DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
Changing Politics
New party alignments open opportunities for civil rights legislation
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
Ever since post-Civil War Reconstruction failed to ensure the civil rights of blacks in the American South, two great obstacles had blocked efforts at the national level to end Jim Crow: the political party system and the rules of the U.S. Congress. When the United States acquired vast and potentially slaveholding territories (including California and much of today’s American Southwest) in the Mexican War of 1846-1848, the nation’s political parties increasingly formulated their positions on sectional lines: Democrats favored the South, and the expansion of slavery; Whigs, and later Republicans, favored the North, opposed the extension of slavery into the newly acquired territories, and often believed that complete abolition was only a matter of time. Whigs and Republicans in this era favored the aggressive use of federal power to promote economic development. Southerners and Democrats — fearing federal action against slavery — favored the supremacy of individual states against a federal government properly limited to only those powers specifically granted by the Constitution. This “states’ rights” concept has deep roots in American history. Early in the 19th century, however, it became entangled with the issues of slavery, segregation, and civil rights.
These patterns persisted after the Civil War. As we have seen, the post-war Radical Republicans pressed for a Reconstruction that would ensure African-American rights. After Reconstruction, the “Party of Lincoln” — the Republicans — continued to enjoy the support of most blacks. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, evolved into an alliance of southern segregationists and northern urban residents, often immigrants and industrial workers. As the 20th century progressed, the party’s northern wing became more politically liberal, and, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal economic policies, more accepting of broad federal powers. Liberal northern Democrats often chafed against southern racism, but their party could not compete nationally without the support of the “solid South.”
The rules of the U.S. Senate were another formidable obstacle to civil rights legislation. While passing a bill required only a simple majority, any senator could block a vote simply by declining to stop speaking during Senate debate, refusing to relinquish the floor. At that time, a two-thirds majority of senators could vote “cloture” of debate. In practical terms, then, no significant legislation could pass the Senate without the support of two-thirds of its members. This meant that southern senators, elected in states where blacks were routinely deprived of the right to vote, could — and did — block civil rights bills.
Anti-civil-rights filibusters, as these lengthy senatorial speeches came to be known, blocked much legislation over the years. In 1946, a weeks-long filibuster defeated a bill that enjoyed majority support and would have prevented workplace discrimination. In 1957, Senator Strom Thurmond (then a Democratic senator from South Carolina) filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes in an unsuccessful effort to block the mild Civil Rights Act of 1957.
But slowly the constellation of political forces was shifting in ways that would prove helpful to the civil rights movement. The black vote, at least in the North, had grown more important. For most of the nation’s history, the overwhelming majority of African Americans resided in the South. During the first half of the 20th century, many African Americans began to move from the South to Chicago and other northern cities. An estimated 6 million blacks would head north during this “Great Migration.” The North was not free of racial prejudice, but blacks there could vote, and they became an increasingly attractive target for ambitious politicians.
In 1960, the Democratic candidate for president, Senator John F. Kennedy, was determined to increase his share of the historically Republican African-American vote. When Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed following an Atlanta sit-in, Kennedy phoned King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, to offer his sympathy, even as his brother, the future attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, worked to secure King’s release. Freed on bail, King acknowledged a “great debt of gratitude to Senator Kennedy and his family.” Kennedy carried an estimated 70 percent of the African-American vote in a tight election in which he prevailed over Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon by less than 1 percent of the popular vote.
While historians differ over the Kennedy administration’s civil rights record, it is not unfair to remark that it was better than that of its 20th-century predecessors, but not as strong as civil rights activists would have liked. John and Robert Kennedy repeatedly urged King not to press too hard. But when King would forge ahead, the Kennedys generally would follow.
As previously described, President Kennedy introduced broad civil rights legislation in the aftermath of the events in Birmingham. With Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, responsibility for that legislation would fall to his vice president and successor, Lyndon Johnson.
