Essay: Through the Wilderness with Sam Grant (Complete) (Part 6 of 9)
A grinding climb over broken ground.
Part 6
After the turn of the century, forces and actors across American society and within the political Branches of the Federal Government compounded the harm done by the Supreme Court in the 19th century and contributed significantly to the ongoing suppression of effective civil rights enforcement until the breakthrough legislation enacted by Congress in the 1960s.
The anti-Reconstruction academics of the Dunning School of scholarship dominated the history departments of many American institutions of higher learning until 1930. And the cross burners and lynching mobs of the Ku Klux Klan resurged in 1915 and roamed largely unrestrained in many parts of the South and other sections of the country into the 1940s.
The recrudescence of the Klan gained steam with the wide popularity of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 blockbuster silent film The Birth of a Nation, based on a 1905 novel, The Clansman. Griffith’s film used the power and prestige of Hollywood—already far-reaching in 1915—to denigrate the historical Reconstruction program and to glorify the original Klan’s resistance to equal rights of citizenship for blacks.
Teddy Roosevelt’s hubris in mounting a third-party challenge to his former Secretary of War, President Taft, in the 1912 election saddled the Nation with our most unabashedly racist President, Woodrow Wilson, himself a Dunning School professor of American history. Although Governor of New Jersey, Wilson was a son of the Confederacy, born in Staunton, Virginia in 1856 and raised in Georgia and South Carolina by parents who fervently supported the Confederacy during the Civil War and opposed Reconstruction in its wake, and he embraced that legacy.
Wilson’s published work as a historian defended the cause of the Confederacy and white supremacy and attacked the policies of Reconstruction. (D.W. Griffith featured quotations from Wilson’s history books in The Birth of a Nation, and Wilson proudly screened the film at the White House.) And as president of Princeton University, Wilson had blocked African Americans from admission, though other Ivy League universities had begun to admit blacks.
He was known for his progressive pro-worker policies and support for occupational health and safety reforms, and he was publicly endorsed in his run for the White House by several prominent black leaders, but as President of the United States, Wilson institutionalized racial segregation in the Federal Government, both for the Armed Forces and for the civilian workforce.
He expanded the segregation policies of the Army, introduced segregation into the Navy, and held back the promotion and commissioning of black officers;
He appointed Southern segregationists to his Cabinet, including as the Secretaries of major departments like Treasury and Commerce, and allowed them to institute racial segregation for the first time throughout the civilian ranks in these departments;
These segregationist policies had the secondary (perhaps intentional) effect of blocking and ousting black citizens from jobs in the Federal Government, supposedly for lack of separate office space to accommodate non-white employees;
After Wilson was gone, Presidents Harding and Coolidge took incremental steps to reverse segregation in the Federal workforce, but it took decades to overcome the damage done by Wilson: The Armed Forces were not fully integrated until the Eisenhower administration, and the last vestiges of segregation persisted in certain working quarters, lunchrooms, and restrooms of the Federal Government until the 60s.
Not surprisingly, Wilson had no interest in, and his administration made no effort toward, rejuvenating and pursuing a program of Federal civil rights enforcement, despite a sharp rise in racial violence in the U.S. during his time in office. In 1921, his successor President Harding supported Federal anti-lynching legislation, but the bill, which passed the House of Representatives, died in the Senate—a common fate.
From the early decades of the 20th century, individual litigants had some success in court, including in the Supreme Court, challenging specific laws and actions that denied voting rights on the basis of race, but those States and local governments intent on preventing blacks from voting had little trouble evading these court decrees. They maintained widespread systematic racial discrimination in voting across the South until the 1960s by adopting an ever-evolving variety of voter tests and qualification requirements.
From 1890 until 1965, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia used various literacy tests and writing requirements specifically contrived and applied to thwart black voters. White voters were given easier tests or were exempted from the qualification requirements altogether by property ownership, by the use of vague and subjective “good character” showings, or by the application of “grandfather” rights—for example, an exemption from literacy tests for the lineal descendants of any person who was registered to vote in the county on January 1, 1866 (i.e., before ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment).
Persistent barriers to voting for blacks in the South guaranteed that most States and Congressional Districts of the former Confederacy would be represented by unreconstructed Southern Democrats. Long-time Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn of Texas was first elected to Congress in 1912 along with Wilson, and by the 1930s, he and other Southern Democrats, like Senators Richard Russell of Georgia and James Eastland of Mississippi and Congressman (later Senator) Lyndon Johnson of Texas, had risen to power in Congress, and through the rules of seniority, they gained control and dominance over key committees and procedures in both Houses—a dominance that lasted into the 60s. This power bloc in Congress, especially in the Senate, enabled the Southern Democrats to stifle and filibuster all proposals for serious new civil rights legislation.
In the Executive Branch during the 30s, the priority focus of Hoover’s and FDR’s administrations was on economic recovery from the Depression and rural development, not on making advances in civil rights enforcement. In 1937, with his first appointment of a new Justice to the Supreme Court of the United States (the first of eight!), who did FDR choose? Alabama Senator and loyal New Dealer Hugo Black, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan—the Robert E. Lee Klan No. 1 of Birmingham, Alabama, to be exact.
After the 30s, all of FDR’s attention was fixed on defeating Nazi fascism and Japanese militarism until his death, and during the remainder of the 40s and into the early 50s, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower were consumed by the unfolding Cold War with Communism and the hot conflict with Red China on the Korean Peninsula.
Civil rights rose back into the national consciousness after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that State laws mandating segregation in public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment regardless of the physical qualities of the separated school facilities, thus finally breaking the spell of Plessy’s “separate but equal” doctrine, at least in the realm of education. The Court’s historic reconsideration of segregation in schools was the fruit of a dedicated and effective litigation strategy by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
There was militant resistance to court-ordered integration in the South, however, and President Eisenhower sent troops from the 101st Airborne to protect the children and enforce the initial court decrees—the first deployment of the Army to enforce Federal civil rights since Grant’s orders during Reconstruction.
Recognizing that the key to achieving true comprehensive civil rights reform across the Nation was securing the most basic civil right—the right to vote—for black Americans and that voting rights had been effectively thwarted by Southern States despite decades of litigation, President Eisenhower sent Congress proposed legislation to advance that goal in April 1956. This proposal led to enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first civil rights law passed by Congress since Reconstruction.
Eisenhower’s legislation established the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, headed by a new Assistant Attorney General; empowered the Justice Department to obtain Federal court injunctions, backed up by criminal contempt penalties, against any person, whether or not acting on behalf of a State, who interfered or threatened to interfere with voting rights in Federal elections; and created the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to investigate issues relating to racial discrimination and to recommend corrective legislation.
Eisenhower’s bill passed the House but ran into trouble with Southern Democrats in the Senate, where Senator Russell and others threatened a filibuster. Senator Eastland, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, amended the bill by reducing drastically the criminal penalties available for the willful violation of court injunctions and by interposing procedural barriers to contempt proceedings, including an extraordinary right to a jury trial in certain cases. As described in Robert Caro’s volume Master of the Senate, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson orchestrated passage of Eastland’s watered-down bill, and that’s the version that became law in September 1957 (to Eisenhower’s chagrin). It was another missed opportunity.
Three years later, Congress passed further legislation intended to strengthen the 57 Act. Signed by President Eisenhower in May 1960, the Civil Rights Act of 1960 provided additional enforcement authorities, required State and local election officers to retain voter registration and eligibility records for Federal elections, and gave the Justice Department authority to obtain these records in counties suspected of voter discrimination.
Although the penalty provisions proposed in the initial bill were once again weakened by Senate Democrats, the 1960 Act still proved historically important. It enabled the Justice Department to secure voter registration records from 26 Southern counties in 1960 and 1961, and based on these records, DOJ brought 19 voter discrimination suits by the end of 1962—actions that produced a bounty of evidence revealing the wide extent and variations of racially discriminatory voting practices employed to deny black citizens the right to vote in the South. This evidence informed Congress’s subsequent deliberations and supported enactment of stronger voting rights legislation.
Meanwhile, popular pressure was building for broader civil rights reform, as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a movement of peaceful civil disobedience to protest Southern segregation in public facilities like transit systems and in restaurants and other places of public accommodations and later marched to protest the suppression of voting rights. The arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to ride in the back of the bus and the marches and rallies of the civil rights movement (and the violent reactions to it) received high-profile media coverage in newspapers and on the evening news, and this attention increased the level of support across the Nation for civil rights legislation.