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The New York Times
Ike Liked Civil
Rights
By DAVID A. NICHOLS,
OP-ED Contributor,
From nytimes.com on
the Web, September 12, 2007
Winfield, Kan, -- FIFTY years
ago this week, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a law providing voting
protections for blacks known as the Civil Rights Act of 1957. While that
act is hardly as well remembered as the landmark laws of the 1960s, it’s not
because it wasn’t important: at the time, it had been 82 years since any
federal civil rights legislation had been passed because a coalition of Southern
Democrats and conservative Republicans had consistently blocked progress.
What happened to break that logjam has been largely lost to history.
Eisenhower complained in 1967 that if his critics felt “there was anything good
done” in his presidency, “they mostly want to prove that it was somebody else
that did it and that I went along as a passenger.” That has been
especially true of his championship of civil rights.
The “somebody else” in this instance was Lyndon B. Johnson, who in 1957 was the
Senate’s Democratic majority leader. Historians have consistently credited
Johnson for the bill’s passage. Yes, Johnson played a role, but hardly the
one his advocates might imagine: Eisenhower and his attorney general,
Herbert Brownell Jr., first proposed strong legislation, and it was Johnson and
his Southern cronies who weakened it beyond recognition.
Johnson wanted a cosmetic bill that would enhance his presidential ambitions
without alienating his white Southern base. It was a balancing act, as
even a weak bill depended on Eisenhower’s new legislative coalition, which
formed after he persuaded the Republicans to abandon their longtime opposition
to civil rights legislation. (Republicans provided 37 of the 60 yes votes
when the final bill passed the Senate.)
The Eisenhower proposal had four main parts. The first two — the creation
of a civil rights commission to investigate voting irregularities and a civil
rights division in the Justice Department — survive to this day. The other
two pillars, unfortunately, became victims of politics. Part 3 proposed to
grant the attorney general unprecedented authority to file suits to protect
broad constitutional rights, including school desegregation. Part 4
provided for federal civil suits to prosecute voting rights violations.
Senator Richard Russell of Georgia led the attack on Part 3, accusing the
attorney general of conspiring “to destroy the system of separation of the races
in the Southern states at the point of a bayonet.” Johnson eventually told
Eisenhower he had the votes to kill the entire bill unless the president dropped
Part 3. Eisenhower reluctantly capitulated.
The reasoning behind the fourth part of the proposal, providing for civil suits,
was that in 1957, civil rights prosecutions were carried out by the criminal
division of the Justice Department, and offenses would be subject to jury
trials. Given the all-white juries of the South, prosecutions were acts in
futility. Thus Eisenhower and Brownell wanted to open these cases to civil
suits, without a jury, that could result in a court order and, if resisted, a
contempt citation.
Southerners insisted that these civil suits would be criminal trials in
disguise, denying defendants their constitutional right to a trial by jury.
So on Aug. 1 Johnson and his fellow Southerners succeeded in passing an
amendment to the bill requiring juries in such civil trials.
Angry, Eisenhower refused to accept this outcome. He threatened to veto
the amended bill and blame the Democrats. His pressure resulted in a
Democratic retreat and a compromise, based on a Justice Department proposal to
allow civil suits before a judge without a jury so long as the projected
punishment did not exceed a $300 fine or 45 days in prison. The compromise
bill passed the Senate on Aug. 29.
If Eisenhower’s original proposals had passed, the cause of civil rights would
have been significantly advanced. Still, the Congressional deadlock had
been broken, opening the door for the passage of another Eisenhower-backed civil
rights bill in 1960 and the more famous acts that Lyndon Johnson, as president,
championed in 1964 and ’65.
Eisenhower’s bravery on the act went largely unrecognized by the civil rights
leadership. An exception was Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was New York’s
only black member of Congress. “After 80 years of political slavery,”
Powell declared, this was “the second emancipation.” More typical was the
reaction of Roy Wilkins, then executive secretary of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored Persons, who called it “a small crumb from
Congress.”
Perhaps, but it was the first crumb Congress had dropped in eight decades.
And without the leadership of Dwight Eisenhower and Herbert Brownell, it would
never have happened.
David A. Nichols is the author of “A Matter of Justice:
Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution.”
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