When Freedom Would Triumph: The Civil Rights Struggle in Congress, 1954–1968

17. We Are Demanding the Ballot

218 17 WE ARE DEMANDING THE BALLOT For years, southern members of Congress fought to defeat civil rights measures by arguing that such pernicious legislation would inevitably lead to violence and dangerous social upheaval in the former Confederate states. The balance between whites and blacks, they argued, was simply too delicate to alter suddenly with sweeping federal legislation. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of  proved what many liberals had suspected: Such arguments were not based on legitimate concerns about maintaining peace and harmony; they were merely insincere excuses for preserving the South’s brutal status quo in race relations. Those who had accepted the threadbare southern arguments against the bill must have been greatly surprised by southern reaction to the legislation ’s passage. While Democrats suffered significant electoral losses in the South, the five southern states that Goldwater carried hardly quali- fied as the electoral disaster predicted by Russell and others. Furthermore, response to the dreaded public accommodations provisions was surprisingly benign: An extensive fifty-three-city survey conducted by the Community Relations Service found “widespread compliance” with the bill’s provisions. “What is most important,” Johnson said in reaction to the report, was that “it shows the law is being obeyed in those areas where some had predicted there would be massive disobedience.” In New Orleans two hundred business leaders—including the manager of the well-known Roosevelt Hotel—put their names on a newspaper advertisement urging compliance with the law. Elsewhere in New Orleans, blacks quietly and peacefully desegregated downtown movie theaters and dined at French Quarter restaurants for the first time. The Jackson, Mississippi, Chamber of Commerce called on its members to obey the law “pending tests of its constitutionality in court.” In Birmingham, where Mayor Albert Boutwell refused to use the city’s resources to enforce the act, blacks and whites 219 WE ARE DEMANDING THE BALLOT ate together in several downtown restaurants; the city’s hotel and motel associations said they would obey the law. Holiday Inns of America told its  motels to observe the law. The South’s largest cafeteria chain, Morrison ’s, announced it would do the same. There was resistance. The city of Greenwood, Mississippi, drained its white and black community swimming pools rather than allow blacks and whites to swim together. Despite the peaceful integration of three hotels in Jackson, the Robert E. Lee Hotel closed its doors on July , four days after the bill became law. The Mississippi legislature unanimously praised the hotel’s owners for their “courageous” decision. There was scattered violence. In Moss Point, Mississippi, a sniper’s bullet wounded a nineteen-year-old black woman as she sang the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” at a voter registration rally on July . That day, in Bessemer, Alabama, a band of white men wielding baseball bats assaulted a group of blacks that asked for service at a departmentstore lunch counter. The most prominent resistance to the bill came on JulyinAtlantabyLesterMaddox,ownerofthePickwickRestaurant.Aided by angry white customers waving ax handles, Maddox produced a revolver and chased three blacks from his establishment. Three days later, when another black bravely demanded service, Maddox again refused. He called the police, who took away the would-be patron. In late July a three-judge panel in Atlanta ordered Maddox to obey the law, a decision that was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in December. In writing for the – majority, Justice Tom Clark said that Congress possessed clear constitutional authority to enact laws removing obstructions to interstate commerce. “How obstructions in commerce may be removed— what means are to be employed—is within the sound and exclusive discretion of the Congress,” Clark wrote. For Maddox, the unfavorable Supreme Court ruling was not a total defeat. He became a hero among Georgia’s white racists. In  the voters of Georgia—aided by the state legislature—rewarded his violent racism and his contempt for the law of the United States by electing him governor. As the Supreme Court ruling of December had shown, the civil rights act’s public accommodations provision had sharp teeth. By contrast, the act’s voting rights provision proved a toothless, ineffectual instrument to guarantee black voting rights. Despite three separate acts—the , , WHEN FREEDOM WOULD TRIUMPH 220 and  civil rights bills—Congress had so far been unable to break down the barriers to significant and widespread registration of blacks...