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July 2, 1964. Civil rights leaders and leaders of Congress and the administration gather in the East Room of the White House as the president prepares for the historic signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Consensus and
Civil Rights:

Lyndon B. Johnson and the Black Franchise

STEVEN F. LAWSON and

MARK I. GELFAND

Lyndon Johnson was, as T. Harry Williams observed a few months after the former president's death, a "tormented man from [a] tormented region who had such large visions of what his country might become." Born and raised in the South, Johnson had only gradually come to recognize the hardships blacks endured under the racial caste system in Dixie. But as he became aware of their plight, and as he acquired power and spoke to a constituency beyond his region, the Texan dedicated himself to realizing the American dream for Afro-Americans. That commitment, however, had to be fulfilled in the context of Johnson's penchant for what Professor Williams has called, "measured, manipulated change within the system and a consensus built on compromise." In the process, Johnson shaped some of twentieth-century liberalism's greatest triumphs but also some of its bitterest disappointments.

Both Lyndon Johnson's contemporaries and those historians who have dared to venture into the very recent past have praised his civil rights legislative achievements as outstanding. In less than six years he guided to passage three measures that destroyed public

1976 by Steven F. Lawson and Mark I. Gelfand

1 T. Harry Williams, "Huey, Lyndon, and Southern Radicalism," Journal of American History 60 (Sept. 1973): 292, 293.

segregation in the South, made good the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment, and attacked the nation's discriminatory residential patterns. Clarence Mitchell, who, as the legislative representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), closely observed Johnson's performance in Washington, concluded, "[Lyndon Johnson] made a greater contribution to giving a dignified and hopeful status to Negroes in the United States than any other President, including Lincoln, Roosevelt and Kennedy." 2 This judgment has been seconded by Carl Degler, who wrote of Johnson that as "President his record on Negro rights surpassed that of any President since Lincoln; his public avowal of Negro equality more than matched that of John F. Kennedy." 3

Yet, despite the widespread plaudits Johnson has received for his efforts to rectify the nation's racial wrongs, some critics have questioned his prescriptions for change. Generally,

2 Clarence Mitchell, oral history interview, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library (LBJL).

3 Carl Degler, Affluence and Anxiety: 1945-Present (Glenview, Ill., 1968), p. 135. Other works commenting favorably on Johnson's accomplishments include John Herbers, The Lost Priority: What Happened to the Civil Rights Movement in America? (New York, 1970), John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1969), Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power (New York,

these commentators do not doubt Johnson's sincerity, but they find the New Frontier's and Great Society's liberal remedies inadequate cures for the ills that have plagued blacks for generations. They believe that in dealing with southern white obstructionists Washington policymakers have unduly stressed conciliation and negotiation and held a traditional conception of the federal system when nothing less than compulsion, massive intervention, and a restructuring of the political order was needed. Furthermore, these dissenters maintain that much of the radical protest against the system which surfaced in the late 1960s reflected disillusionment with the reformist approach. As political scientist Charles V. Hamilton has contended, "Notwithstanding the eloquent argument of liberals-white and black-that American politics required compromise, it is also the case that there are limits beyond which a theoretical political democracy cannot go and expect unswerving loyalty from those who perceive themselves to be the perpetual victims of the democratic process.'

"4

Johnson's strong advocacy of civil rights while in the White House is all the more striking when compared to his early record in Congress. As a member of the House, he had opposed proposals to abolish the poll tax, create a fair employment practices commission, and make lynching a federal crime. When Johnson assumed his Senate seat in 1949, he quickly lined up with his southern colleagues against the Truman administration's civil rights program, which he attacked as "sadistic"

1966), Eric F. Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (New York, 1968), August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto (New York, 1970), p. 269, Benjamin Muse, The American Negro Revolution (Bloomington, 1968), Sig Synnestvedt, The White Response to Black Emancipation (New York, 1972), Harry McPherson, A Political Education (Boston, 1972), Allan Wolk, The Presidency and Black Civil Rights (Rutherford, N.J., 1971), C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford, 2d rev. ed., 1966), and James Sundquist, Politics and Policy (Washington, 1968).

4 Charles V. Hamilton, "Blacks and the Crisis in Political Participation," The Public Interest 34 (Winter 1972): 201. For other critical evaluations, see James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (New York, 1972), Victor Navasky, Kennedy Justice (New York, 1971), Pat Watters and Reese Cleghorn, Climbing Jacob's Ladder (New York, 1967), Ronald Radosh, "From Protest to Black Power: The Failure of Coalition Politics," in The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism, ed. Marvin E. Gettleman and David Mermelstein (New York, 1967), pp. 278-293, and James C. Harvey, Black Civil Rights During the Johnson Administration (Jackson, Miss., 1973), pp. 224-226.

and "designed more to humiliate the South than to help the black man." 5 During his tenure on Capitol Hill, however, Johnson never played the role of Negrophobe, a practice popular with other politicians from his region. Rather, for the Texan, progress in race relations would come slowly, and Negroes would have to be patient before they secured their constitutional rights. Explaining his philosophy to one of his black constituents after the delivery of his maiden speech to the Senate-a defense of the filibuster-Johnson wrote, "Personally it is my hope to see the day when the atmosphere throughout the South and the nation is such that the laws the Negro wants are laws for the good of the entire populace, not for individual and distinct segments."6 Over the next several years, the pressure increased for action on civil rights. In 1954, the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling struck down desegregation in the public schools, and a year later blacks in the Deep South, most notably in Montgomery, Alabama, rallied to confront Jim Crow. Furthermore, northern Negroes began to exert a potent political force for equal rights. In the decade since the outbreak of World War II, the black population in the North had nearly doubled, swelled by the heavy exodus of southern blacks searching for jobs and firstclass citizenship. Northern Negroes were able to use their ballots as a balance of power in close congressional elections, and they might swing their states with large numbers of electoral votes into the winning presidential column. Thus, as southern Negroes petitioned the federal government to combat racial discrimination, their enfranchised norther brethren influenced both political parties to listen carefully to this request.7

When the Eisenhower Republicans introduced a comprehensive civil rights bill in 1957, Johnson was majority leader of the Senate. In this position he tried to bridge the gulf between regional and national politics as he

5 Lyndon B. Johnson to James H. Rowe, Mar. 15, 1949, box 1 (Civil Rights), Senatorial Papers, LBJL.

6 Johnson to Carter Wesley, Mar. 16, 1949, ibid.; Williams, "Huey, Lyndon," p. 283.

'For an early example of northern black voters' effect on politics and civil rights, see Harvard Sitkoff, "Harry Truman and the Election of 1948: The Coming of Age of Civil Rights in American Politics," Journal of Southern History 37 (Nov. 1971): 597-616; and 'Where Does Negro Voter Strength Lie?” Congressional Quarterly Weekly 14 (May 4, 1956): 491-496.

worked to maintain harmony among the Democrats and to steer his party on a middle course. "The American people," Johnson had remarked in 1953, "will never long tolerate a political party dominated exclusively-nor one that appears to be dominated-by any special groups-be it labor, capital, farm, North, South, East, or West." 8 The senator feared that the administration's civil rights plan, especially Title III, which was designed to help implement the Brown decision, would disrupt the Democratic Party. Johnson tried to shape a bill with which the warring factions of his party could live. By trimming the proposal down to a mild right-to-vote bill, he hoped to assist the southern Democrats in forestalling the omnibus Eisenhower measure from becoming law. In addition, the majority leader, as his press secretary George Reedy noted, would partially satisfy the need of his northern colleagues to "take some of the edge off the Negro groups-who are the only ones with a direct interest.' "19

Johnson's strategy worked. The final piece of legislation that emerged under his skillful maneuvering was a suffrage law. He led the forces to remove the controversial Title III, which he claimed would result in "new and drastic procedures to cover a wide variety of vaguely defined so-called civil rights." 10 On the other hand, the senator perhaps was willing to endorse a suffrage measure, because he believed that the Fifteenth Amendment specifically shielded voting rights from racial discrimination, and he thought that disfranchisement made a mockery of the constitutional principle of representative government. Moreover, Johnson reasoned that southern blacks, by casting their ballots effectively, could gain first-class citizenship for themselves without the need for further federal action. Yet even in this instance Johnson would only vote for a franchise plan that had "proper safeguards." Consequently, he forged a coalition behind an amendment granting a jury trial

8 Quoted in Evans and Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson, p. 65. Before 1957 the majority leader had begun to break away from the strict southern position. He refused to endorse the "Southern Manifesto" attacking the Supreme Court's desegregation opinion.

"George Reedy to Johnson, Dec. 3, 1956, box 7, Senatorial Papers, LBJL. For a further explanation of the Johnson strategy, see Reedy to Johnson, n.d. (ca. 1957), box 3, ibid.

10 U. S. Congress, House, Congressional Record, 85 Cong., 1 sess., 1957, p. 12564.

to those accused of criminal contempt in defiance of the civil rights law. Most of the reformers argued that this provision would seriously weaken the bill, since southern juries seldom convicted whites of violating blacks' civil rights. In the end Johnson had his way, and he led sixty senators including three from the South in passing the first civil rights measure since Reconstruction.

In 1960, when civil rights again received congressional attention, Johnson operated in the center once more. Of the many proposals under scrutiny, the Republican administration and Democratic leaders chose to concentrate on the franchise. The approved bill authorized the appointment by the federal courts of referees to enroll qualified blacks who were disfranchised by hostile local officials. Most suffragists found the referee procedure less satisfactory than the alternative of presidentially selected registrars, recommended by the Civil Rights Commission. Although the bill that Johnson shepherded into law disappointed most of the liberals, it did keep the Democratic Party united for the approaching presidential contest. 11 The Texas senator had traveled a great distance since 1949. No longer a strictly regional spokesman, Johnson had voted for two civil rights statutes and gained for himself the Democratic nomination for vice president.

Lyndon Johnson had come to speak for equality because he thought it would liberate Negroes and his native South. As he climbed higher up the political ladder and addressed a wider audience he became aware of the severe handicap that racism inflicted upon AfroAmericans. By the time he ran for vice president, he had already promised a group of liberals that he intended to meet his "moral obligation to every person of every skin color." "12 Johnson also believed that if the southern racial caste system were dismantled the alienation of the region from the rest of the country would come to an end. In discarding the race issue, Dixie leaders might realistically tackle the economic and social

11 For an appraisal of Johnson's leadership, see Anthony Lewis, "The Professionals Win Out Over Civil Rights," Reporter, May 26, 1960, pp. 27-30.

12 "Notes on Senator Johnson's remarks to Clarence Mitchell and other delegates to January 13-14, 1960, Legislative Conference on Civil Rights," box 13 (Civil Rights), Senatorial Papers, LBJL.

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