Free The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act by Clay Risen Page A

Kennedy introduced it in June 1963 in response to growing racial tension across the South, in particular the violent crackdown against black protesters in Birmingham. As the bill moved through the House that year, it was spurred along by events like the March on Washington in August, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in September, and the assassination of President Kennedy in November. Once the House passed the bill the next February, Southern Democrats in the Senate tried to kill it by refusing to allow a vote on it, also known as filibustering. Despite sinking dozens of bills before, this time the Southerners failed, and the bill became law.
    We think we know this story, because we know so well the two men most often associated with it: the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Every biography of King and Johnson tells how one or the other, or sometimes both, made the bill a reality—King with his moral force on the streets of Birmingham and before the Lincoln Memorial, Johnson with his political lever-pulling behind the scenes on Capitol Hill. Their combined efforts overcame the Southerners’ historic filibuster and demonstrated what great men can achieve when the stars align, as they did in Washington that year.
    This story, however, is in need of significant updating. King and Johnson were great men, and they played critical roles in the bill’s passage. But neither deserves all the credit, or even the bulk of it. On the contrary, the bill came to pass thanks to a long list of starring and supporting players: men like Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, and Republican representatives William McCulloch and John Lindsay. Outside Congress and the White House, dozens of civil rights, labor, and religious groups brought enormous pressure on the government to create and then strengthen the bill, and later provided the manpower and coordination to pull the bill through the record-breaking filibuster it faced in the Senate—led by men like labor leader Walter Reuther, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)’s Clarence Mitchell and Roy Wilkins, and the National Council of Churches president, J. Irwin Miller. The Civil Rights Act is often explained like a one-man play, when in fact it had a cast of thousands.
    The idea that either King or Johnson was the dominant figure behind the Civil Rights Act distorts not only the history of the act but the process of American legislative policymaking in general. The purpose of this book is to correct that distortion.
    Again, King and Johnson played important roles. Without King’s Birmingham protest campaign in the spring of 1963, in which the city’s police were goaded into siccing dogs on schoolchildren, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his Justice Department advisers could not have persuaded President John F. Kennedy to submit the original civil rights bill to Congress. And King’s magnificent “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington helped persuade white America that the time had come for federal action on civil rights. But King did not plan the march, and the speech itself had little direct impact on Congress. And King played no role whatsoever in the writing of or lobbying for the bill. Instead, that work was done by men like Mitchell, the head lobbyist for the NAACP, and Whitney Young, the head of the Urban League, both of whom had deep contacts in Congress and quietly but forcefully worked for the bill’s passage.
    Likewise, Johnson’s repeated public demands that Congress pass the entire bill were vital. Had he even once called on the bill’s backers to compromise, the fragile edifice of support for the legislation might well have crumbled. But Johnson’s role has been greatly exaggerated, while the momentum generated by his predecessor, and the tireless work done by Justice Department officials and