Ripon Society Quotes

He was right. Even the vaunted Southern Filibuster was broken by the strategy and tactics Johnson and Senator Humbert Humphry, the Floor Leader for the 1964 Civil Rights Bill.

Bickel was then clerk to Justice Frankfurter.

at the Department of Justice He was commenting on the fact that when he was an official of the Civil Rights Division of the U. S. Justice Department, the Southern members of Congress would not allow any appropriated money to be spend for Civil Rights reform activities. So they would do the Civil Rights work and call it something else so the Southerners who dominated the key Congressional Committees just never knew what was happening in the Department. Ideally, government officials would not try and deceive members of Congress, but the racism of a minority of Congress had been corrupting American life and law since the Constitution was originally ratified. Somoral corruption just brought on another type of moral corruption.

She was always an American optimist. Most of the Southern States did everything possible to try and defy the Supreme Court’s decisions on school segregation and other matters regarding their “traditional rights” to discriminate racially. Entire public school systems closed rather than desegregate. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in 1964 made it much more difficult, But change took place inexorably over the next years as the older generation gave way to the new—one that was more educated and better informed as a result of television. Mississippi had more Black elected public officials than white. By the 21st century, there were relatively few areas where the Southern States still tried to evade the Supreme Court.

The stranglehold that the Southern Democrats had held on civil rights legislation had been broken in 1968 by Lyndon Johnson and the other Democrats with key support from some liberal Republicans like Lindsay. However, the South felt politically betrayed. The Republican leadership, in what was one of the most brilliant political strategies in American history, played to the disaffected racist Southerners and welcomed into their party. Within the next 30 years virtually the entire South had gone Republican, and the Republican captured both houses of Congress and the Presidency with the South solidly Republican. At the time, Lindsay and some Republican leaders criticized bitterly about the party pandering to the worst racist elements of the nation. The “Party of Lincoln” had become the party of the segregationists, the racists, the hate groups of the country.

A school desegregation case from Clarendon County had reached the Court. However, Frankfurter was a leader in getting the court to demur and send it back to the lower court for more fact-finding. One of the clerks thought that the court was ducking the issue because it was so controversial. In addition to the election issue Frankfurter and Justice Robert Jackson had only 4 votes for desegregation, but the 5 justice majority consisted of some very old men. Frankfurter and Jackson tried.

At the time less than 10% of the Southern Blacks were allowed to vote. The result was that Southern segregationists were elected to Congress even in a state like Mississippi which had a majority Black population, The Southern segregationist bloc was large enough that with a few very conservative Republicans, they formed a coalition could block any civil rights legislation including voting rights reform,

This phrase was also to be used over 100 years later by Malcolm X. See {624101} and {38291}.

In the 1920s through the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1963, Southern politicians labled all efforts for desegregation as “socialist” or “communist”. What is less known it that this canard goes back to the slavery argument BEFORE the Civil War. This document was relatively widely distributed in the South to the literate part of the public (Even the white population had high illiteracy rates in the South—even in modern times it is higher than the rest of the nation.) In this case the author actually claimed that many Northern State legislatures were socialist controlled as was the House of Represented; and many Southerners actually believed him. Even into the 21st century Southern conservatives were claiming that pro affirmative action politicians like President Obama were socialists and some people actually believed that also.

Plessy v. Ferguson was one of the worst Supreme Court Decisions in American history. It held that states could provide and/or mandate racially segregated facilities and institutions so long as they were equal.

Preclearance was a requirement that any change in the voting or registration laws, rules or procedures needed to be approved by the Federal Justice Department. He was testifying about why preclearance was important and why it was placed in the Voting Rights Act every time it was reauthorized. See {635271} for what happens without preclearance.