The use of the courts in the civil rights movement is considered the paradigm of a successful strategy for social change. Nichols, A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster. Schmidt, The Sit-Ins: Protest & Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018) , 25.
This thesis emphasizes the importance of the Civil Rights Division—rather than the federal government as a whole—in raising these expectations. John Doar's article "The Work of the Civil Rights Division in Enforcing Voting Rights Under the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960." The newspapers, in contrast, reflect how certain segments of the body politic viewed the Civil Rights Division.
Chapter One: Rising Expectations but Stubborn Continuities, 1870-1959
Thus, the second theme of this chapter emphasizes the continuity between the Civil Rights Section and the Civil Rights Division. The history of the Civil Rights Division cannot be separated from the institutional pathology of its parent organization, the U.S. Carr, also pointed out in a 1947 Civil Rights Section study that “some of [them] are profound.
Attorney General Brownell fired the opening salvo in the battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Another area of continuity between the Civil Rights Division and the Civil Rights Division centered on the receipt of complaints. Alabama most embodied the mistakes and tendencies that undermined the Civil Rights Department at this point.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 followed within a decade. So the 1960s promised a "new frontier" for the Civil Rights Division, as it did for the rest of the country.
Chapter Two: “High Hopes”: Redistricting and a New Administration, 1960-1961
This chapter tells the first part of that story, the voter registration battle, through the lens of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division as it evolved from the last year of the Eisenhower administration to the first year of the Kennedy administration. The "high hopes" of the Kennedy presidency were inflated by the disappointments of the Eisenhower years. As Russell Baker of The New York Times acknowledged, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 “was the work of Lyndon Johnson of Texas.
Among the attorneys involved in the drafting of the Civil Rights Act were those from the Appellate Division. Egon Schwelb was a lawyer for the Czechoslovak government in exile until the end of the war. As early as February 23, 1960, Section Chief Greene received a memorandum stating “the independent interest of the.
Years after the case, he admitted the possibility that Rankin had “authorized the Civil Rights Division to prepare a letter to be reviewed in the Office of the Solicitor General.”249. The Justice Department linked Baker to Gomillion and the black freedom struggle because black people were too. increasingly concentrated in the urban cities of the South. Baker was, in the words of the Attorney General's 1961 annual report, “a highly unusual and important case.”274.
Department of Justice, Report of Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall in Charge of the Civil Rights Division, 1962. Department of Justice, Report of Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall in Charge of the Civil Rights Division, 1961. Martin confirmed that “field operatives of the Civil Rights Division spent the entire work week in Washington analyzing.
325 Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (New . York: Oxford University Press. The Kennedy administration left nothing to chance and played a key role in the development of the Voter Education Project (VEP). Federal inaction "shattered" black expectations, argues historian Allan Lichtman, so much so that "the ensuing disillusionment manifested itself in the Selma demonstrations and helped create the seeds of the Black Power movement."374.
Chapter Three: The Magnolia Quagmire: Positive and Negative Mobilization, 1961-1963
The disheartening situation,” Katzenbach explained, “exists in large part because the judicial process, on which all existing legal remedies depend, is unconstitutionally inadequate to address practices so deeply ingrained in the social and political structure.”412 Nearly four months earlier – in December 1964 – the attorney general specifically blamed “the. By merely filing franchise lawsuits,” Lawson agrees, “the Justice Department encouraged many Negroes to attempt to register.”416 Charles V. Squier of New Jersey predicted that “the South voted for the Kennedys will take care of it.”425 .
Schlesinger admitted that "Kennedy's civil rights strategy, however suited to the mood of Congress in 1961, was miscalculated."441 Even Schlesinger admitted that they did not appreciate the "dynamism of the revolutionary movement."445 Other contemporaries of the Kennedys seeing what we could - or wanted - not to. Based on his subsequent actions, it appears that the President also did not think that “the proposed bill .
Solomon predicted that even a limited number of federal personnel "would effectively deter many local officials."466 Attached to his letter was a journal article he co-authored, "The Psychosocial Meaning of Nonviolence in Student Civil Rights. In most of the prominent motels," he warned, "the FBI agents have contacts working in the motel who keep them informed of any unusual guests from the city." Perhaps the most sensitive proposal came eighth.It was a program in which “the men are heavily indoctrinated with radical right-wing propaganda.” Such.
I would estimate that in about 90% of the situations where agency personnel referred to Negroes,” Levine claimed, “the word . Apparently, in early 1961, FBI agents had lamented that "the Federal Building was overrun by ["n******"] since the Kennedy administration took over."469 Levine's claims are consistent given the Bureau's harassment of Martin Luther King .470. Southern Democrats' legislative influence, internal miscalculations, and the FBI all contributed to what Christy Lopez called the division's "pathological moderation." "The Civil Rights Division is not and never has been a radical agency," she opines in Yale Law Journal Forum.474 One reason is the "inherent political nature of the division."475 If anything, this chapter has confirmed Lopez's thesis: that political constraints moderate CRD, almost to a "pathological" point.476.
471 “Thelton Henderson,” The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, 2005, https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/henderson_thelton.pdf. Such belief in "the framework of the same institutions" rang hollow when those very institutions lacked diversity. When the CRD lawyers planned dinner in the office, they would "say, 'Oh, we can't go to that place because we can't take Thelton'." The location of the restaurant in question, "the fact that it is in the street of the Department of.
Epilogue: “Let Us Continue,” 1963-2023
Inspired by the previous year's freedom vote, Freedom Summer invited a host of out-of-state white volunteers, including many college students, who registered African-Americans to vote.515 Most infamously, the Ku Klux Klan murdered three Freedom Summer participants, including two white: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Instead, he planned to prioritize health and education.519 Martin Luther King and the rest of the SCLC disagreed.520 “Dissatisfaction with the pace of progress coalesced. CRD attorney and division chief Harold Greene helped craft its provisions.526 Indeed, David Garrow credits Greene and Justice's Sol Lindenbaum with primary authorship of the bill.
The jurisdictions covered included many of the areas CRD lawyers had traveled to over the previous five years. Section 4(b) formally applied prior authorization to two kinds of areas: states and localities (1) with literacy tests and similar restrictions in effect for the 1964 presidential election, and (2) where turnout was less than 50% of the eligible population. Johnson, "Remarks in the Capitol Rotunda at the Signing of the Voting Rights Act," The American.
Presidency Project, Aug. 6, 1965, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-capitol-rotunda-the- signing-the-voting-rights-act. This article states that Greene "was considered a principal legal architect of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965." Informed by the painful experience of piecemeal litigation, the VRA was a deliberate effort to avoid the mistakes of the past.
After all, voting has more meaning than the expressive act of casting a ballot. Describing voting rights in Mississippi after the VRA, Parker said, "the complete denial of suffrage to black Mississippians, now prohibited by federal law, was replaced by these more subtle strategies to dilute and nullify the black vote."544 In the last decade, from Roberts Court. Skeptics such as Gerald Rosenberg are right to caution against an enthusiastic faith in judicial proceedings.546 Alexander Bickel, a leading critic of the Warren Court, correctly observed that “[the] Supreme Court .
Department of Justice, June 11, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-merrick-b-garland-livered-policy-address-regarding-voting-rights.
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The work of the Civil Rights Division in enforcing voting rights under the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. Florida State University Law Review 25, no. Thelton Henderson.” The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, 2005, https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/henderson_thelton.pdf. The South and Civil Rights.” Capitol Weekly, July 6, 2017, http://capweekly.wpengine.netdnacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/TheSouthTranscript.pdf.
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