expansion of federal power, retaining some place for the public in the legal process seemed a reasonable, modest request.
59

As the debate ran on through the day, the Georgian senator backed off his intention to call for a vote that day, satisfied that he had given the Southern position a new wind. But unbeknownst to Talmadge, it also gave time for Dirksen and Humphrey to have a quiet meeting at the minority leader’s desk. In hushed tones, Dirksen underlined for Humphrey what he had been planning all along: he wanted the bill to pass, and he just needed some way to leave his mark on it so he could win over skeptical conservative Republicans, who might otherwise balk at supporting a bill so heavily identified with the liberals and Democrats. He had just one more amendment, he said, and it was to Title II. Whether Dirksen was truly trying to play the statesman, or just trying to get on board with a bill everyone knew would be a historic piece of legislation if it passed, was not on Humphrey’s mind at the moment. When the conversation ended, Humphrey rushed off to tell his aides the good news. “It appears that Dirksen is beginning to swallow the great man hook and when it is full digested we will have ourselves a civil rights bill,” wrote one of them, Raymond Wolfinger, in his diary the next day.
60

On April 23, Dirksen got a call from Mansfield, who said he was sitting in his office with Humphrey, Kennedy, Katzenbach, Valeo, and White House Congressional Liason Mike Manatos and that they wanted to talk with him about the amendment. When he arrived, they laid out their case: Talmadge’s amendment would probably pass, and it would do irreparable harm to the bill. Before they could talk about Dirksen’s amendments, they needed to deal with this one. They asked if Dirksen would sponsor an amendment to counter Talmadge’s: jury trials would not be required, but if a defendant did not receive one, the most he or she could receive as punishment was sixty days in jail. At first Dirksen agreed, and he quickly persuaded Mansfield to go along with him. But then the old Dirksen came out, and he began to bargain. Ten days, he said—the most a defendant could face without a jury trial was ten days. No, Humphrey replied—forty-five days. Eventually they settled on thirty days, or a $300 fine, and shook on it. Dirksen offered the amendment the next day and asked that it be considered immediately.
61

The Southerners thus faced a dilemma. If they supported the Dirksen-Mansfield amendment, they would come away with a much more favorable bill, from their perspective. But they would also be ceding the momentum to the civil rights forces and giving a stamp of approval, however narrow, to the bill. At the same time, if they insisted on filibustering the amendment itself and lost, they would have proven they could be beaten. In for a penny, in for a pound, they figured, and they decided to oppose any effort at compromise. John Stennis of Mississippi said that “it is merely a slight concession in name but still denies all defendants the right to a jury trial.” The amendment was “just a mustard plaster on a cancer,” Russell said, refusing any entreaty to consider it separate from the bill itself.
62

A new fissure then emerged between Dirksen and the civil rights forces. Dirksen wanted a separate vote, to get cloture on just the amendment. But Humphrey and his allies in and out of Congress, still not completely trusting the minority leader, smelled a ruse: if they held a cloture vote on just the amendment now, and lost, Dirksen’s hand would be greatly strengthened—which would explain why he wanted a vote as soon as possible.

They grew even more suspicious after they learned that Dirksen had set up a meeting with Johnson for the afternoon of April 29. If he could lay the groundwork with Johnson, convincing him that he had the best interests of the bill in mind, then he would have virtually a free hand in demanding changes from the bills’ supporters.

Humphrey decided he needed to act decisively to head off Dirksen. On April 28 he burst unannounced into the White House. He blew past National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who were waiting outside the Oval Office, and barged in on the president, who was in the process of getting ready for his day’s meetings. Humphrey warned the president of Dirksen’s intentions, and demanded that Johnson take a hard line with the majority leader. Johnson, who had been purposely staying aloof from the daily give-and-take of the bill, listened intently but said little.
63

A few hours later, Humphrey got in a limousine and headed over to McDonough Hall at Georgetown University, where he joined Kuchel, Javits, Keating and about five thousand other people—plus dozens of reporters and TV crews—for an ecumenical service in support of the bill. A choir, which sang Mendelssohn and other holy music in between speeches, was composed of singers from Catholic University, Howard University, Georgetown, and Temple Sinai. Though the evening was billed as nonpartisan and apolitical, there was no hiding its targets. “Too many of our top leaders are pleasing the mob,” said Bishop B. Julian Smith in his opening remarks. “What is organized religion saying to them, and what is it saying to the less prominent communicants who use cattle prodders, water hoses, and dogs on human beings?”
64

The evening was punctuated by three sermons from leaders of each major faith—Lawrence J. Shehan, the archbishop of Baltimore; Rabbi Uri Miller, the president of the Synagogue Council of America; and Eugene Carson Blake of the National Council of Churches. In a speech that made headlines the next morning, Blake told his audience that the civil rights bill would only pass when people of good conscience but indifferent attitudes toward the plight of others realized what was at stake. The movement could never convert diehard segregationists, he said, but it could win over those “who are confused and fearful, some selfishly indifferent, content to sit on the sidelines, who see no clear moral or spiritual issue before the nation, who allow consideration of order, peace, or private profit, to neutralize their too general moral commitment to justice or freedom. These are the Americans we must win to our side of the contest.” With high-profile events like the Georgetown gathering, and polls showing national support shifting back to the bill, that is exactly what the civil rights forces were doing.
65

The next day Dirksen made his trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to meet with the president. The appointment was hardly a secret; Dirksen told reporters beforehand that he intended to give Johnson the tough-guy treatment: “You say you want the House bill without any change. Well, in my humble opinion, you are not going to get it. Now it’s your play. What do you have to say?” Dirksen said he wanted the president to endorse his amendments, in exchange for a promise to bring twenty-two to twenty-five senators to the cloture vote. He even took along a gift: a commemorative clock from an Illinois company celebrating its centennial.
66

But Dirksen had overplayed his hand. The Democrats were already indicating they would concede on certain amendments; the day before, Robert Kennedy had indicated that the Title VII changes might be acceptable. “Obviously there had to be some give and take,” he said. And the bill’s leadership had agreed to go after cloture on just the jury trial amendment after all. Moreover, Johnson was incensed over Dirksen’s pre-meeting comments. In a phone call with Mansfield just before the meeting, the president complained, “I don’t know what’s happening to him lately. He’s acting like a shit ass.” Dirksen left empty-handed—Johnson did, nevertheless, accept the clock—and afterward told reporters that the two had barely discussed civil rights.
67

Dirksen was having more luck with Russell. The Republican leader had been imploring Russell to allow a vote on the jury trial amendment if he had any hope of influencing the overall bill; Russell’s absolutism, he said, was pushing away potential allies.

Russell knew it. He had wanted to allow a vote for a while, in order to show that the Southern Democrats were not being simply obstructionist, and therefore buying time and patience with conservatives and the public. But Strom Thurmond and his fellow absolutists had refused. Eventually Russell wore them down, and on May 1, he said he would allow a vote on the Dirksen-Mansfield amendment in five days. Even better for Russell’s purposes, earlier that day he had persuaded Senator Thruston Morton of Kentucky, a moderate Republican who leaned toward supporting the bill but was also friendly with the Southerners, to offer what was called a perfecting amendment to the Talmadge amendment. The Talmadge amendment technically applied to all criminal contempt cases, and Morton proposed a tweak that would limit it to just civil rights cases. That made Morton’s amendment, not Dirksen-Mansfield, the first order of business when Congress convened on the sixth. If it passed, it would shift the momentum back to the Southerners.
68