The Politics Of Passing 1964's Civil Rights Act ***

Transcription

1 The supplement below is taken from an author interview conducted by Terry Gross for NPR s Fresh Air radio program. If you would like to listen to the interview in full, copy paste the following link: The Politics Of Passing 1964's Civil Rights Act February 16, :03 PM ET Heard on Fresh Air The act, which turned 50 last year [in 2015], ended the era of legal segregation in public accommodations, like restaurants and hotels. Author Todd Purdum talks about the battles that surrounded it. Originally broadcast Jan. 20, TERRY GROSS, HOST: *** This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The film "Selma," which is nominated for an Oscar for best picture, has reawakened interest in the relationship between Martin Luther King and President Lyndon Johnson and the pressure the civil rights movement exerted on the president and Congress to move forward with civil rights legislation, including the Voting Rights Act of On this Presidents' Day, we're going to hear about the legislative and political battle to pass the Civil Rights Act of Martin Luther King didn't have a vote in Congress, but the bill wouldn't even have been introduced without him and the movement that he helped lead. The Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, including restaurants, hotels and motels, ending the era of legal segregation in those places. Our guest, Todd Purdum, is the author of the book, "An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, And The Battle For The Civil Rights Act Of 1964." The two presidents are Kennedy and Johnson. I spoke with Purdum last year, a few weeks before the book was published. The book will be published in paperback next month. Todd Purdum, welcome to FRESH AIR. What would you describe as the biggest changes that were brought about by the Civil Rights Act? TODD PURDUM: In a very real sense, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 created modern America - the things we take for granted today - people in restaurants and hotels and motels and transportation, enjoying it regardless of race - the things my children take absolutely for granted. It's hard to remember that just 50 years ago, they were anything but taken for granted, and people were literally fighting and dying for them. So in a very important way, this law, which is often called the most important law of the 20th century, created the world we live in today. GROSS: What were some of the actions of the civil rights movement that were most effective in pushing President Kennedy to move forward with civil rights legislation? PURDUM: Well, beginning early in his administration with the sit-ins at lunch counters around the South, and then the freedom rides to integrate interstate transportation of buses and so forth. And finally, the most dramatic of all was in the spring of 1963, under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King and others of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Birmingham, the demonstrations, particularly those involving children and young people who were brutally turned-back by police dogs and fire hoses - high-pressure hoses - hundred pounds per square inch of water knocking them to the ground, tearing off their clothing. And these images went all over national television, all over the world media, the front pages of newspapers all around the world. And it shocked President Kennedy, and it shocked the country. And frankly, it shocked a large segment of the American population who did not live in the South, who did not have large black populations in their states or areas. And it pricked the conscious of, really, right-thinking people all over the world. And that was, I think - most people agree that was the thing that really got the ball rolling on the legislation.

2 GROSS: But President Kennedy had serious reservations about pushing civil rights legislation during what he thought would be his first term. He thought he might serve a second and that the bill would be better served in his second term. What were his reservations? PURDUM: Well, in that era, we must remember, the Congress, and particularly the Senate, was completely controlled by the southern delegations who were adamantly opposed to integration. And President Kennedy wanted a lot of other programs, including a tax cut. He wanted support for his foreign-policy, for things like the space race, for other programs of, you know, income redistribution and, you know, help for poor people and so forth. And so he felt that - the Peace Corps - he didn't want to jeopardize any of those other programs, many of which were, you know, liberal in their intent, by giving the Southerners an excuse to fight him on civil rights. So while he personally was appalled, I think, by segregation, and was - also felt it gave America a very big black eye in the Cold War. He was horrified at the exploitation that the Soviets were able to make of the situation here at home. He was very cautious about moving too quickly. GROSS: So how did he end up moving forward? PURDUM: Well, in the end, he moved forward because events forced his hand. He and his brother, the Attorney General Robert Kennedy, realized that the only way they had a chance, they felt, of stopping these demonstrations that were sweeping across the country and prompting violent backlash from both southern officialdom and average citizens in the South, particularly, was to propose a new law that would end the discrimination, that would end the cause of the unrest. And I think they were persuaded, in many senses, that this would be a practical way to calm the situation down... GROSS: So the bill originates in the House, and what was originally in the bill. Can you give us a synopsis of that? PURDUM: Well, there were basically about seven main provisions. The first would have enforced the right to vote in federal elections, and it would, regardless of race. The second... would outlaw discrimination at hotels, motels, restaurants, and it would exempt private clubs without precisely defining them. The third would allow the attorney general to bring suits to desegregate public schools. The fourth would establish a community relations service to help individuals and communities in resolving racial disputes in their own localities. And the fifth would extend the life of the civil rights commission, which had been created originally by the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first real loss since Reconstruction to try to get at this question. The sixth would prohibit discrimination in federally assisted programs in states and localities and allow the federal government to cut off money to, say, school districts or municipalities that discriminated. And the seventh would create an equal opportunity employment commission to address discrimination by government contractors. But that was controversial because it didn't include the real teeth that some of the most ardent civil rights supporters wanted. It didn't include a real regulatory scheme to let that commission sanction private businesses and so forth and so on... GROSS: What was the status of the civil rights bill when President Kennedy was assassinated? PURDUM: It had passed the House Judiciary Committee by a whisker kind of a way with President Kennedy's help in the end of October. And it was hung up in the House Rules Committee, which as we know is the committee that sets the ground rules, the guidelines, for debate of a bill on the House floor. The House is so big, with 435 members, that it can't have unlimited debate the way the Senate does. It can't have kind of freewheeling debate. So every bill that comes to the House has a tightly proscripted pattern of debate and rules for the how many minutes and so forth are set to do it. And the chairman of that committee was an 80-year-old man from Virginia named Howard Smith, who was an infamous segregationist and infamous conservative Democrat, whose favorite way of blocking a bill was simply to retreat to his farm in Fauquier County, Va., and take no action at all. And that's really where things stood on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated. GROSS: So after Kennedy's assassination, when Johnson becomes president, Johnson pledges to make civil rights a priority, to make passage of the bill a priority. And he says, like, nothing's going to happen in Congress until this bill is passed. But didn't Johnson advise Kennedy not to move forward with the civil rights bill in his first term? PURDUM: He had been careful to advise him that if he moved forward with it, he should first get the rest of his legislative program in line. He should first get the tax cut passed. He should first get some of these other priorities taken care of so they would not be then held hostage to civil rights. But the interesting thing is that while he had a reputation among civil rights groups, particularly because of his work as Senate majority leader in 1957 and 1960

3 civil rights bills, he had a reputation of watering down such legislation in order to get it passed. By 1963, he had actually become a very strong supporter of civil rights. And that spring, he had made a series of speeches that went way beyond anything the president had said to that point and that, in fact, discomforted the White House and the attorney general because he was so outspoken. So what happened in the wake of the assassination was that Johnson realized he could not do anything else that he cared about in his presidency if he didn't establish his bona fides, his undisputed credentials, on civil rights. So he vowed to finish the job that Kennedy had started and to make it his absolutely top priority. And for the next 10 months, that's what he did. GROSS: So when Johnson becomes president, the civil rights bill is still stuck in the Rules Committee. What was Johnson's strategy to get it out? PURDUM: There were a number of strategies, but one of the strategies that he chose to pursue was to put pressure on Chairman Smith by circulating what's known as a discharge petition in which if a majority of the members of the House - that would be wanted to call a bill out of the committee and put it directly on the House floor, it could happen. It was a very rare procedure, almost never happened. And most people in the leadership of Congress did not like it because it usurped the prerogatives of chairman, it bypassed the normal procedures. And in those days, Washington was much, much more traditional in terms of seniority and procedures in Congress. And it was just something that nobody was very much in favor of. But what happened was that because word got out that Johnson was considering this possibility and was rounding up support for it, there was another mechanism in which members of the Rules Committee itself could force the chairman to hold hearings and take a vote, and that's what happened because of the pressure that Johnson began applying... GROSS: So one of the big changes to the Civil Rights Act that happened in the House was that women were added as a protected class in the bill. So you couldn't discriminate against women in employment? PURDUM: Yes, that was the work of Chairman Smith of the Rules Committee, who thought that by including sex as a protected category, it would be a poison pill and he could doom the bill because his male chauvinist colleagues would not want to gum up a civil rights bill with protecting the fairer sex. And in fact, the women in Congress immediately rose up, of both parties, Republican and Democrats, and said for Pete's sake, we need this. We don't cause you any problem. You know, this would be a very important thing to do. And so, in fact, it passed, as we know. It then became one of the most important parts of employment discrimination law in the 20th century, and it all happened because, in a sense, of the maliciousness of Chairman Smith, who wanted to block the bill... GROSS: So somebody who you give a lot of credit to the passage of the Civil Rights Act is somebody who isn't really very well known, and that's Congressman Bill McCulloch. Tell us what his role was in shepherding the bill through the House. PURDUM: Well, he was a rock-ribbed Republican from a conservative district in West Central, Ohio... And he was against government spending, against foreign aid - all the things we think of as being conservative. But he was also the descendent of pre-civil War abolitionists, and he'd always been a strong supporter of civil rights. So by 1963, he was the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and he believed that the time had come for a big, comprehensive bill. But he didn't want to have happen what usually had happened, which was to have the House pass a strong bill and see it watered down and frittered away in the Senate. So McCulloch told the Kennedy administration that he would take the lead in supporting the bill in the House if the administration would promise to stick by that bill in the Senate - not see it watered down by a bunch of weakening amendments... And he had a population...in his district - a black population of less than 3 percent. But he just believed that this was the right thing to do, and he stuck by his guns all through the debate. And he carried along with him the entire House Republican leadership simply because of his stature as the ranking member on the committee and because of his strong passion and reasonableness on the question. GROSS: So the bill finally, you know, passes the House. Let's talk about what happened to the Civil Rights bill as it made its way through the Senate. Hubert Humphrey - Senator Hubert Humphrey was the bill's floor manager. He was the one with the responsibility of shepherding the bill through the Southern Democrats' filibusters. What were some of the more memorable things that were said against civil rights and in support of segregation during the filibuster?

4 PURDUM: Well, it's almost unbelievable to go back and look at the congressional record and see some of the things that were said in broad daylight on the floor of the Senate just 50 years ago... Herman Talmadge of Georgia called the Civil Rights Act a bill to regulate the American people. John McClellan of Arkansas said it was the discrimination act of Russell Long also said (reading) the good Lord did as much segregating as anyone I know of when he put one race in one part of the world and another race in one part of the world. We folks in the South are not hypocrites about this matter. We think it's absolutely desirable that the white people should continue to be white and that their children and grandchildren would be the same, and we let our children know we think just that. Paul Douglas of Illinois, a liberal Democrat, replied to that, you know, (reading) Senator, there has been a lot of mixing of the races in the South and most of it has occurred not initiated by the Negroes. So, you know, you can go page after page of that kind of stuff. GROSS: And Strom Thurmond spoke skeptically of the constitutionality of the entire 14th Amendment, shocking Hubert Humphrey with that statement. What was his grounds for that? PURDUM: Yeah, yeah. He said, you know, it had been passed in the wake, in the blood of the Civil War, and he wasn't really sure that it was valid. The whole thrust of this debate was that 100 years after it ended, the Civil War was really being re-fought in the corridors of Congress, and the Southerners were giving their last stand and they knew it. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, who was really the leader in the Senate of the opposition to the bill, he knew that his day was passing. He knew that segregation was ending. He confessed to constituencies - to constituents and other civil rights advocates that, you know, he was fighting a losing battle, but he felt he had to do it. And in part he felt he had to do it because if the Southerners made their stand and did their best to defeat the bill and it passed anyway, then their constituents at home would know that the bill had been won fair and square and they would have to support it, and in fact that's what happened. GROSS: President Johnson told Hubert Humphrey, who was trying to move the Civil Rights Act through the Senate and get it passed - Johnson told him you can't pass the bill unless you get Senator Everett Dirksen, and in order to get him, you have to give him a piece of the action. What did Johnson mean and what piece of the action did they give Dirksen? PURDUM: Well, Senator Dirksen was the Republican minority leader. He was from Illinois. He was by far the most colorful senator of his day. He smoked incessantly, drank constantly. He gargled every day with a swallow of Pond's cold cream and water, which he swallowed. And he was known - he had an incredibly mellifluous voice and was known as the Wizard of Ooze. He felt, despite his long support in Congress and the Senate for most civil rights measures, that he did not get enough credit with constituents in Illinois, particularly black constituents in Chicago and elsewhere for that position. And when President Kennedy proposed the bill, Dirksen announced that he was generally supportive of it, but he had big doubts about two sections - section two, the one on public accommodations. GROSS: Which is a pretty important section. PURDUM: That was really the heart... GROSS: Centerpiece of it, yeah. PURDUM: Really the heart of the bill. And Title VII, which was the one on employment discrimination. And part of Dirksen's objection there was states like Illinois, Northern states, already had strong anti-discrimination laws on employment. And he was worried in that classic Republican way about bureaucratic overlap, federal overreach. He did not want businessmen in Illinois to be have to - keeping two sets of books: one for the state law, one for the federal law. So he and his lawyers on his staff determined to figure out how they could work to clarify some of that. And, as a symbolic matter, Humphrey gave Dirksen tremendous credit at every turn. Meetings of bipartisan negotiating sessions were held in Dirksen's office as a sign of respect so that Dirksen could say to his own constituents and his own caucus in the Republican Senate that he was working to make changes in the bill. And in the end what happened was that Dirksen made dozens and dozens of mostly picayune - small - changes to the bill and was able to persuade his members that he had in fact made - what the effect of what he did was to make the bill mostly apply to the South and to exempt estates in the North, like his own of Illinois which already had strong antidiscrimination laws, from some of the bill's provisions. And the administration - the Johnson administration was willing to accept that because the real - what they saw as the real problem they had to address immediately was the legalized segregation in the South, and they would worry about the sort of de facto segregation in the North later.

5 GROSS: You know, we're used to tight votes being - or any votes in Congress being divided according to Democrats and Republicans. But that's not exactly how the division was in the civil rights bill in Give us a sense of what the final vote was. PURDUM: The final bill passed the Senate 73 to 27 with 27 Republican votes. That's remarkable. There were only 33 Republicans in the Senate. So an overwhelming majority of Republicans supported the bill, whereas 18 Democrats, segregationists, opposed it. So in proportional terms, the Republicans did far more to support the bill than the Democrats did as a whole. GROSS: So once the bill is passed, then the next big decision for President Johnson is, when does he sign the bill? He wanted to sign it immediately. He wanted to sign it that night, which was July 2, And then Robert Kennedy, his attorney general, is saying no, you can't sign it that quickly. You have to wait until after the July 4 holiday weekend. What was Bobby Kennedy's concerns? PURDUM: Well, it passed the Senate on June 19 and then it had to go back to the House for final passage, so that was July 2nd. And Bobby Kennedy called him that morning and said, you know, Mr. President if we sign it on the eve of the long Fourth of July weekend, we're going to have black people running all over the South in every motel and restaurant trying to get service and maybe we should delay. Well, Johnson just thought that, you know, he was not going to tell Kennedy to his face because by that point relations between them were so bad and the trust was frayed. So instead, Johnson called five or six other people and floated the idea, attributing it to Bobby and saying, what you think? And they said, oh, no, Mr. President, you should all sign it right away. So he determined to sign it that night. He asked for television time. His press secretary George Reedy told him the networks recommended 6:45. And Johnson, who'd gotten rich owning a television station in Austin, said they just don't want to give up their prime airtime. We'd rather do it at 7. In the end, the earlier time prevailed. But it was a wonderful signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House where Johnson went on live television and explained the rationale for the bill and then handed out something like more than 70 pens afterwards. GROSS: All pens used to sign his signature on the bill. PURDUM: Exactly. GROSS: It must've been like micro-signing for each pen (laughter). PURDUM: You can see him on the extant film, he's putting a tiny, little movement with his hand with each pen and then picks another pen out of the rack and does some more. GROSS: So, you know, and legislatively it didn't end there. Soon after, there was the Voting Rights Act and the Housing Rights Act. Was that part of the plan all along, do you think, in the minds of either people and, you know, liberals in Congress or the president? PURDUM: I think liberals in Congress certainly felt that the vital first step was to end this scourge of, you know, legalized segregation in public places. And then after that was done, other things could follow. And, of course, they quickly realized a year later in 1965, after the bloody demonstrations in Selma, Ala., that voting rights were not fully protected and the bill had not been strong enough on that question. It didn't apply to state elections, for example. It only applied to federal elections. So the Voting Rights Act was passed to apply to all elections and to carry forward, and that same - in 1968, the Housing Discrimination Act. What's sad is that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in some ways, in very real ways, marked the high watermark of consensus on the question of civil rights. And as the '60s went on and violence in the streets continued and discord continued and ultimately the '70s debates about affirmative action and bussing, the coalition that had so magnificently passed the Civil Rights Act of '64 splintered and began to fall apart and the country became much more divided up until really the present day when we see the Supreme Court overturning certain aspects of the Voting Rights Act just last year. And the national consensus on civil rights has in the last, you know, 20 years or so, 30 years, diminished a great deal from where it was in GROSS: What impact did the Civil Rights Act and its passage have on President Johnson's relationship with the leaders of the civil rights movement?

6 PURDUM: Well, the immediate effect was a positive one. He became quite close to them - many of them - and they worked cooperatively through the Voting Rights Act. But as the '60s went on, and particularly as Martin Luther King and others began to oppose very vocally President Johnson's policies on Vietnam, estrangement grew up. And by the time of King's assassination in 1968, he and Johnson were not on speaking terms anymore. So that also was a very poignant - I mean, the two of them really combined to pass this landmark legislation and by the end of King's life, they were really not speaking. GROSS: You know, another ripple effect of the passage of the Civil Rights Act was the change in voting habits in the - voting patterns in the American South. You want to just describe that? PURDUM: Well, the night he signed the bill, Johnson had told his friend Bill Moyers that he had a premonition that they'd just delivered the South to the Republican Party for years to come. And, in fact, beginning in the 1960s and up to the present day, that really came true as white backlash and resentment against these laws conspired to help revive and revitalize the Republican Party throughout the South. The Republican Party in the South had been basically a black party and by the, you know, end of the 20th century was almost a completely white party. And the Republican Party's source of national strength is and remains the South. GROSS: Well, Todd Purdum, I want to thank you so much. PURDUM: Thank you very much, Terry. GROSS: Todd Purdum's book, "An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, And The Battle For The Civil Rights Act Of 1964" will be published in paperback next month. Our interview was recorded in January of last year. Coming up, rock historian Ed Ward reviews volume two of a massive collection documenting the early blues, jazz and gospel label Paramount Records. This is FRESH AIR.