ROBERT D. LOEVY

THE BACKGROUND AND SETTING OF

THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964

The first permanent English colony in North America was founded at Jamestown, Virginia, in May of 1607. Twelve years later, in 1619, a Dutch ship sailed into the harbor at Jamestown and sold twenty African slaves to the Virginia colonists. Thus did "slavery" and "involuntary servitude," as they are referred to in the United States Constitution, come to the American South.

Negro slaves, brought in chains from their original homelands in central and southern Africa, proved useful and profitable in what was to become the Southern United States. The flat farmlands, served by meandering tidewater rivers, were ideal for creating large plantations for growing cotton and other agricultural products. The African slaves provided a cheap and reliable source of agricultural and household labor for the emerging Southern economy.

North of Virginia, where there were more hills and a harsher climate, the use of human slaves was not as successful. This part of the American colonies, the North, harnessed the labor of yeoman farmers and men and women working for wages. This created one of the great sectional differences of United States history - a group of southern states which relied heavily on slave labor and a group of northern states emphasizing the work and industry of free citizens.

By the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 there were almost half-a-million black persons in the colonies. A thriving slave trade had developed in which men, women, and children were sold, often at public auction, from one owner to another. Thomas Jefferson, a slave holder from Virginia, had included a condemnation of the human slave trade in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, but his impassioned words were deleted to keep the support of the southern colonies during the Revolutionary War against Great Britain.

The United States next confronted the slavery problem at the time of the drawing up of the federal Constitution at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1787. The delegates provided for the abolition of the importation of slaves 20 years after the Constitution was adopted, but the institution of slavery was allowed to remain. In addition, in a famous compromise, each slave was to be counted as "three-fifths" of a person for establishing how many representatives each state could have in the lower house, the House of Representatives, of the national Congress.

Throughout the early 1800s the South and the North drifted progressively further apart over the issue of allowing the institution of human slavery to continue in the United States. As the nation expanded westward across the North American continent, particularly hard political battles were fought over the issue of "slavery in the territories." Finally, after Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, the Southern states seceded from the federal union rather than run the risk of having the U.S. Congress in Washington abolish slavery outright.

President Lincoln refused to let the Southern states "go in peace," and the result was the American Civil War. The North achieved by force of arms that which it had not been able to achieve through legislative politics. On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, thereby freeing the slaves in those states that had seceded from the Union.

The Civil War Amendments "worked" but only for a short while. During a twelve year period of "Reconstruction" in the South following the Civil War, blacks were allowed to vote and a number were elected to important state and national political offices. But, after the Civil War ended, white southern politicians and government officials went to work subverting and reducing the position of blacks in the American South. As early as 1865, the year the Civil War ended, a number of southern state legislatures began passing Black Codes, laws designed to put black citizens in a state of near-slavery by limiting their rights and privileges.

This effort to have the United States Government protect black rights in the South received a major setback in 1876. In the presidential election that year (the famous Tilden-Hayes contested election), the Republicans garnered the necessary electoral votes to elect Rutherford B. Hayes by agreeing to remove all Union troops from the southern United States. As Republican fortunes continued to wane in the late 1870s and the 1880s, the Republican Party became less and less interested in protecting black civil rights in the South and more and more interested in winning white votes anywhere they could be found. This problem was further complicated by the fact that the more "civil rights oriented" Republicans of the Civil War period, those most committed to the cause of the recently freed slaves, were growing old and retiring from active politics. The younger members of the Grand Old Party simply did not share their deep devotion to protecting black civil rights in the South.

This wholesale removal of protections left the black citizen in the South almost completely at the mercy of southern state governments, and the result was a rash of state laws protecting the right of white citizens to segregate themselves from black citizens in many aspects of social and political life. Southern whites particularly used state law to deny black citizens access to places of "public accommodation," such as restaurants, hotels, and swimming pools, which could be designated by their private owners as "for whites only."

The change in the Republican Party attitude toward black Americans that occurred in the late 1870s was an important event in the history of civil rights in the United States. It marked the beginning of a long period of time in which the interests of black Americans were made secondary to the needs of the two major political parties to win national elections. Time and again over the following 90 years, both the Republican and Democratic parties would sacrifice civil rights programs and civil rights bills on the altar of "not losing white votes" in the next election. This situation was exacerbated, of course, by the fact that, after the 1890s, southern whites were eligible to vote but most southern blacks were barred from voting by poll taxes, literacy tests, and "white-only" primary elections.

Thus black Americans were faced with what could be called the "political party problem." The political power to pass civil rights laws rested with the two major political parties - the Republicans and the Democrats - but both parties had more to gain by appealing to the votes of enfranchised segregationist southern whites rather than the non-votes of disenfranchised southern blacks.

Although the United States Supreme Court played a significant role in the mid-20th Century where protecting black civil rights was concerned, such was not the case in the late 19th Century. In fact, the protections guaranteed by the constitutional amendments and congressional statutes enacted following the Civil War were largely taken away by the court.

In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, the Supreme Court ruled that the protection of rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment applied only to the states and not to individuals. Thus an 1875 act of Congress prohibiting discrimination against blacks in inns, public conveyances, theaters, and other public accommodations or amusements was declared unconstitutional because it was limiting private behavior rather than state behavior.

In retrospect, it is interesting to ponder how different United States history might have been if the Supreme Court had not ruled as it did in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883. Congress, after all, passed a public accommodations law, much the same law that members of the civil rights movement worked for so diligently in the 1950s and early 1960s. If the Supreme Court in the early 1880s had upheld the power of Congress to pass such a law and prohibit racial discrimination in public places throughout the entire nation, the course of civil rights history in the United States could have been completely different.

A careful reading of the relevant portions of the 14th Amendment, however, reveals why the Supreme Court ruled as it did. "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor

shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Clearly the 14th Amendment prohibitions were on the state governments and not upon the private individuals who lived within those states.

The impact of this decision on the position of blacks in the South was extensive. It meant the 14th Amendment could not be used to protect black Americans from mistreatment by southern individuals - it could only be used to protect black Americans from official actions by the states. The result was a system of oppression in which private individuals could not only discriminate against blacks but could actually terrorize them, confident in the knowledge that the power of the United States Government in Washington, D.C., would not be used to punish them. The state governments, which were limited by the 14th Amendment, thus needed only to stand aside and let private individuals do the discriminating and/or terrorizing, simply being careful not to pass any state laws or initiate any state actions that took away any of the rights protected by the 14th Amendment.

This was the legal situation that made the beating, the lynching, and the assassination such effective weapons for subjugating blacks to white majority rule in the South. Beatings, lynchings, and assassinations were carried out by individuals rather than by state governments, thus preventing the national government in Washington, D.C., from using the 14th Amendment as an excuse to intervene. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, national law enforcement officials were unable to act to stop lynchings and racial murders in the South because, according to the Supreme Court, the 14th Amendment only limited the states. If white individuals who beat, lynched, or murdered blacks were to be caught and punished for their crimes, it would be up to the state governments, and not the national government, to do it.

Another part of the Southern system of black oppression was "the free white jury that will never convict." In most Southern states, white citizens who beat, lynched, and murdered blacks could do so with almost complete confidence that state and local police, being committed themselves to the doctrine of white supremacy, would be less than zealous about investigating the crimes and catching the perpetrators. In the few cases where arrests were made and trials were held, lynch mobs and race murderers could be certain that a jury of their white neighbors and friends would find them "Not Guilty" and let them go free. The end result of the Civil Rights Cases, therefore, was to give white individuals in the South almost complete license, including lynching and murder, to personally enforce racial segregation, all of it done without any sense that there would ever be any official punishment.

In 1896 racial segregation in the American South was upheld by a decision of the United States Supreme Court. This landmark decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, arose when a railroad company refused to provide a sleeping car berth to a black train passenger. The Supreme Court ruled the railroad could segregate white sleeping car passengers from black sleeping car passengers, but the railroad had to provide sleeping accommodations for blacks that were equal to similar accommodations for whites. This decision promulgated for the first time the famous "separate but equal" doctrine. That doctrine was used extensively by southern states to justify racially segregated public schools, from kindergarten to graduate school, throughout all of Dixie.

Plessy v. Ferguson did produce a stirring dissenting opinion. In a lone voice strongly opposed to the majority opinion, Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote: "Our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."

Despite Justice Harlan's inspiring words, the major characteristic of southern blacks at the beginning of the 20th Century was that they were "governmentally isolated." They lived in a world in which, by both congressional action and Supreme Court decision, the protections of the national government had been removed from them. They were subjected simultaneously to the will of segregation-oriented state governments and, more threateningly, white individuals who could beat, lynch, or murder them with no fear of substantial punishment by either the national or state governments. After 1892, when the Congress repealed national voting rights laws, black southern males were even denied the vote, guaranteed by the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, as a way of improving their position in society.

It thus was clear to many by the start of the 20th Century that, if southern blacks were ever to be freed from southern white oppression, both official and unofficial, the national government in Washington, D.C., would have to do the job. There thus arose a constant call by those interested in black civil rights for action by the national government. Simultaneously, southern segregationists, realizing that the only potential threat to their "peculiar institution" came from Washington, D.C., became strong advocates of states' rights and dedicated opponents of national power. It Southern blacks were to ever be free, the national Congress in Washington, D.C., would have to "renationalize" the civil rights issue.

But any new national laws protecting black civil rights would have to pass both houses of Congress - the Senate as well as the House of Representatives. In the Senate was a rule guaranteeing unlimited debate, the famous filibuster rule. Any civil rights bill to come before the U.S. Senate would face a filibuster by a determined group of southern senators, and the filibuster could only be stopped by a "cloture vote," which required a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Thus, from the very beginning of the black civil rights movement, the Senate filibuster was regarded as the great obstacle - and a successful cloture vote to stop a civil rights filibuster was the great goal.

Following a particularly violent race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, a group of humanitarian whites formed a new organization to help combat racial discrimination. Joining forces with a group of black intellectuals, they met in New York to organize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some early gains for blacks came from the Supreme Court. In 1938 in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, the court took up the question of whether the "separate" black facilities were indeed "equal" to the white facilities. The facility in question was the University of Missouri's whites-only law school, and Missouri had no equivalent black law school. The court ruled that Missouri must provide its black citizens with a black law school equal to the white law school.

This decision was a step forward in the cause of black civil rights. Anywhere it could be shown that segregated black facilities were not equal in quality to the equivalent white facilities, a suit could be filed seeking improved facilities for blacks.

In the South most blacks were prevented from voting by literacy tests, a technique by which white election judges refused to allow blacks to register to vote if the blacks could not read and analyze an obscure section of the state constitution. When blacks moved to the North, however, they came into a political arena where they could register and vote and have an impact on state and national politics.

As the percentage of blacks living outside the South swelled to 23 percent by 1940, significant numbers of U.S. senators and U.S. representatives from the North came to have sizable numbers of black constituents living and voting in their states and congressional districts. There thus came into existence a sizable group of U.S. senators and U.S. representatives from the North who were interested in actively pursuing the cause of black civil rights on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

Prior to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s, the vast majority of American blacks voted for the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. In the 1932 presidential election, in the depths of the depression, when one-third of all black males were jobless, the incumbent Republican president, Herbert Hoover, drew more than three-fourths of the black vote over the Democratic candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In the years following the New Deal, the Democratic Party found it best to win black votes with economic benefits rather than by advancing the cause of black civil rights. Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected by an uneasy coalition of northern liberal voters, both black and white, on the one hand and white southern Democratic voters on the other hand. This so-called "Roosevelt Coalition" was strengthened by economic programs, which simultaneously aided southern whites and northern blacks, but it was split apart by civil rights programs, which appealed strongly to northern Democrats but stirred inflamed opposition from segregation-oriented southern Democrats.

Because the Southern Democrats were a key part of the large Democratic majorities that controlled both the Senate and the House of Representatives during the New Deal period, Franklin D. Roosevelt had neither the inclination nor any reason to believe he would be successful at getting a civil rights bill through Congress during the 1930s. Roosevelt therefore adopted a policy that served as a working model for subsequent presidents of both political parties. He would use the executive powers of the presidency to further the interests of black Americans, doing those things which a president could do unilaterally without having to get legislative authorization from Congress.

Roosevelt used his executive powers of appointment to name large numbers of blacks to United States Government jobs. Not only did the number of black appointments increase, but so did the quality of the jobs which blacks were given.

Most important, Roosevelt bypassed Congress and, by executive order, established the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department. Although it started slowly at first, the Civil Rights Section began building a skilled bureaucracy of lawyers and other trained professionals to further the cause of black civil rights in the United States. For the first time since the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, there was a definite place in the United States Government where blacks could go for legal and governmental help in the fight to win their civil rights.

In its early days the Civil Rights Section devoted itself to fighting for the right of blacks to vote in national elections and to opposing police brutality to blacks. Later on the Civil Rights Section became an ally of the NAACP in filing suits to bring about school integration and in lobbying Congress to pass civil rights laws.

In 1941 Franklin D. Roosevelt's efforts on behalf of African-Americans encouraged black leaders to press for even more integration of the races. Six months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, as defense plants were gearing up for anticipated U.S. involvement in World War II, black leaders saw an opportunity to make substantial progress. A group of nationally prominent blacks, headed by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, began to organize a mass march on Washington, D.C., to demand more and better jobs for blacks. As the number of anticipated marchers rose to over 100,000, President Roosevelt agreed to create a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) and ban discrimination in defense plants if the so-called "March on Washington" was called off.

Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee, and the planned "March on Washington" never took place. Roosevelt's good judgement in using an executive order, rather than a law of Congress, to establish the FEPC was supported by subsequent events. In 1946 Congress abolished the Fair Employment Practices Committee, thereby wiping out some of the employment gains that had been made by blacks during the wartime period. The House of Representatives voted to create a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission in 1946, but the bill was rejected in the Senate. The House passed the Fair Employment Practices Commission bill a second time in 1950, but once again the proposal died in the Senate.

Following Franklin D. Roosevelt's death in the spring of 1945, Democratic president Harry S. Truman continued the use of executive action as the principal means of furthering black civil rights. When Congress refused to pass a Selective Service Act which would eliminate all racial discrimination in the United States armed forces, Truman in 1948 issued an executive order that integrated the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps and specifically banned "separate but equal" recruiting, training, and service.

Truman also appointed a presidential Committee on Civil Rights. The committee issued a lengthy report, To Secure These Rights, which presented factual data and gripping personal testimony on the denial of black civil rights in the South. The reaction of Congress to To Secure These Rights was not a civil rights bill but a number of speeches by southern Democrats condemning the report as factually untrue and an attempt by the U.S. Government to interfere in matters that should be left exclusively to the states.

By furthering black civil rights through executive orders, Roosevelt and Truman created a situation in which black Americans came to regard the presidency as responsive to their needs. Simultaneously the Congress, and particularly the Senate, came to be seen by blacks as the enemy of civil rights. Among segregationist southern whites, on the other hand, the Senate came to be regarded as the great protector of states' rights, and the presidency was seen from Dixie as an interfering force trying to overthrow southern institutions from afar.

In 1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower, the commanding general of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, was elected president of the United States. A Republican, Eisenhower followed Roosevelt's and Truman's example of using the powers of the presidency to further the cause of black civil rights.

One achievement of President Eisenhower in the civil rights field was the appointment of Earl Warren to be chief justice of the United States.  Eisenhower had promised Warren the first vacancy on the Supreme Court but had not expected that vacancy to be the chief justiceship.  Nonetheless, when Chief Justice Fred Vinson died of a heart attack, Eisenhower named Warren, the Republican governor of California, to lead the high court.

Almost as important as the appointment of Earl Warren to the Supreme Court was Eisenhower's decision to allow his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, to argue the case against racial segregation before the Supreme Court.  Although Eisenhower separated himself publicly from Brownell's arguments supporting public school integration, in private he helped Brownell write his opinion.

Having the attorney general, or an assistant attorney general, be the strong administration spokesperson for civil rights was an Eisenhower trait that was continued by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s.  As Eisenhower relied on Brownell (and his successor, William Rogers) in the civil rights area, President Kennedy relied on his attorney general - his brother Robert Kennedy - to be the "front person" on civil rights.  Following President Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson placed equally heavy and public civil rights responsibilities on Deputy Attorney General (later Attorney General) Nicholas Katzenbach.

When handed down in May of 1954, the landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, called for the desegregation of all public school systems in the nation "with all deliberate speed."  The court unanimously ruled that separate facilities were, by definition, unequal and, therefore, unconstitutional.  Most important, however, was the breadth of the decision.  In outlawing segregation in all public education throughout the entire nation, the court thereby implied that all forms of segregation were illegal.  It could now be assumed that the court would uphold new civil rights legislation banning all forms of public discrimination, provided, of course, Congress could be persuaded to pass such legislation.

The Brown decision was a turning-point for the executive branch of the United States Government as well as the judicial branch.  Minority Americans had won much more than the right to seek a court order to integrate any public school at any educational level anywhere in the United States.  The court order would have to be enforced, and the obvious group to do the enforcing would be the Civil Rights Section of the United States Department of Justice.  Civil Rights Section lawyers, when needed, could begin moving into the American South to oversee the orderly desegregation of public schools.  Desegregation orders from U.S. courts would be enforced, if enforcement became difficult, by U.S. marshals.  The judicial branch of the United States democracy had given the executive branch the legal justification - if it cared to use it - to go into the South and become directly involved in the enforcement of public school integration.

It was originally hoped that state and local governments in the South would comply voluntarily with the Brown decision. In many areas, however, the decision was met with "massive resistance." White political and governmental leaders worked to put off as long as possible the racial integration of their local schools. Segregationist-dominated southern state legislatures soon joined the act, enacting state laws that cut off state educational funding to any school system that had the temerity to racially integrate. In some cases, amendments to state constitutions were adopted that required shutting down public schools rather than allowing them to desegregate.

The Brown decision thus had two simultaneous but contradictory effects.  On the one hand, it inspired northern liberals and black political activists to press ever more strongly for racial integration in the American South and the Border States.  On the other hand, it unified much of the official white South in its all-out opposition to race mixing in any form.  Conflict between these two forces became ever more inevitable during the later years of the Eisenhower administration.

By the early 1960s, the lack of progress on school integration in the South became one of the strongest arguments for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  As the tenth anniversary of the Brown decision approached in the spring of 1964, civil rights supporters pointed out that a decade had gone by since the Supreme Court's landmark decision but very few southern blacks were attending integrated schools.  Such a conspicuous example of lack of state action on desegregating schools dramatized the need for congressional - and thus national government - intervention.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded in Chicago, Illinois, in 1942 and became a national organization in 1943. Based on the non-violent principles of Mahatma Gandhi of India, CORE sought to integrate restaurants, snack bars, lunch counters, and public rest rooms throughout the North, the Border States, and the upper South. (Any attempt to integrate such facilities in the "Deep South" states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana was regarded as too dangerous and very unlikely to be successful.) CORE was dedicated to pushing southward the "Jim Crow" line, an indeterminate east-west line across the United States above which black customers could be served along with whites in public places and below which they could not.

CORE's preferred techniques for pressing the cause of integrated public facilities were the "freedom ride" and the "sit-in" demonstration. The first freedom ride was staged in 1947. The Supreme Court had outlawed segregation in buses and bus stations operating in interstate commerce (across state lines), so CORE sent a group of its members through the upper South by bus to see if the court decision was being obeyed.

Socio-dramas were used to train CORE members. Acting out the roles of demonstrators and arresting officers, experienced CORE members would teach newcomers how to curl their bodies and put their arms around their heads so as to reduce the effects of physical violence. CORE members were taught to be non-violent but determined. They were trained not to leave a demonstration site unless actually arrested. If restaurant or snack-bar personnel would not serve the demonstrators, they were to remain in their seats until they were either served or arrested. No matter how hard a CORE demonstrator might be struck with a fist or a club, the CORE demonstrator was never to strike back.

Similar to the NAACP, CORE had both black and white members and would send "integrated" teams on freedom rides and to sit-ins. Only half the members of a CORE team would actually participate in the demonstration. The other half would behave legally in order to be able to render medical assistance if necessary or bail arrested demonstrators out of jail.

When traveling through the upper South in the late 1940s, CORE freedom riders held their meetings and stayed overnight in local black churches. This was because the local black church was the only place where CORE members were reasonably safe from being harassed by southern opponents of racial integration.

The NAACP frowned on CORE's form of non-violent direct action because of the NAACP's preference for using court suits as the best method of securing black civil rights. After CORE began drawing significant national press attention in its efforts to integrate public facilities throughout the South, however, the NAACP began to take over the role of defending CORE demonstrators in southern court rooms after they were arrested and came to trial.

In addition to freedom rides through the upper South, CORE in the late 1940s was busy integrating the swimming pool at Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey. By 1949 CORE was working at integrating all downtown eating places in St. Louis, Missouri, and by 1953 they were working toward the same goal in Baltimore, Maryland.

By the mid-1950s CORE had refined the sit-in demonstration into a highly perfected and effective technique. Integrated groups of demonstrators would fill a certain number of tables and chairs in the restaurant or lunch counter in question, thus denying the owner the income that those tables and chairs would ordinarily be earning. One demonstrator would have a sign on his back stating the number of hours-and-minutes the demonstrators had sat there without being served. In some instances CORE would use a "trying on" technique, sitting in at the particular restaurant for only one-or-two hours one day a week in order to show the restaurant owner that having blacks in his or her eating place did not really harm business.

Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, CORE did not generate much national or local publicity with its various freedom rides and sit-in demonstrations. In the South and the border states, newspaper editors simply did not bother to cover CORE demonstrations or report on CORE's isolated victories in integrating a snack bar here and a bus station rest room there. Until the year 1955, fighting for black civil rights was neither a popular cause nor a hot news item.

Although blacks and whites were permitted to ride the same city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, seating on the buses was racially segregated. Whites were to sit at the front of the bus and fill seats toward the rear. Blacks were to sit in the back of the bus and fill seats toward the front. If the bus was so crowded that a white person had to stand, a black bus rider was required by Montgomery city law to give up his or her seat to the white person.

Riding the bus home after a tiring day at work, Mrs. Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man. The date was December 1, 1955, now regarded by many observers as the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. Mrs. Parks was arrested and subsequently bailed out of jail by E. D. Nixon, the Montgomery representative of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a local leader of the NAACP. Later that evening Nixon was struck with the idea of having Montgomery's black citizens boycott the city's segregated bus system.

Other groups, including an organization of black women known as the Women's Political Council, also decided a bus boycott was the best way to respond to the arrest of Rosa Parks. An organizational meeting was held at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and subsequently the minister at that church, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was elected to lead the bus boycott. Montgomery's 40,000 blacks stayed off the city buses for more than a year, vowing not to return until the buses were totally desegregated. Many of the boycotters walked to their destinations. Others rode in car pools or received free automobile rides from volunteer drivers supporting the bus boycott.

The bus boycott failed to convince the white political and governmental leadership in Montgomery to desegreate the city's buses. In November of 1956, almost one year after the bus boycott had begun, the United States Supreme Court ordered the city bus system in Montgomery to integrate racially. The court proved willing to act when the local white leadership would not. On December 21, 1956, with every word and move recorded by national and international television news, Martin Luther King and his supporters boarded a Montgomery city bus and were able to sit in any empty seat they wanted.

Eisenhower's policy of minimizing legislative requests and maximizing executive action was followed by his successor as president, John F. Kennedy.  It can even be argued that President Kennedy, by delaying signing an executive order to racially integrate public housing in the United States for more than two years, was less willing to use executive action on behalf of civil rights than Eisenhower was. To Kennedy's credit, following the violent and well-publicized racial demonstrations in Birmingham in 1963, he sent a major civil rights bill to Congress and worked diligently for its passage.

Part II provided for transforming the small Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department into a Civil Rights Division headed by an assistant attorney general.  The proposed Civil Rights Division would enjoy the enhanced status of being created by congressional legislation rather than executive order.  It also would have more lawyers and more money with which to pursue civil rights objectives.

Part III of Herbert Brownell's proposed civil rights bill provided that the attorney general of the United States be granted the power to secure court injunctions in civil rights cases and that such cases be removed from state courts to United States courts.  Civil rights supporters had long argued that only intervention by the United States Government would end civil rights violations against blacks in the South.

The Eisenhower Part III was not adopted until 1964, but almost all civil rights bills brought to Congress in the 1957-1964 period contained a provision similar to Part III. This provision invested the attorney general with the power to seek court injunctions to protect the civil rights of African-Americans throughout the South.  The concept retained the identifying label "Part III" even when it was not the third part of the particular bill in question.

Part IV would increase the power of the Justice Department to seek injunctions against actual or threatened interference with the right to vote.  It also extended U.S. election laws to cover primary elections and special elections as well as general elections.

Because there is no filibuster rule in the United States House of Representatives, the southerners opposed to civil rights had no way of stopping the Eisenhower civil rights bill in the House.  All four of Herbert Brownell's recommended provisions were, with only minor amendments, passed by the House on June 18, 1957.

The first major problem confronting the Eisenhower civil rights bill was the Senate Judiciary Committee and its strongly segregationist chairman, James O. Eastland of Mississippi.  Eastland had used his powers as committee chairman to kill every civil rights bill that came to the committee during the 1950s.  Eastland and his Judiciary Committee thus were famous as the "burial ground" in the Senate for civil rights bills.

The strategy devised in 1957 for bypassing the Senate Judiciary Committee was used repeatedly with civil rights bills during the 1960s.  The House-passed civil rights bill was intercepted at the moment a clerk carried it over to the Senate from the House of Representatives.  Before the bill could be routed to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate leadership took the bill and put it directly on the Senate calendar for debate at a future time.

The vote to bypass the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1957 received only lukewarm support from Democratic senators.  Only ten of them voted to bring the bill directly to the Senate floor for debate.  The Republicans in the Senate were virtually unanimous in their support for the 1957 bypass motion, however, and that support is what enabled it to be narrowly adopted.  Senate Republicans probably supported the bypass motion so strongly because it was a Republican president's civil rights bill.

The southern attack on President Eisenhower's 1957 civil rights bill centered on Part III, the provision permitting the attorney general to file suits in civil rights cases.  Georgia Senator Richard Russell, the post-World War II leader of the pro-segregation Southern Democrats in the Senate, condemned Part III as an all-out invasion of states' rights.  Russell told the Senate:

Russell concluded his speech by noting that many Americans living outside the South "would not approve of another reconstruction at bayonet point of a peaceful and patriotic South."

The most important lesson learned from the 1957 Civil Rights Act by civil rights supporters was that any deal with the southern senators on a civil rights bill would result in "cutting the heart out" of the bill.  By the early 1960s, this had produced a "no compromises" attitude on the part of civil rights supporters where the southerners were concerned.  The lesson of 1957 was that any bill that the southerners approved of would not be worth having.  A favorite expression at the time was that the bill would have been "gutted." In both 1964 and 1965, pro-civil rights forces adopted the strategy that a meaningful civil rights bill would have to undergo a determined southern filibuster in the Senate and that filibuster would have to be ended by a successful cloture vote (2/3 of senators present and voting).

Equally important in the 1957 Civil Rights Act was the creation of the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice.  Under both President Kennedy and President Johnson, the Civil Rights Division worked to further the civil rights of blacks in the American South and sought to reduce the conflict and violence produced by civil rights demonstrations.  Under the leadership of Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, a Kennedy appointee, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department accomplished many important civil rights tasks in the early 1960s.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded immediately to this challenge to court-ordered school integration. Acting under his authority as Commander in Chief of all U.S. armed forces, he "federalized" the Arkansas National Guard, thus putting it under his control rather than Governor Faubus's control. The Arkansas National Guard was ordered out of Little Rock, and regular U.S. Army troops were sent in to occupy the area around Central High School and see that school integration proceeded in an orderly and peaceful manner.

These decisive actions at Little Rock by a U.S. president made a significant impact on public opinion throughout the nation. For the first time since the Civil War period, United States military forces had entered a southern city and state to enforce a national policy (racial integration) strongly opposed by a state government official (Governor Faubus).

Little Rock's Central High School was integrated by military force for the 1957-1958 school year. The following year, however, Governor Faubus closed the schools rather than allow them to be desegregated. For a brief period, therefore, President Eisenhower's powerful intervention in the school integration crisis in Little Rock resulted in Little Rock public schools being closed.  President Eisenhower's fear that going too rapidly with integration might result in closed public schools in the South had proven to be realistic, at least in the short run.

As would be expected, the subcommittee took the Eisenhower proposals and added to them.  A Part III was included in the subcommittee bill, even though President Eisenhower had refused to include Part III in the administration proposals.

Following consideration by the House Judiciary Committee, President Eisenhower's 1959 civil rights proposal ran into a stone wall of opposition in the House Rules Committee.  The chairman of the House Rules Committee, Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, would disappear from Washington for long periods of time when a bill he disliked was supposed to be under consideration by his committee.  With the Rules Committee chairman absent, no action could be taken on the bill in question. When the 1957 civil rights bill came before his committee, Chairman Smith left town for his Virginia farm because, he said, his dairy barn had caught fire and burned down.  He went back to the farm again in 1959, arguing that his dairy cattle were sick and needed him close by.

By February of 1960 the Eisenhower civil rights bill was, as expected, mired in the Senate Judiciary Committee.  At this time Eisenhower's attorney general, William P. Rogers, proposed that court-appointed referees be sent into the South to register black citizens to vote.  The Rogers proposal, which had the support of President Eisenhower, called for U.S. judges to send in referees wherever they found a "pattern or practice" of discrimination in the voter registration process.

Democratic members of the Senate criticized the Eisenhower voting rights plan.  They pointed out that blacks would have to go through lengthy and legally treacherous court proceedings in order to get court-appointed referees sent into the South to register black voters.  The Democrats argued the president of the United States, and not the courts, should dispatch U.S. registrars down into Dixie to put blacks on the voting rolls.

This controversy over how to register blacks to vote in the South, first aired publicly in early 1960, would continue until the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  In the end, it was the president appointed registrars rather than the court appointed referees who were sent into the South to put large numbers of blacks on the voter registration rolls.

A legislative maneuver was used to get Eisenhower's 1960 civil rights bill past Chairman James Eastland (Dem., MS) and the Senate Judiciary Committee. On February 15, 1960, the civil rights bill came up for debate on the Senate floor as an amendment to a minor bill concerning the leasing of a surplus U.S. Army building to a school district in Missouri.  The southern Democrats in the Senate immediately began a filibuster, primarily against the prospect that Part III would be adopted and would give the U.S. attorney general the power to intervene directly in racial relations in the South.

Late in February, in an effort to break the filibuster, the Senate went into round-the-clock sessions.  The 18 filibustering southerners, divided into 6 teams of 3 senators each, had no trouble keeping one 3 person team on the Senate floor while the other 5 teams rested.  Those opposing the filibuster, however, had to keep 51 senators (a quorum) at the Capitol ready to meet a quorum call at any time.  The result of round-the-clock sessions was to exhaust the pro-civil rights senators, not the southerners.

The failure of round-the-clock sessions to break the filibuster of the 1960 civil rights bill was a lesson to civil rights supporters that dominated their thinking during the early 1960s.  The Southerners could not be exhausted by 24-hour-a-day sessions, but the pro-civil rights senators could be.  It meant that there was only one way to end a filibuster - get 2/3 of the Senate to vote cloture. Thus, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were undergoing southern filibusters in the Senate, round-the-clock sessions were not attempted to break the filibuster.  In both cases civil rights supporters, from the very beginning, saw a successful cloture vote as the only way to end the filibuster and get meaningful civil rights legislation passed in the Senate.

One of the most visible forms of racial discrimination in the late 1950s and early 1960s was the refusal of snack bars, lunch counters, and restaurants to serve African-Americans. On February 1, 1960, four black college students staged a "sit-in" at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Although the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had been using sit-ins to publicly oppose racial segregation since the early 1940s, this particular sit-in, perhaps because it involved college students, received extensive coverage in the national news media, particularly on network television news.

It can be argued there is something of a connection between President Eisenhower's swift intervention in the Little Rock school crisis in 1957 and the rise of the sit-in movement early in 1960.  Eisenhower had made it clear that, in the end, the U.S. Government would support, militarily if necessary, those who were working for civil rights in the southern United States.  Although the sit-in demonstrators were protesting local and state laws, Little Rock had given them much reason to believe that the U.S. Government would eventually come into the dispute on their side.

President Eisenhower's support for civil rights might have been considerably more positive and dramatic if the sit-in demonstrations had occurred early in his administration rather than at the very end.  The civil rights issue so completely divided the American body politic that no president took action on meaningful civil rights legislation until a dramatic national event forced him to take action.  Thus President Kennedy did not persuasively support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 until civil rights demonstrations and riots erupted in Birmingham, Alabama.  President Johnson did not press for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 until the violent suppression of the voting rights march to Selma, Alabama.  If the sit-in demonstrations had begun taking place earlier in the Eisenhower years, and Eisenhower had been presented with a serious situation involving equal access to public accommodations, there well could have been considerably more action by Eisenhower in the civil rights field.

In the fall of 1962 James Meredith, a black, sought to be admitted to the all-white University of Mississippi. Furious legal manipulations by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett and the Mississippi state legislature to keep Meredith out of "Ole Miss" resulted in Meredith's legal case being taken up by both the NAACP and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. As a result, when Meredith came on the Ole Miss campus the day before he was to register for classes, the case had been extremely well-publicized and Meredith was under the personal protection of United States marshals.

A large mob of white demonstrators gathered on the Ole Miss campus to protest Meredith's entrance. Time and again the mob assaulted the U.S. marshals as they stood guard in front of the building in which Meredith was to register the next day, pelting both the marshals and the building with eggs, rocks, and bottles. One marshal was severely wounded in the neck. A bystander was killed by a stray bullet, and a news correspondent was mysteriously shot to death at close range. Although snipers fired bullets repeatedly at the university building in which Meredith was to register, miraculously none of the U.S. marshals or Justice Department lawyers there were killed.

It can be said of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that, short of a declaration of war, no other act of Congress had a more violent background - a background of confrontation, official violence, injury, and murder that has few parallels in American history. By late 1962 and early 1963 the map of the South, as viewed from the offices of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., was beflagged with little pins marking the many confrontations between black demonstrators on the one hand and segregationist whites on the other. Emissaries of the Justice Department were traveling through Dixie like emergency squads, enforcing school integration orders, looking for civil rights violations in the arrests and trials of sit-in demonstrators, and trying desperately to mediate peaceful settlements between the warring forces.

Several factors contributed to the confrontational background of this legislation. Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order creating the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department (later the Civil Rights Division) provided a government agency to aid southern blacks in their efforts to gain integration. The 1954 Supreme Court school integration decision had given black leaders a legal basis for arguing for equal treatment, not only in the school room but in the community generally. The Montgomery bus boycott had legitimated the non-violent demonstration as an acceptable, and effective, means of gaining black rights.

Also important was the use of television to dramatize racial repression in the South. Network television news in the 1950s and 1960s originated and was edited almost totally in the North. Most networks news chiefs sent liberal, northern reporters down South to cover the civil rights movement rather than recruiting local reporters in the South who might have been more sympathetic to the segregationist cause. When white segregationist rioters realized they were being presented in an unfavorable light on the television screen, they made the mistake of beginning to rough up reporters and television crews and to destroy cameras and film. Such physical attacks on the press simply made Northern editors more determined than ever to carry the civil rights story to the American people in terms as favorable as possible to the integrationists.

The impact of television on the civil rights movement was not limited to television viewers in the North and the West. Newspapers and local television and radio stations in the South, being local businesses and edited locally, tended to play down civil rights stories or edit them out altogether. There was no such local editing of network television news reports. People in southern cities who heard little about racial problems through their local news media were exposed to a constant barrage of civil rights stories on the national news on TV. The "Cotton Curtain" which used to prevent unpleasant racial items from getting into local southern news media was completely torn asunder by national network television news.

It has been argued that Martin Luther King, Jr., and his associates had an unspoken strategy of using non-violent demonstrations to deliberately provoke attacks from violence-prone white southern officials and white segregationist mobs. It was well-known to King and his associates, so the argument goes, that it was the opposition white violence that would attract widespread and sympathetic media coverage of their activities.

Whether or not King and his associates had such an unspoken strategy, their efforts resulted in the media coverage they needed. The civil rights movement thus became one of the most publicized events in United States history. It set the stage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to be one of the most extensively publicized legislative battles in United States history.