The Civil Rights Act of 1957 represented an important landmark in civil rights legislation, albeit primarily as a symbol, providing hope for future progress in the Civil Rights movement.
The 1957 act, passed 82 years after the last civil rights legislation, was the first attempt to deal with civil rights since Reconstruction. The new legislation, however, was limited by the context in which it developed. In particular, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party were battling for electoral support in the southern states. Republicans looked to protect President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s gains in the South in the election of 1956, and they feared that too close an association with the cause of civil rights would threaten these gains. Southern Democrats also tried to distance their party from civil rights issues, fearing further Republican gains in the South.
Despite this shared fear of addressing civil rights issues in both parties, Eisenhower called for civil rights legislation in his State of the Union Message in 1957. Pushed forward in particular by opposition to the Montgomery bus boycott, the public indignation that it raised, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1956 that Alabama’s separate but equal law for transportation was unconstitutional, the House of Representatives passed a bill in 1957 that included all of the suggestions made in Eisenhower’s address. The House bill proposed the creation of a Commission on Civil Rights, a bipartisan and independent agency within the executive branch, designed to investigate and recommend remedies for unconstitutional discrimination. The bill also proposed creating a Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice. Title III, which met immediate opposition in the Senate, authorized the federal government to seek court injunctions whenever an individual’s civil rights were violated. Finally, the House bill sought to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment by authorizing the Department of Justice to investigate voting rights violations and to seek court injunctions against illegal interference with the right to vote.
Senator majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson, a skilled political negotiator with presidential ambitions, played a key role in the Senate’s debate of the House bill. With Eisenhower’s help, Johnson convinced enough northern senators to support the deletion of Title III in its entirety from the Senate’s version of the bill. Johnson worked to remove Title III, a broad measure that was seen as a way for the federal government to sue for school desegregation, with broad language implying a much wider scope for the Attorney General’s activities, to assure southern support for the revised bill in the Senate. The Senate further diluted the revised bill by attaching an amendment to it that required a trial by jury in all cases arising from the voting rights section of the proposed bill. This amendment, promoted in part by Johnson’s appeals for moderation and pragmatism, further appeased wary southern Democrats who believed that local white juries would prove less threatening than federal judges in such cases. The Senate version of the bill eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
The deletion of Title III allowed many southerners to view the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as a victory. They argued, correctly, that the 1957 act was closely limited to voting rights. They also pointed out that they had prevented federal government intervention in favor of school desegregation, an especially threatening possibility from their point of view in light of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision which ruled school segregation unconstitutional.
Liberal Democrats were less pleased with the 1957 act, viewing its reliance on due process as expensive and time-consuming. They had advocated moving beyond the federal government’s voluntary model with weak enforcement mechanisms to a more aggressive use of federal government power. Title III had thus been central to the 1957 act for them, a symbol of the enlightened use of the power of the federal government to help those too poor, intimidated, or unenlightened to help themselves. Civil rights leaders likewise expressed disappointment with the 1957 act. It was used only once in its first 16 months, in a suit against the election registrars of Terrell County, Georgia. Many African-American spokesmen felt betrayed by the legislation.
The disappointing results achieved in the short term by the Civil Rights Act of 1957, however, proved to be less important than the act’s long-term meaning. The Commission on Civil Rights would investigate and publicize civil rights issues. The disappointment generated by the deletion of Title III and the weakness of the 1957 act also helped galvanize a movement for stronger civil rights legislation. The federal government had become actively involved in civil rights, and its involvement would continue to grow in the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Further reading: Carl M Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
—Allan Wesley Austin