Excerpt
Chapter 1
Responding to the “Negro” Protest
Roberta Tucker slowly gathered herself to speak before the United States Commission on Civil Rights hearings in Tallahas
see after the 2000 presidential election. It was her first appearance before any official inquiry, and it had not been easy to come forward. She faced a packed hearing room, the glare of a mass of television cameras, and a gaggle of print and radio media as she testified about how a white Florida Highway Patrol trooper stopped her on her way to vote. She was driving just south of Tallahassee on the only main road leading to her polling place in Woodville. The officer looked at the forty-nine-year-old woman’s license and then let her drive on. She was puzzled because “nothing was checked, my lights, signals, or anything that they usually check.” Angered by the memory, she spoke more rapidly. “I was intimidated by it and I was suspicious of it.”
John Nelson, fifty-two, another African American witness, at first was too nervous to speak. Then, finding his voice, he recalled the unmanned Florida Highway Patrol cars parked outside his polling place in Monticello, twenty-five miles east of Tallahassee. Nelson testified that he started to turn back and then forced himself to go forward. “I thought that was unusual. It makes you wonder, why is it there? What’s wrong?” At his precinct the intimidation continued as, for the first time, instead of just asking for his voter registration card, the poll worker demanded two pieces of identification.
Apostle Willie Whiting, unlike Tucker and Nelson, was eager to testify. The fifty-year-old African American pastor of the House of Prayer Church in Tallahassee relished describing his election-day experience before the commission. As he stood in the polling place with his family, a poll worker told him he was a convicted felon and could not vote. Whiting protested that he had never even been arrested, but to no avail. Asked by general counsel Edward Hailes how it felt, he answered in a booming voice, “It didn’t feel good.” His family and “other people at the polling place” observing him. Whiting said he felt “sling-shotted back to slavery” by the shame it brought. One after another, African American, Latino, Haitian, older American, and other citizens who were disabled described a nightmare of official government-implemented disenfranchisement.
The testimony in Florida resembled in some ways the commission’s first hearing in Alabama, in December 1958. These were the early years of modern racial protest, when the term “race relations” began to take on new meaning. In Montgomery, blacks had refused to ride city buses for more than a year to end transportation segregation. In Birmingham, bombs were exploding, including one in the home of Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and his family on Christmas morning. Meeting in the Fifth Circuit Courtroom in the Federal Building in Montgomery, the only venue in this cradle of the old Confederacy where blacks and whites could meet together, the commission heard testimony about the endemic violence and intimidation. Commissioners stayed at Maxwell Air Force Base because integrated hotels were legally impermissible.
At the 1958 hearing, twenty-six African American witnesses, all of them educated, property-owning taxpayers who met the state’s residence and legal requirements for voting, told the commission that they were denied the right to register to vote and faced implied and open threats. Risking their livelihood and their lives just by testifying, witnesses came forward to tell of their despair over their treatment and their burning desire to vote. Tuskegee resident Charles E. Miller, a Korean War veteran, told the commission, “I have dodged bombs and almost gotten killed, and then come back and been denied to vote—I don’t like it. I want to vote and I want to take part in this type of government. I have taken part in it when I was in service. I think I should take part in it when I am a citizen.”
Aaron Sellers, owner of a 240-acre farm in Bullock County, told of waiting for nine hours, in a separate room, while whites were quickly registered. Intimidation capped off the boredom. As Sellers and five other “Negroes” waited in line, a white man asked what was their “trouble.” When they answered, “We are waiting to register,” the white man replied, “If I were you all—you are citizens already. If I were you I would go on back home.” When he returned and realized they hadn’t left, the white man yelled angrily, “Well, I thought I told you all to get the hell out of here.” Although they had waited for hours, intimidated and frightened, they left.
The five white and one African American men on the commission who listened to these courageous African Americans were just adjusting to their duties. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, the Montgomery bus boycott, continued black protest and white reaction, this new commission had been established by President Eisenhower and Congress as a response to the emerging civil rights crisis. By the end of the Eisenhower administration, these men would reach well beyond the president’s political purposes, and the commission would play a major role in the struggle for civil rights.
John Hannah, the commission chairman, was a second choice after retired Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed first accepted and then turned the president down. Reed said that it undermined the image of the Court for justices to take on other governmental roles after their tenure. Hannah, who had been Eisenhower’s assistant secretary of defense, was president of Michigan State University. At Defense, one of his responsibilities was the completion of the integration of the armed forces and civilian personnel in the services.
The son of an Iowa chicken farmer, Hannah earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in poultry husbandry at Michigan State and then made his way up the administrative ladder. He eventually married the daughter of the Michigan State president, and then succeeded his father-in-law as president of the university in 1941. As Michigan State president, he essentially transformed an agricultural college into a major Big Ten research university.
The other commissioners appeared to fulfill Eisenhower’s political needs. His staff understood that the president wanted a “Negro” on the commission and he wanted someone whom the Senate would easily confirm. E. Frederick Morrow, the first and only African American professional on the White House staff, recalled from his conversations with senior staffer Maxwell Rabb that a confirmable “Negro” requirement automatically disqualified any “social worker or member of NAACP, etc.” from becoming a commissioner.
White House staffers settled on sixty-two-year-old “sturdy, bulb- nosed” Ernest Wilkins, a Chicago lawyer and former president of the Cook County Bar Association, for the “Negro” slot. Wilkins, who was “accepted by the establishment black and white,” had already been confirmed as an assistant secretary of labor for international affairs. In almost three years at Labor, he had quietly presided over the president’s committee charged with preventing racial discrimination in government contracts, officially chaired by Vice President Richard Nixon. Wilkins apparently worked well with A. Philip Randolph, the organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who led the 1940s March on Washington protests that were principally responsible for the creation of the contracts committee, and the only black vice president of the American Federation of Labor– Congress of Industrial Organizations union (AFL-CIO). Wilkins also received high marks for his representation of the United States in international labor organizations.
Wilkins’s publicly reported comments on racial matters as an assistant secretary of labor were benign and inoffensive to whites. When whites stoned Vivian Malone, a black woman, for trying to attend classes at the University of Alabama, Wilkins called the incident “deplorable.” However, he suggested no remedy and tepidly said that it should be seen as affording some people the opportunity to gain “new insights into their own lives” from the problems “involved in change.” He also told an Urban League dinner on February 15, 1956, that “the cloak of freedom is sitting much better on our collective shoulders these days—though not too well at that.” He continued: “There needs to be a little tailoring done here and there—for instance, in Mississippi, South Carolina and Washington DC—I have no doubt that it will finally get done.”
Eisenhower also wanted “moderate” white Southerners on the commission. He appointed sixty-four-year-old Robert G. Storey, the dean of Southern Methodist University’s Law School and a renowned Dallas attorney who had served as executive trial counsel for the United States at the Nuremberg trials of major war criminals after World War II. Storey had also served as president of the American Bar Association, as president of the Inter-American Bar Association, and as a member of President Truman’s Hoover Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government.
The president’s other Southern “moderate” appointee, seventy-two-year- old Tampa lawyer Doyle E. Carlton, was the governor of Florida during the Roosevelt years. He had dealt successfully with the collapse of the state’s land boom, a violent hurricane, the Mediterranean fruit fly infestation, and the nation’s Depression. His only other foray into politics was an unsuccessful run in 1936 for a Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. Carlton, a friend and active supporter of then Florida Governor Leroy Collins and Senators Spessard Holland and George Smathers, was eminently confirmable.
The commission was formed at a time when the Mason-Dixon Line demarcated race relations, a condition that had persisted since before the Civil War. But that North-South divide also determined seniority and power in the Senate. Eisenhower’s nominees needed confirmation by the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator James Eastland (D-Miss.). To overcome this hurdle, the president also appointed former Virginia governor John S. Battle, a well-known and outspoken Southern segregationist, to the commission in November 1957. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr., of Virginia, Battle’s political mentor, had denounced the idea of a commission as “a vehicle for witch-hunting at its worst, and dangerous beyond the comprehension of most living Americans.” A staunch defender of the racial conventions of Southern society, Battle had made his views widely known through his speech at the 1952 Democratic convention defending Virginia for its refusal to accept a loyalty oath binding delegates to support the convention decisions. The tall, distinguished-looking Virginian pleaded that his state be allowed the “freedom of thought and freedom of action” that had been “enunciated by Thomas Jefferson—in whose County I happen to live—the great patron saint of this Party.” At his confirmation hearing, Battle assured the committee that Eisenhower had chosen him because he believed “it might be helpful if there was some member of the commission who had . . . strong southern views.”
Charismatic and black-haired, with gentle features set off by a remarkable cleft chin, Father Theodore Hesburgh, the president of Notre Dame University, was Eisenhower’s youngest commission selection. At forty years old, Hesburgh was head of the best-known Catholic institution of higher education in the country, a post he had assumed in 1952 at the age of thirty-five. With this bipartisan group of appointees, Eisenhower expected easy confirmation and then moderate commission recommendations. Carlton, Battle, and Storey were Democrats, Hesburgh was an Independent, and Hannah and Wilkins were Republicans.
The commission had its first experience with the growing conflict over race in the 1958 Alabama hearings. As the commission staff prepared for the hearings, Alabama voting officials defied subpoenas and refused to make their records available for inspection. The registrars in Macon County, source of most of the African American complaints, refused to cooperate on orders from the state’s attorney general, John Patterson. In two other counties, Judge George Wallace, the future governor, impounded all registration records and announced that he would “jail any commission agent who attempts to get the records.”
When state and local officials testified, they were uniformly hostile. The commission’s vice chair, Robert Storey, asked Grady Rogers, a member of the Macon County Board of Registrars, about the testimony that prospective voters were racially segregated. Rogers answered, “At times. But, I don’t care to answer that question on advice of counsel.” When Storey inquired, “Why do you refuse to answer it?” Rogers answered, “Because it might tend to incriminate me.” When Storey repeated the line of questioning, Rogers consulted with Attorney General Patterson (soon to be governor) and replied that he was “a judicial officer under the State laws of Alabama” and his actions “cannot be inquired into by any body.” Each subpoenaed Alabama state and local government official mouthed the same defense.
Commissioner Ernest Wilkins asked Harrell Hammonds, judge of probate of Lowndes County, whether it was true that there were no “Negroes” registered in his county. He responded, “That’s what they say.” Wilkins continued, “In other words, out of a population of 17,000 or 18,000, 14,000 or 15,000 Negroes and 3,000 or 4,000 whites, you have approximately 2,200 or 2,300 whites registered and not a single Negro! Don’t you think that is a rather unusual and peculiar situation?” Hammonds replied, “It might be unusual and peculiar in some places; yes.” Wilkins and the other commissioners were quite startled at their first encounter with the raw racial exclusion that the Alabama officials regarded as commonplace and their defiance when questioned.
Dorothy Woodruff, one of three Lowndes County registrars, was asked whether white prospective voters were asked to demonstrate literacy. She answered, “After we meet, we discuss it and if their qualifications are up to par we send them their certificate. We have never had any that haven’t been up to par.”
Storey asked her, “Is that true as to both the blacks and the whites?” Woodruff responded, “We have no blacks.”
Eventually even Commissioner Battle, the former Virginia governor, who supported segregation, was exasperated by the evasive, chilling responses provided by the state and local officials. The segregationist commissioner thundered, “I have come to the state of my ancestors. . . . My grandfather, Cullen A. Battle, was . . . the commanding officer of a brigade of Alabama troops which was honored by a resolution of the Confederate Congress. . . . My grandfather was subsequently denied his seat in Congress, to which the people of Alabama had elected him, because he had served the Confederate cause.
“So, I come to the people of Alabama as a friend. The President . . . was not in error when, in asking me to serve as a member of this commission, he said he wanted someone with strong Southern sentiments, which I have. . . . It is from this background ladies and gentlemen that I am constrained to say in all friendliness, that I fear the officials of Alabama have made an error in doing that which appears to be an attempt to cover up their action.” He thought they should appear and defend their segregationist behavior.
At the request of the commission, the Justice Department obtained a court order for the information sought. However, the Alabama legislature instructed the counties to completely destroy all papers concerning rejected applications. Therefore the inquiry necessarily sputtered to an end.
