Debate in the Senate; A Meeting in Birmingham

During 16 days of drone-and-drawl talk, Southern Democrats had argued that the Senate should not even bring the civil rights bill up for consideration. With those preliminaries well over, the time had arrived for the start of formal debate, and the bill's backers had a chance to present their case. Said Minnesota Democrat Hubert Humphrey, floor manager for the measure: "I will attempt to lay the affirmative case for the bill before the Senate."

Humphrey did just that, and often eloquently, for 31 hours. "This bill is long overdue," he said. "Moderate as it is, it ensures a great departure from the misery and bitterness that is the lot of so many Americans. This misery has found remarkably quiet methods of expression up to the present."

But, Humphrey continued, "within the past few years a new spirit has arisen in those people who have been so long denied. How will we respond to this challenge? The snarling police dogs of Birmingham are one answer. The force of equality and justice is another. That second choice is embodied in the bill that we are starting to consider."

Simple Goals. Section by section, Humphrey went through the bill's eleven titles, explaining each and giving examples of grievances that the bill was designed to redress. In discussing the protection of Negro voting rights, Humphrey noted that in many Southern states, would-be Negro voters are rejected, while even the most illiterate whites are generally allowed to register. He told the story of one white Alabaman who, when confronted with the voter-registration-test question, "Will you give aid and comfort to the enemies of the U.S. or the government of Alabama?", wrote in reply: "If hurt would give comfort only if wonded." The man passed with flying colors. On public accommodations, Humphrey reported that in Charleston, S.C., there were ten hotels and motels that welcomed dogs, none that would take a Negro. As for job opportunities, Humphrey cited a Bureau of Census study that showed that a Negro college graduate during his lifetime would earn less than one-half as much as his white counterpart, some $6,000 less than a white man who quit school after the eighth grade.

"The goals of this bill," concluded Humphrey, "are simple ones: to extend to Negro citizens the same rights and the same opportunities that white Americans take for granted."

Anticipating the Worst. Following Humphrey was California's Senator Thomas Kuchel, the Republican whip, who also offered urgent arguments for the bill. "This issue," said Kuchel, "should not be a partisan fight. It should be, and is, an American fight." But some powerful Republicans do have doubts about certain parts of the bill, a fact attested next day by G.O.P. Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois. Dirksen said he had received "very substantial encouragement" from the Senate Republican Policy Committee for a dozen changes, most of them technical, in the bill's fair-employment and union-membership provisions. Dirksen also indicated that he had found some support for his idea of an amendment to the public-accommodations section--probably to make compliance voluntary for the first year of the new law's life.

This was bad news to the Democratic leadership. They desperately need Republican votes to impose cloture, and to get those votes they may have to accept Dirksen's amendments. Yet they fear that to do this would be to set off an avalanche of amendment attempts that would, at worst, gut the bill and, at best, protract the battle indefinitely. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield said he thought the debate might even last through the national nominating conventions and into the fall.

Within the Citadel. The longer the debate drags on, the greater will be the external pressures on the Senate for action, and last week civil rights advocates were plainly becoming increasingly restless. In Baltimore more than 2,000 marched on city hall to demand housing and job legislation. In Tulsa 54 were arrested for trespassing during a CORE-sponsored sit-in at a segregated restaurant. When the demonstrators, 50 Negroes and four whites, refused to leave, they were carried out bodily by cops. At police headquarters, they were carried inside, booked but not jailed. In St. Augustine, Fla., cops with police dogs and electric cattle prods at the ready rounded up some 300 civil rights demonstrators, including the 72-year-old mother of Massachusetts' Democratic Governor Endicott Peabody.

Mrs. Mary Parkman Peabody had left her retired Episcopal bishop husband at home in Cambridge, donned sensible shoes, and gone south with three friends because, she said, "we decided that the Negroes needed help." On her first full day in town, Mrs. Peabody satin with Negroes at three segregated restaurants, a movie house and two motels. Next day, while sitting in at a segregated motel dining room with five Negroes, she was arrested for trespassing, being an undesirable guest, and conspiracy. Rather than post a $450 cash bond, Mrs. Peabody chose to spend two nights and two days in a St. Augustine jail cell with six other women. At week's end she was back north, leaving the St. Augustine situation unimproved but vowing "I shall go wherever I am asked to participate for freedom."

Perhaps the most remarkable demonstration of all came on Easter Sunday in Birmingham, Ala., citadel of segregation. There, some 35,000 people, Negro and white in almost equal numbers and comprising the largest integrated gathering in Alabama history, flocked to a city-owned football field to hear Evangelist Billy Graham. Exclaimed he: "What a moment and what an hour in Birmingham!" It was certainly that--far different from another Sunday, only seven months before, when a dynamite blast at a Negro church killed four little girls. Said Arthur P. Cook, white publisher of three local weeklies, about the Graham meeting: "It is the greatest thing that has happened to Birmingham." And if it could happen in Birmingham, it could happen anywhere--a fact of which the debating Senators might take notice.

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