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By Root 3508 0

for constituents in my congressional district, which had a modest minority population. But it was a priority for me. When my father was in the war and stationed briefly in North Carolina, segregation and racial tensions were facts of life, a situation vastly different from the suburbs of Chicago. In rural North Carolina, as a boy, I once watched from the other side of a fence while black and white students from different schools confronted one another by waving the sharp edges of broken glass bottles. An even worse situation broke out after some black citizens attempted to enter the segregated white movie theater. It was sad to see the hostility. When I worked for Congressman David Dennison of Ohio in the late 1950s, I learned more about civil rights issues. Dennison had been a supporter of the 1957 Civil Rights Act proposed by the Eisenhower administration, an admirable effort that unfortunately became much reduced in scope because of the opposition of Southern Democrats in the Senate.

Back in early 1962, I had included my support for “effective civil rights measures” in my original campaign platform because I wanted the voters to know that the issue was important to me, even if it weren’t yet a major issue for them. But in the coming months and years, as protests and demonstrations increased, civil rights became an issue all across the country, except not in the way I had hoped. As a result of the violence seen on television, many in the country and some in my district began to equate civil rights with civil unrest.

Since my father was a local real estate agent, I came to know a number of area realtors. If they had a position on civil rights at all, it tended to be for the status quo. Their clients were often concerned that property values would go down if minorities moved into their neighborhoods. Some of my supporters preferred I stay away from the issue.

At the height of efforts to pass civil right legislation, I was invited to be part of a meeting with a group of black leaders to hear their thoughts. The meeting was arranged by Clarence Mitchell of the NAACP, a civil rights pioneer who did a great deal to advance the cause of black Americans. He was on Capitol Hill so often that he was dubbed the 101st senator. Mitchell brought with him a number of African American leaders, including Jim Farmer from the Congress of Racial Equality, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

The group was realistic about the challenges they faced but determined to achieve change. They wanted more pressure placed on the Johnson administration. Though President Kennedy had publicly supported civil rights, they noted, he had not been willing to tackle the Southern Democrats in Congress. In fact, Kennedy’s hesitancy about the issue had inspired Dr. King to take his cause to the streets of Washington for his stirring “I have a dream” speech in August 1963. With other members of Congress, I went to a balcony in the Capitol to listen to King’s speech over the radio while we looked out over the sea of humanity on the Mall. The peaceful crowd stretched out from the Lincoln Memorial, where King was speaking.

As protests increased, the issue of the civil rights legislation became even more controversial. The Chicago Tribune editorialized against passage.10 The paper even put the term “civil rights” in scare quotes, as if there were something suspicious about the phrase. The editorial page labeled a number of the black leaders working to pass the legislation “racial agitators” and cautioned Americans about the bill’s potentially adverse consequences. The bill being considered by Congress, one Chicago Tribune editorial claimed, was “a license for virtually unlimited civil disorder” and would turn “communities over to street mobs” while making black Americans “a privileged class.”11 It was scary stuff for many nervous white suburbanites who had few interactions with black Americans.

I thought I could make a case to my constituents that civil rights legislation was a