FDR - Jean Edward Smith [252]
Senator Wagner’s bill came before the Senate on January 6, 1938. For the next six weeks the upper chamber was immobilized, snarled in a southern filibuster, senators spelling one another round the clock. Twice Wagner moved for cloture to end the debate, and twice he was defeated. Roosevelt kept his hands off. At his press conference on January 14 he was asked whether he favored the bill. “I have not referred to it at all,” said FDR. “I should say there was enough discussion going on in the Senate.”43 If Roosevelt had intervened decisively—perhaps if he had simply offered a word of encouragement—cloture could have been obtained and the bill passed. Yet he declined. To some it looked as if the filibuster had White House sanction. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP charged that there was a gentleman’s agreement to let the bill be talked to death. Most senators really did not want antilynching legislation “but would have to vote for it if it came up.”44 On February 21, 1938, Senator Wagner withdrew the bill so the Senate could move on. In 1939, when the Seventy-sixth Congress convened, the bill was introduced again but failed to make it to the floor in either chamber. In 1940 it passed the House but was not taken up by the Senate. Then came the war.*
During the twelve years FDR was president not one piece of civil rights legislation became law. No federal effort was made to abolish the white primary in the South or overturn the poll tax.45 Roosevelt’s closest aides—Stephen Early, Marvin McIntyre, and Pa Watson—were southerners who shared the prejudice of the times. To the best of their ability they smothered controversial issues that might offend voters in the South. No effort was made to use the bully pulpit of the White House to advance the cause of racial justice.
That does not mean the Roosevelt administration was insensitive to the needs of African Americans. The segregation of government employees introduced by Woodrow Wilson was quietly set aside; blacks were employed in increasing numbers and at significantly higher levels of federal service— including the appointment of William H. Hastie as district judge for the Virgin Islands, the first African American to sit on the federal bench.46
But it was at the symbolic level where the greatest strides were taken, and they were taken by Mrs. Roosevelt, not the president. When ER rose to fetch a glass of water for Mary McLeod Bethune, history was made.† When Eleanor demonstratively placed her chair in the aisle between the white and black sections at a segregated conference in Birmingham, she rallied the spirits of African Americans throughout the country. “You would have to have lived in that era to know what kind of impact this had,” recalled the civil rights activist Pauli Murray.47 When ER resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution to protest their refusal to allow world-famous contralto Marian Anderson to sing at Washington’s Constitution Hall, shock waves echoed through the country.
No incident did more to advance the cause of racial tolerance than the concert Marian Anderson performed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939. When the DAR refused to make Constitution Hall available, Sol Hurok, Miss Anderson’s manager, conceived the idea of an open-air concert at the shrine of the Great Emancipator. Secretary Ickes signed on, and FDR gave his approval. “Tell Oscar [Chapman, assistant secretary of the interior] he has my permission to have Marian sing from the top of the Washington Monument if he wants it.”48 The Roosevelts were in Hyde Park that Sunday, but an integrated throng that stretched as far as the eye could see gathered to hear the great artist. Washington’s Afro-American called it “one of those rare occasions when caste is forgotten, when dignitaries rub elbows with street urchins, and when milady and her servant meet in the same social sphere.”49 When Miss Anderson lifted her voice to sing “America,