SEVENTEEN 

MISSISSIPPI, MEDGAR EVERS, AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS BILL

JUST HOURS AFTER Kennedy’s speech, Mississippi NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was shot to death from ambush in his driveway. Evers had been leading a movement, like Birmingham’s, in Jackson for weeks. By June 1, 1963, more than six hundred Blacks were in jail, and Roy Wilkins, who had condemned the sit-ins just two years before, flew to Jackson to join them. The Jackson movement sputtered and stopped and started. It was only one of several flash points across the South. In Tallahassee, Florida, 257 demonstrators were tear-gassed and arrested. Forty Black soldiers in Newfoundland protested segregation at a restaurant near their base, and there were demonstrations in a half-dozen North Carolina cities. On June 6, 278 students from North Carolina A&T University were arrested, including the student body president, Jesse Jackson.¹ Between the settlement in Birmingham and Evers’s murder, there had been 758 racial demonstrations and 14,733 arrests in 186 cities.

Four days before Evers was shot, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer was returning to Greenwood, Mississippi, from a Citizenship School session in Charleston, South Carolina, with sixteen-year-old June Johnson, SCLC’s Annelle Ponder, and three others. Thirty miles away at a rest stop in Winona, Mississippi, Ponder entered the bus station’s white waiting room. Police arrived and threw her out. As she stood on the sidewalk writing down the license numbers of the police cars, she was arrested.

At the station, Ponder was beaten by three policemen with blackjacks for ten minutes when she refused to say “Sir” to the policemen, who called her a “nigger bitch.” The policemen then beat June Johnson; Mrs. Hamer was next. She was taken into the jail’s bullpen where two Black inmates waited. A policeman gave one a blackjack, and Mrs. Hamer remembered him being told, “I want you to make that bitch wish she was dead.” The inmate told Mrs. Hamer to lie down on a bed. She asked him, “You mean you would do this to your own race?” She described what happened next.²

I had to get over there on the bed flat on my stomach, and that man beat me—that man beat me until he give out. And by me screamin’, it made one of the other ones—plainclothes fellow . . ., he didn’t have nothing on like a uniform—he got so hot and worked up off it, he just run . . . there, you know, and start hitting on the back of my head. Well, my hand, I was trying to guard some of the licks . . . you see—and my hands, they beat my hands till they turned blue, and . . . quite naturally, being beaten like that, my clothes come up, and I tried to pull them down, you know. . . . One of the other white fellows—just taken my clothes and just snatched them up, and this Negro, when he had just beat me until I know he was just [about to] give out, well, then, this state patrolman told the other Negro to take it. So he taken over from there. . . . I had to hug around the mattress to keep the sound from coming out.³

By this time, the SNCC office in Greenwood knew where the women were. Lawrence Guyot went to Winona to see what had happened to them. When he refused to say “Sir” to a policeman in front of the jail, he too was arrested and beaten. A young law student, Eleanor Holmes, also visited the jail.⁴ Finally, on June 12, SCLC’s Andrew Young posted their bail, and they were released. They learned that President John Kennedy had made a stirring civil rights speech the night before, and that a few hours after the speech Medgar Evers had been murdered.

BIRMINGHAM’S EFFECTS

Before the Birmingham movement began on Easter weekend 1963, active opposition to the city’s segregation system seemed limited to a small cadre of liberal whites and members of Shuttlesworth’s organization, but these numbers were too small to effect any significant change. Only the intervention of outside forces obliged Birmingham to confront segregation. Using nonviolent techniques refined in the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and Albany, King’s SCLC drew some previously uninvolved local Blacks into the protest movement but was never able to attract sizeable numbers of the city’s Black middle class.

Birmingham’s white community reacted in two ways. Initially, Bull Connor and the police he directed tried to meet nonviolence with nonviolence, as Chief Laurie Pritchett had done in Albany, but, as the protests grew larger, Connor brutally unleashed the full force of the police. The newly elected mayor and council did not make the city’s racial problems worse, but they took no positive steps to make them better. Only when they agreed to meet and negotiate secretly with the protest leaders did they separate themselves from the prevailing view of the city’s former political leadership.

It was the city’s business leadership, rather than political leaders, who brokered the deal that ended segregation and ended the demonstrations. The federal government, drawn unwillingly into Birmingham by the sympathetic reaction nationally to televised fire hoses and police dogs, sent Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall to facilitate negotiations. Desegregation of downtown stores, employment opportunities for Blacks, establishment of a permanent biracial committee, the release of jailed demonstrators on low bail—all were achieved within three months.

These victories for Blacks stimulated heightened resistance among antagonistic whites; after initially preparing to accept limited school integration, the Birmingham school board used the post-protest riots as an excuse to close the integrated schools, and, when they reopened, Governor George Wallace used state troopers to prevent Black children from attending. Only when President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard to ensure the children’s safety were the schools integrated.

But the primary impact of the Birmingham demonstrations was national, rather than local. Birmingham’s six weeks of demonstrations were followed by an explosion of protests. Time magazine called it a “feverish, fragmented, spasmodic, almost uncontrollable revolution.”⁵ Across the South, Blacks asserted their right to use facilities that had been whites-only two months earlier—parks, playgrounds, beaches, libraries, theaters, restaurants, and hotels. They marched and boycotted and sat in.

The post-Birmingham protests were like the 1960 sit-ins—disconnected and spontaneous but much more widespread, involving many more people of all ages and backgrounds. There were 930 demonstrations in 115 cities. In a single three-week period after Birmingham, 143 cities agreed to some degree of integration; by the year’s end, over 300 had done so. Birmingham’s inspiration meant that maintaining segregation had become untenable. Segregation had depended on everyday acceptance by Blacks, but the civil rights movement in six short weeks had defeated the beast in its most entrenched locale, against an opposition led by violence-prone racists.

Like the Freedom Rides before them but on a much greater scale, the Birmingham protests nationalized the civil rights movement, bringing televised images of dogs and fire hoses into American homes. At the most basic level, the protests galvanized Northern political opinion against the excesses of defiant Southern whites. President Kennedy said it best: “The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He’s helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.”⁶ The Birmingham protests caused the Kennedy administration to rethink its civil rights strategies. Its civil rights program had been developed in response to crises—federal protection for the Freedom Riders in 1961 and for James Meredith at Ole Miss in 1962.

After the Birmingham protests, it was obvious that a basic tenet of nonviolent theory had been found wanting: unmerited suffering by peaceful protesters would not soften the hearts or change the minds of the most resistant whites. More was required—the economic squeeze that a boycott of stores could provide and national and worldwide publicity created by dramatic confrontations. For many in the movement, power replaced love and Christianity. Rather than converting white opponents and arguing the moral righteousness of their cause, they could force change through mass disruption.

Birmingham’s images of young people facing down dogs and fire hoses goaded thousands nationwide into activism. If children in Birmingham could do this, how could their elders say no? Historian Adam Fairclough described the catalytic effect of the movement: “The SCLC’s protests electrified black Southerners. They were thrilled when hundreds of black schoolchildren marched out of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and into lines of waiting policemen, taunting them and singing as police vans hauled them off to jail. They were incensed when blacks were chased by police dogs, then drenched and pounded by high-pressure fire hoses. Above all they were inspired by the sheer audacity of it all—and moved to action.”⁷

“The sound of the explosion in Birmingham,” King said, “reached all the way to Washington.”⁸ Across the country, Blacks awakened to a new sense of power. If America’s most segregated city, led by the most intransigent whites, could be forced to yield, then any city could be brought to heel by an awakened Black insurgency.

Birmingham drew into the racial struggle the previously torpid, poorest Blacks, a population with little interest in the symbolic and status gains motivating college students, professionals, and religious middle-class Blacks. As the racial struggle’s demographics became more democratic and massive and encompassed more lower-class participation, impatience multiplied, disobedience became less civil, and nonviolence became more and more a mere tactic.

Birmingham also heightened the militancy of civil rights organizations, even those that played no role in the Birmingham protests, presenting greater demands on civil rights leadership. The national mood changed too. Polls and surveys in 1963 showed large majorities favoring Black voting rights, job opportunities, good housing, and desegregated schools and public accommodations.⁹

White supremacists, perhaps realizing that Birmingham represented a great shift in the national mood signaling an end to their way of life, under attack by an alliance of civil rights agitators and the federal government, felt embattled, endangered, and desperate and increasingly turned to terrorism and murder.

KENNEDY’S CIVIL RIGHTS BILL

The centerpiece of the bill Kennedy sent to Congress on June 19, 1963, was Title II, the section on public accommodations, which allowed individuals to file suit against discriminatory establishments and permitted the attorney general to file suit under limited conditions. There was no Title III, the disputed section of the 1957 bill that would have given the attorney general authority to sue over the violation of any citizen’s rights. The school desegregation section would give the attorney general limited authority to sue local school boards or public colleges that refused to integrate.

The Kennedy administration found the constitutional authority for the public accommodations section in a controversial place: the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to regulate the nation’s economic life, rather than in the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection. This choice was as much political as it was legal—the use of the Fourteenth Amendment would send the legislation to the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by bigoted Senator James O. Eastland. The commerce clause meant it would be considered by the Senate Commerce Committee, chaired by much more liberal Senator Warren Magnuson (D-WA).

The school desegregation section posed potential political problems too. Northerners of both parties agreed that segregated schools were bad—in the South. Those in their own backyards were another matter. A behind-the-scenes bipartisan coalition quickly arose to focus the school desegregation bill on Southern segregation, away from requiring that the segregation found in the North and West also be addressed.¹⁰

To the administration’s surprise, Title VI of the bill found bipartisan, non-Southern support as well. It called for a single, comprehensive ban on federal funding of racially discriminatory programs. Also not included was a title on job discrimination. Kennedy had asked Congress to make the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, headed by Vice President Lyndon Johnson, permanent.

By the time Kennedy introduced his bill, on June 19, other members of Congress had introduced several versions of their own, including the small band of Northern, liberal Republicans in the House. When hearings began, there were 168 bills on the House Judiciary Committee’s calendar. May 8 was the same day King announced the Birmingham settlement. The administration’s strategy was to pass a bill through the liberal House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Emanuel Celler (D-NY), to overwhelm the reactionary Rules Committee, chaired by Howard Smith (D-VA), and to pass the bill to the House floor, where national outrage over the Birmingham brutality would send it to the Senate.

The biggest opponent on the Judiciary Committee was not the chair, Senator Eastland; rather, it was a member from North Carolina, Senator Sam Erwin (D-NC). Ten years later, Americans would think of Erwin as a hero as he demolished the Nixon administration’s attempts to justify its break-in and cover-up in the Watergate scandal. In 1963, however, he conducted a “committee filibuster” against the civil rights bill, which dragged the hearings into September.

On a separate track, another piece of civil rights legislation was moving through the tortuously slow processes in the House. When Representative Adam Clayton Powell became chair of the Education and Labor Committee in 1961, he created a Subcommittee on Labor, which held hearings across the North and West in 1961 and 1962 on racial discrimination in employment, to demonstrate the need for a strong federal law like the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which civil rights forces had been trying to establish for years. In the 1962 hearings, another committee looked quickly into including age and gender discrimination in such a law. It found great enthusiasm for making age discrimination illegal but little for the prospect of adding gender.

The Powell committee’s legislation was introduced in 1963 and reported to the full House on July 22. It made it illegal for an employer, labor union, or employment agency “to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment because of such individuals’ race, religion, color, national origin, or ancestry.”

There was no mention of gender discrimination, although age was added, with seniority systems excepted. The mechanism that enforced this new law would be a five-member Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), modeled on state fair employment practices commissions. After investigation and attempts at conciliation, the commission could order an offender to “cease and desist from such unlawful employment practice and to take such affirmative action . . . as will effectuate the policies of the Act.”¹¹

On August 5, the House Judiciary Committee had completed twenty-two days of hearings on the administration’s bill, compiled 1,742 pages of printed testimony, and begun private sessions to mark up the bill. President Kennedy asked Chairman Celler to delay the markup sessions; he was afraid that the seven Southern committee chairs would use progress on the civil rights bill to threaten the president’s tax cut bill, which had higher priority for him. Congress recessed for the Labor Day weekend on August 28, 1963.¹²

That day, August 28, President Kennedy was host at the White House to the leaders of that day’s successful March on Washington—only male leaders; no women were included. It had been the largest gathering of civil rights supporters in the nation’s history.