The Civil Rights Bill

...One facet of the Democratic triumph in the debate must be assigned to the Southern leaders, particularly Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, who did not threaten with the stale tactic of the filibuster but challenged the bill on its merits...

...and Negro voters, who have achieved a significant marginal power in the elections, are not the sole arbitrators of democracy...

...Moreover, the strategy was quite unnecessary because the Republicans were bound to get more credit for the bill among the Negro voters...

...Young Senator Herman Talmadge is not only a rabid racist, but an isolationist and nationalist who is worried about the competition of Egyptian cotton...

...It has been interesting to observe the mixture of moral and political motives in the competition between the parties for the prestige of achieving a real civil-rights bill, while shrewd commentators estimated the significance of the possible shift in Negro votes in the industrial centers of New York...

...One nurses the consoling thought that, if our 1952 and 1956 hopes were dupes, our present fears may be liars...

...But even these considerations do not remove the grave apprehension that the figure of Vice President Richard Nixon may loom large in our future, and not merely because the President may not outlast his term...

...This conflict was compromised in the Senate bill by the provision of jury trial legislation, who decided not to challenge the bill, would have cut rather unconvincing figures...

...Thus, we have a bill which represents a triumph of democracy if we include in democratic justice not only the guarantee of rights but the reasonable accommodation of conflictonly in cases of "criminal contempt," that is, when a judge is confronted with actual defiance of an injunction which he seeks to punish...

...This is particularly true when dealing not with individual and criminal recalcitrance but with the stubborn customs of a region...

...Senator Russell affirmed that the bill was "cunningly contrived" to adopt the old "force" methods which the South so abhorred...

...The very debate in Congress, with the two parties contending for the favor of the Northern N?em'oi"i...

...A majority of the Senators, including some liberal Republicans and Democrats, concurred in the Southern objections and emasculated the famous Section 3, which contained the sanctions on integration...

...Civil-rights purists will undoubtedly not be satisfied with the bill...

...The judgment may be heedless, and time may prove it to be wrong...

...At that time, Roosevelt himself was the symbol of the party and one could forget the Senator Bilbos...

...and that the Democratic majority, embodying the interests of many "common people," will not be dissipated as quickly as now seems probable...

...But the Republicans, including the President, had second thoughts about this posture, designed to keep the issue alive until the Congressional election in November 1958...

...Since the Civil War, which freed the Negro from slavery but left him essentially rightless, the Southern white population has, on the whole, remained sullen and recalcitrant...

...In my opinion, they were right in acceding to this compromise for two reasons: The first is that the Court decision had already proved so potent in changing the customs of generations that it would have been ill advised to obscure the majesty of the law with obvious sanctions, at least so long as that majesty was proving itself potent...

...What is worse, his senior Georgia colleague, Senator Russell, has been busy trying to reduce foreign aid...

...was a vivid justification of the logic which regards all other rights as derived politically from the franchise right...

...To begin with, the rights of Negro citizens have undoubtedly been made more secure...

...The South appealed to the ancient right of trial by jury...

...The Negro voter may be pardoned if he forgets both what he owed to Roosevelt, who made the party so potent in the North, and what the party owes to the artful compromises of Senator Johnson...

...He sees Democratic Senator Russell defending the hated "Southern way of life" and the Democratic leader, Senator Lyndon Johnson, artfully projecting the compromises which made the passage of the bill possible and which saved the unity of the Democratic party...

...As the Negroes made their way in our culture and economy, the "Southern way of life" became more and more an anachronism and a moral offense...

...It worked for almost a century...

...Southern whites were complacent in their defiance of the Federal standards of equality and in circumventing, as far as possible, the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment for the sake of preserving the "Southern way of life...

...In every community, we must strive not only for justice to the individual but for the harmony of the community...

...Truman's stubborn stand on civil rights preserved the single image...

...The Northern liberals insisted that, in this case, a jury trial would negate the right to vote, because no Southern jury would convict anyone who interfered with the right to vote...

...At any rate, only one more insignificant compromise was needed to push the bill through the House in essentially the same terms given it by the Senate amendments...

...But history moves and the Negroes moved north, where they acquired the vote...

...After the evils of Reconstruction days, resulting in part from the enfranchisement of former slaves who were not equal to the responsibilities of the franchise...

...These second thoughts were politically valid because the Republican politicians pretending to be more uncompromising than life-long devotees of civil-rights ing interests...

...But the total image of the party, in the eyes of Negro voters, has shifted since FDR accomplished the amazing feat of making the party an instrument of Northern liberalism on both civil rights and economic issues without losing the Southern base of the party...

...At the same time, the Northern Negro votes made the preservation of this peculiar Southern defiance more and more politically untenable...

...This meant that the South, whether from a sense of the hopelessness of its cause or because time had softened ancient enmities, was willing to come into the same universe of discourse and try to persuade, rather than threaten...

...This distinction must be made, both because the South should have an uneasy conscience about its circumvention of the Fourteenth Amendment, which might have been relieved by equating voting rights with educational rights, and because the redoubtable Negro leader Martin Luther King was right when he declared: "Give us the vote and we will do the rest...

...the whole process which produced the bill was a great triumph, not only because it advanced the rights of Negro citizens but because it also made some progress in reconciling a recalcitrant South to a higher standard of justice...

...The second reason for approving this compromise is that the bill thus made a sharp distinction between the denial in the South of the very basic right of the franchise and the much less basic right of school integration...

...Pennsylvania and Illinois...

...FDR was a political genius, but even he could not have held the party together if the economically and racially conservative South were unable to espouse one part of his program out of real conviction...

...But, in my opinion, both the bill and the debate which finally produced it represent a great triumph of democratic justice...

...And that was as great an achievement as the advancement of Negro rights...

...The South favored the foreign policy of Roosevelt because it was, as a cotton-and tobacco-exporting region, traditionally in favor of free trade...

...Even if one superimposes the image of the artful compromiser, Lyndon Johnson, the image is still blurred...

...We are in for a cold and probably long winter in the Democratic party...

...The images of Senators Douglas and Russell do not combine to yield a Roosevelt or even a Truman...

...As a Democrat, I must confess that this same bill, in which the nation gained so much, was probably a catastrophe for the Democratic party...

...But consider this whole debate from the standpoint of the average Negro voter: He sees a Republican President vigorously championing the bill (that is, at least as vigorously as he champions any bill) and the Republican leader of the Senate, William Knowland, piloting it through the chamber...

...The parliamentary mode of this defense was the filibuster to prevent any new civil-rights legislation...

...The charge seemed absurd until it became apparent—which most of us, including the President, did not know—that the bill was designed not only to guarantee voting rights but to implement the Supreme Court decision on integration...

...But that is just the point: Johnson may have saved the unity of the party, but he could not hide its deep disunity on the race issue...

...Also, the Negroes, despite handicaps, proved more and more the validity of the principle that all men are equal, at least in the sense that they must be given equal opportunities to realize their potentialities and to prove that many inequalities are due to unequal opportunities...

...Furthermore...

...we must wait for the election returns...

...But without the White House the party was symbolized by its disparate Senatorial representatives...

...With Section 3 eliminated, there remained only the long struggle about the provision of the bill which made it possible for a Federal judge to try contempt cases involving voting rights without a jury, as is usual in contempt cases...

...As we all know, the President at first seemed very scornful of this compromise, and Congressman Joseph Martin, the leader of the House Republicans, stoutly declared that the House would never accept it...

...If this were not true, it would be wrong to regard the compromises which produced the bill as a triumph of democracy...

...Nor do they all consider civil rights the only issue...

...I am sure local Negroes will not forget their consistent champions in the Democratic party, such as Senators Paul Douglas, Richard Neuber-ger, Wayne Morse, Hubert Humphrey and others...

...There goes the "enlightened" South in foreign policy...

...Fortunately, civil rights is not the only issue which determines elections, even Presidential ones...

...Now this common ground seems to be vanishing also...