The Undercard

The main Congressional event in the spring and summer of 1965 was the consideration and passage of the Voting Rights Act.  In boxing, when there is a strong bout but not the main event, it is called the undercard.  Such it was in 1965 when Senate liberals tried to strengthen the voting rights measure proposed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Those who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama wanted to eliminate pre-conditions to voting such as literacy tests and poll taxes that prevented blacks from registering to vote.  Advocates like Clarence Mitchell and Joe Rauh cheered the efforts of Senate liberals led by Sen. Philip Hart (D-Mich.) to strengthen the administration-proposed bill.

In Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia, prospective voters had to pay a poll tax in order to register.  The poll tax prevented poor whites and blacks from registering.  The 24^th Amendment approved in January 1964 eliminated the use of poll taxes in federal elections.  This was of little use to those in Alabama who wanted to vote Sheriff Jim Clark out of office.

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) in his first major legislative act proposed to eliminate the use of poll taxes in all state and local elections.  Kennedy’s approach had support in the House of Representatives as well as among the coalition of civil rights, unions and church groups. It did not have the support of Lyndon Johnson and his Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach.  President Johnson considered the Kennedy amendment to be unconstitutional.  Johnson preferred to take the Southern states that still used poll taxes to court.  Kennedy, with the support of Sens. Paul Douglas (D-Ill.), Jacob Javits (R-N.Y.) and Clifford Case (R-N.J.), saw a responsibility to put the poll tax ban in the legislation and felt that Congressional action would only strengthen the administration’s arguments in court should it come to that.

The bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans that had long championed civil rights were frustrated by the efforts of LBJ and Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.) when weak civil rights bills were passed in 1957 and 1960.  The civil rights coalition saw Johnson as too eager to pass a bill, any bill that pleased Dirksen and lessened the hue and cry from the Southern barons.  Liberals in 1957 and 1960 were left to vote for whatever bill was worked out by LBJ and Dirksen.  In fairness, Johnson knew that he needed Dirksen to get the votes to shut off a Southern filibuster.  Civil rights advocates urged their Congressional supporters to pursue the strongest possible bill.  1965 was not the first time that LBJ’s approach had caused friction between him and the civil rights coalition in Congress.  In 1965, the Voting Rights Act earned the name, the “Dirksenbach bill.”

Why did the civil rights liberals push so hard for the Kennedy amendment when LBJ objected?  The history of 1957 was still fresh in their minds.  They also knew that the voting rights section of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill was inadequate.  This was their chance, perhaps their last chance, to get it right.

Kennedy’s amendment failed by two votes 45-47.  Democratic Sens. Vance Hartke of Indiana and Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota opposed Kennedy.  Why? Senator Robert C. Byrd’s (D-W.Va.) history of the Senate suggests an answer.  When Hartke and McCarthy came to the Senate in the class of 1958, they won coveted assignments to the Finance Committee.  In 1958, Lyndon Johnson was the Senate Majority Leader and he would have played a determinative role in their assignments.  Sen. Paul Douglas, a world famous economist, tried for seven years to get on the Finance Committee without success.  In 1965, Johnson called in his chits.

It took the involvement of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to get civil rights supporters in Congress to abandon their efforts on the poll tax ban.  LBJ urged Dr. King to decide whether he was going to trust him and Katzenbach or Ted Kennedy.  Johnson told Dr. King that “those boys are not good lawyers.”  The boys he was referring to were Robert and Ted Kennedy.

The nation won the main event in 1965 and the undercard.

Howarth served as director of the Father McKenna Center (2005-2014) and as a legislative assistant to former Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J). He was vice-president of Peyser Associates, a Washington-based government relations firm from 1987-2002.