(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



June 19th Sixty Years Ago Advanced What We Celebrate Today [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-06-19  

Senate passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act brought America a step closer to our stated ideals.

In 1964, as surely was the case with a vast majority of Americans and almost all white Americans, I had never heard of Juneteenth. As far as I can tell, it was not mentioned at the time, but what happened on this day sixty years ago took the nation a major step closer to what we celebrate from 99 years before: a stride towards freedom, towards bringing America more in line with the ideals proclaimed 188 years earlier and 248 years ago, that all humans are equal.

Contrary to what many people think, the Juneteenth holiday is not a celebration just for African Americans, it is a celebration for America—all of us. Enslavement was a huge contradiction to the ideals on which the nation was established and bringing it to an end is something all of us should celebrate.

On June 19, 1964, the Senate finally passed the civil rights bill that President John F. Kennedy had called for a year before, in a televised address on June 11, 1963, and President Lyndon B. Johnson had made his top priority.

Johnson addressed Congress and the nation on November 27, 1963, five days after JFK’s assassination. On the afternoon before his address, LBJ met with a group of advisers who cautioned him not to push for the civil rights bill, which they said was a lost cause in the Senate and would antagonize southern senators whose support he would need on other issues. “The presi­dency,” argued one of the “wise men” sitting around the table, “has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t expend it on this.”

Johnson’s response was direct and powerful: “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”

♦ ♦ ♦

Shortly after he became president, Johnson asked staunch segregationist Sen. Richard Rus­sell of Georgia, who had been the new president’s mentor in the Senate, to come and talk with him about the civil rights bill. “Dick, you’ve got to get out of my way. I’m going to run you over,” Johnson told him. “I don’t intend to cave or compromise.”

“You may do that,” Russell responded, “but by God, it’s going to cost you the South and cost you the election.”

“If that’s the price I’ve got to pay,” LBJ declared, “I’ll pay it gladly.”

We can readily dismiss the “gladly” part. Lyndon Johnson was terri­fied of defeat. But he did proceed to run over former colleagues in the Senate’s southern bloc to enact the most significant legislation protect­ing “the rights of Negroes” since Reconstruction. While there were times when Johnson thought pushing civil rights might be politically helpful, he greatly feared Russell’s prediction.

Despite his fears, Johnson pushed on. The big question, of course, is: Why? Why did LBJ work so hard to bring “white freedom” to black and other minority people? Like almost all questions concerning Johnson, there is no single answer.

“I’m Going to Be the President Who Finishes What Lincoln Began”

“Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.” – Lyndon Johnson, spring 1964, on why he was pushing civil rights

One simple explanation for Johnson’s remarkably strong stand for civil rights would be his overriding quest to become the greatest president in history. “He said over and over and over again in those days,” John­son aide Roger Wilkins recalled, “‘I’m going to be the president who finishes what Lincoln began.’”

An additional reason for his powerful commitment to civil rights was that he believed it was right, moral, and necessary. John­son asserted that he “wanted power to give things to people—all sorts of things to all sorts of people, especially the poor and the blacks.” He identified with the downtrodden. Johnson absolutely wanted to get the credit for helping people, but he genuinely did want to help them. Lyndon Johnson, so skilled as an “insider” in Washington, continued even as president to identify himself with the outsiders.

When Mississippi Senator John Stennis told LBJ that the people of his state would never accept the provisions in the civil rights bill, citing the segregationists’ view of the meaning of freedom (“It’s just impossible. I mean I believe that a man ought to have the right—if he owns a store or runs a café, he ought to have the right to serve who he wants to serve”), Johnson responded:

Well, you know, John, the other day a sad thing happened. My cook, Zephyr Wright, who had been working for me for many years—she’s a college graduate—and her husband drove my official car from Washington down to Texas. . . . They drove through your state and when they got hun­gry, they stopped at grocery stores on the edge of town in colored areas and bought Vienna sausage and beans and ate them with a plastic spoon. And when they had to go to the bathroom, they would stop, pull off on a side road, and Zephyr Wright, the cook of the Vice President of the United States, would squat in the road to pee. And, you know, John, that’s just bad. That’s wrong. And there ought to be something to change that. And it seems to me that if the people of Mississippi don’t change it voluntarily, that it is just going to be necessary to change it by law.

That’s just bad. That’s wrong. That brief, simple, moral statement sums up Lyndon Johnson’s view on racial discrimination and the imperative to remedy it.

♦ ♦ ♦

There were four hurdles the civil rights bill would have to clear to become law: the House Rules Committee, the full House, the Senate Judiciary Committee, and, finally, the inevitable filibuster by southern senators.

The Senate was accurately described by Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey as the graveyard of civil rights bills (a circumstance echoed when Republican Mitch McConnell proclaimed himself “the Grim Reaper” as Senate majority leader in the 2010s). Getting a bill with real teeth through the House posed a major challenge in itself. As chairman of the House Rules Committee, Howard Smith of Virginia, an unyielding defender of segregation, could block such a bill from reaching the House floor.

Lyndon Johnson knew how to get things done in Congress. If Smith wouldn’t agree to send the bill to the full House, the new president and his allies in that chamber would force his hand by circulating a discharge petition. If they could get the signatures of a majority of House members, the bill would go straight to the full House. That move led Smith to allow the bill out of his committee.

Johnson skillfully combined public appeals with private pressure on members of Congress, working the phones incessantly. After ten days of debate, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly (290 to 130) for the bill on February 10.

Without taking even a brief pause to catch his breath, Johnson turned his attention to the Senate. At a news conference, the president declared that the segregationists could “filibuster until hell freezes over; I’m not going to put anything on that floor until this is done.”

Wooing Ev Dirksen and Enlarging the Meaning of Freedom

“You get in there to see Dirksen; you drink with Dirksen, you talk with Dirksen, you listen to Dirksen.” – LBJ to Hubert Humphrey (spring 1964)

Unless the segregationists in the Senate gave up, the only way to break the filibuster was to get two-thirds of all senators to vote cloture—that is, to end the debate and bring the bill to a vote. Cloture votes had often been taken on civil rights bills in the past; all had failed. Lyndon Johnson and his allies had to find a way to make it different this time. Republican senators from the Midwest and West would be essential to obtaining the requisite two-thirds vote. The key man in getting their votes was Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, the Senate Republican leader. Johnson tried to diminish his own centrality in the Senate struggle, “so that a hero’s niche could be carved out for Senator Dirksen, not me.”

Johnson assigned the task of winning over Dirksen to Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey. The president was concerned that liberal Democrats would not want to work with Dirksen. “Now don’t let those bomb throwers talk you out of seeing Dirksen,” the president instructed Humphrey.” Humphrey later remarked that he “would have kissed Dirksen’s ass on the Capitol steps” to get the minority leader’s support for cloture.

Senator Dirksen proved to have no objection to becoming a “hero in history.” The Illinois Republican met with Humphrey several times in May in the minority leader’s office, where LBJ’s instructions to “drink with Dirksen” were not difficult to follow—a section of the office was named the “Twilight Lodge” and every number on the clock there was “5.” The result was an amended bill that both Dirksen and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights endorsed.

While Humphrey was working the inside game with Dirksen, Lyndon Johnson was handling public opinion. Like an evangelical preacher, he exhorted his fellow citizens to do the moral thing. “Now I knew that as president I couldn’t make people want to integrate their schools or open their doors to blacks,” LBJ later said, “but I could make them feel guilty for not doing it and I believed that it was my moral responsibility to do precisely that—to use the moral persuasion of my office to make people feel that segregation was a curse they’d carry with them to their graves.”

Johnson also believed that civil rights reform was a practical matter for the white South. As biographer Robert Dallek has nicely put it, Johnson “was determined to administer the unpleasant medicine that would cure the region’s social disease.” Racial integration in the South would, Johnson was convinced, lead to economic and political integra­tion of the South with the nation.

Johnson shrewdly allowed Dirksen to rewrite the bill, without alter­ing its substance but putting it in his words, so that he could claim to be its coauthor. “You’re worthy of the Land of Lincoln,” the president told Dirksen in a phone call. “And the Man from Illinois is going to pass the bill, and I’ll see that you get proper attention and credit.”

The combination of Johnson’s outside and inside games and the courting of Dirksen worked. A cloture vote was taken on June 10, and Senator Dirksen was given center stage. Quoting Victor Hugo, the minority leader proclaimed: “‘Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.’ The time has come for equality of opportunity. . . . It will not be stayed or denied. It is here!”

Less than sure of the outcome, the pro–civil rights forces took no chances. In a dramatic moment, Senator Clair Engle arrived in a wheelchair. The California senator was dying from a brain tumor and unable to speak. When he was called upon to vote, he pointed to his eye to indicate an “aye” vote. Cloture wound up passing with four votes above the required two-thirds, 71 to 29. Only one Democrat from a state that had been part of the Confederacy, Ralph Yarborough of Texas, voted to end debate, while all but two of the other Demo­crats voted that way. On the Republican side, twenty-seven senators, all from outside the old Confederacy, voted to end debate, while six, including the only Republican senator from a former Confederate state, John Tower of Texas, and soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater of Arizona, voted against.

Dick Russell’s reaction to being beaten by his longtime pupil—his substitute son—on this issue so dear to his heart was magnanimous. “Now you tell Lyndon,” Russell had said to Bill Moyers after the fili­buster began, “that I’ve been expecting the rod for a long time, and I’m sorry that it’s from his hand the rod must be wielded, but I’d rather it be his hand than anybody else’s. Tell him to cry a little when he uses it.” Russell’s attitude reflects the importance of it being a southern pres­ident who pushed through civil rights legislation. It was what would later be termed Nixon-to-China—the idea that the only president who could get away with doing something very controversial was one who came out of a background that gave him cover for doing so.

With the filibuster broken, the Senate approved the bill on June 19 by a vote of 73 to 27. Given that the day would come to be a national holiday celebrating freedom, it was the perfect day for this historic accomplishment.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/19/2247500/-June-19th-Sixty-Years-Ago-Advanced-What-We-Celebrate-Today?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/