History Lesson: When the Majority is Wrong

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.”