Restoring the Conscience of the Nation: The Commission’s Early Years

Restoring the Conscience of a Nation: A Report on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. March 2009.

The Commission’s Early Years

As the commission got to work - investigating complaints, drafting field surveys on the exercise of voting rights around the country, and planning hearings - the commissioners also made the decision to establish State Advisory Committees (SACs). Commissioner Storey declared this "the smartest thing we ever did."³¹ While the headquarters staff undertook its inquiry into all federal and state laws bearing on civil rights, their enforcement and effectiveness, the SACs could take on a grassroots information gathering role. Because there was no regional staff at that time, appointments to the committees were necessarily handled at headquarters. Each commissioner took responsibility for recommending members for eight states, although all appointments were subject to approval by the full commission. By August 1958, SACs had been established in every state except Mississippi and South Carolina. The SACs would play a varied but often important role throughout the commission’s history. As the agency expanded and began to establish regional offices around the country, in part to support the work of the SACs, the primary responsibility for recommending SAC members devolved to the field.

Although the commission’s primary mandate was voting rights, plans for the first two years also included work in the fields of education and housing. To that end, the commission scheduled hearings in several southern states, a conference on education in Tennessee and investigations and public hearings on segregation in public housing in New York, Chicago, and Atlanta. Its first public hearing was to be a voting rights hearing in Montgomery, Alabama in December 1958. At that point, it had less than a year to complete its work, including its report to the president and Congress on its activities, findings, and recommendations.

The controversies that arose during the congressional debate over the establishment of the commission ultimately paled in comparison to the legal (and other) confrontations that occurred once the agency began its work in earnest. While preparing for the Montgomery hearing, the commission staff encountered obstruction and opposition from Alabama voting officials. Registrars withheld records upon orders of the state attorney general. Then-Circuit Court Judge George C. Wallace officially impounded all registration records in two counties. Wallace told one newspaper that "[t]hey are not going to get the records. And if any agent of the Civil Rights Commission comes down to get them, they will be locked up."³² Nevertheless, the commission proceeded with the hearing on December 8, 1958, first listening to African-American witnesses who detailed their many frustrating and often unsuccessful attempts to register to vote. Later in the day, the commission began questioning county officials who had been subpoenaed to appear. The witnesses were uncooperative. They refused to answer questions, claimed ignorance of registration procedures, and failed to produce records. Transcripts from the hearing indicate an atmosphere of tension, exasperation, and frustration on the part of the commissioners and defiance on the part of the state officials.³³

Press accounts of the hearing, including reports from several southern newspapers, were highly critical of the Alabama officials’ defiance of the commission. The New York Times commented on the "intolerable contempt for the law" displayed by the local officials in their "resistance to this ultra-moderate Presidential Commission." President Eisenhower later characterized the conduct of the officials as "reprehensible," decrying "this refusal of complying with the basic laws of the land." The commission had no intention of letting the matter rest. That night they decided, by a vote of 4 to 2, to seek enforcement of the subpoenas. Ultimately, Federal District Court Judge Frank Johnson issued an order requiring state officials to make their voting records available to the commission.³⁶

The commission met a similar challenge to its authority when it attempted to schedule a hearing in Louisiana in the summer of 1959 in response to numerous affidavits alleging voting rights violations. State officials refused to cooperate, going so far as to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act itself. Hours before the hearing was to begin, the state attorney general obtained a court order preventing the commission from holding the hearing.³⁷ The resulting legal battle ultimately led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the 1957 Act and the commission’s procedures for conducting hearings and subpoenaing witnesses and documents.³⁸ In delivering the court’s opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren stated:

[The Commission’s function] is purely investigative and fact-finding. It does not adjudicate . . . . It does not indict, punish, or impose any legal sanctions. . . . The only purpose of its existence is to find facts which may subsequently be used as the basis for legislative or executive action.³⁹

The Alabama voting hearing served as a model for the commission’s future activities. By thoroughly and irrefutably documenting the deprivation of civil rights, the commission showed the need for action and provided the record that Congress and future administrations could use to push for legislation to address the problems. Through its hearings and investigations, the commission would collect the facts; analyze and debate them; write reports that documented its findings; and make recommendations for action. The commissioners would present their findings and recommendations to the president and Congress, as required by law, and would often testify before Congress in support of their recommendations.

In that first year, the commission held a conference on education in Nashville, Tennessee and hearings on housing in several cities around the country, both in the north and the south. The education conference revealed that public school desegregation was moving at a snail’s pace, despite the Supreme Court’s mandate. The housing hearings found that residents of all three cities - New York, Chicago, and Atlanta - lived in racial isolation, regardless of the legal status of segregation: in New York, laws prohibited discrimination; in Chicago, there were no laws on the books; and in Atlanta, rigidly enforced segregation was the custom.

The commission completed its work and submitted its report to the president and Congress in September 1959. ⁴⁰ That first report, With Liberty and Justice for All, summarized the scope and effect of existing civil rights laws, described the results of the commission’s hearings and investigations in the areas of voting, education, and housing, and presented the commission’s findings and recommendations. The report reflected the differences of opinion and approach between the commission’s northern and southern members. Nevertheless, there was unity on broad principles and on many specific recommendations.

For example, in the voting section, there were a number of unanimous recommendations, including a call for legislation to prohibit any action which would deprive, or threaten to deprive, any individual or group of individuals of their right to register and vote. However, other voting recommendations did not achieve unanimity, including the recommendation that the president be empowered to appoint temporary federal registrars in areas where there was a pattern of discrimination. Commissioner Battle dissented, stating that existing laws were sufficient to protect the right to vote. His was a solitary dissent, however; the other two southern members of the commission voted with their northern colleagues. A more overt split arose in connection with another voting recommendation. Commissioners Hannah, Hesburgh, and Johnson called for a constitutional amendment declaring that the right to vote should not be denied for any reason other than the inability to meet state requirements regarding age, residency, or legal confinement. Commissioners Storey and Carleton dissented on the ground that there was no evidence that the federal government lacked the power to address the issue through other means. Commissioner Battle concurred with Storey and Carleton.

Nor were all the recommendations in the other sections of the report unanimous. Commissioners Hannah, Hesburgh, and Johnson recommended that the federal government withhold funds from any institution of higher education, public or private, that continued to practice racial discrimination. Commissioners Storey, Battle, and Carleton opposed any form of "economic coercion" and maintained that the commission had not done enough work on this issue. The recommendations for federal action in the housing section were more general, reflecting the magnitude and complexity of the issues. The report called for biracial commissions on housing to further study the issue and to investigate complaints, as well as for various other non-binding but ameliorative steps. There were no dissents to these recommendations, but Commissioners Storey, Battle, and Carleton were critical of the tone of this and other parts of the report.

The process of dealing with dissent within the commission during these early years bears examination, especially in light of more recent years in the commission’s life which have seen greater tension and disagreements among the commissioners. Dissenting opinions were embodied in the text of the report, in separate statements or in footnotes, rather than in a separate minority report. And, where agreement was not possible, subgroups of commissioners - usually Hannah, Hesburgh, and Johnson and at least once, Hesburgh and Johnson alone - made proposals that were included in the main body of the report. Only Commissioner Battle included a specific dissent, not only on the recommendation to appoint voting registrars, but on the tenor of the report as a whole.

Given the commissioners’ different perspectives, it was not surprising that there were disagreements. The report addressed these differences head on:

Problems of racial injustice have been present in varying forms since the birth of the nation. . . . So it is still necessary for men to reason together about these questions and to continue to search for answers. This, the Commission has tried to do. Because reasonable men differ on the best remedial measures, it was agreed that the Commissioners should express these disagreements wherever deemed important, either in footnotes or in supplementary statements.⁴¹

Nevertheless, they were convinced that the country faced no more important problem than civil rights and that somehow it must be solved. ⁴²

The release of the report coincided with the last stages of a lengthy debate over the future of the commission. Legislation extending its life had become bogged down in Congress. Although President Eisenhower had praised the work of the commission and called for its extension at the time of the Alabama hearing, opposition from southern senators to civil rights legislation generally, and to the commission in particular, had led to stalemate. The report only served to increase their opposition. In a pattern that was to be repeated throughout the commission’s life, staffing and morale problems developed due to the uncertainty of the commission’s continued existence. Only through 11^th hour parliamentary maneuvering were Senate supporters able to add an amendment to an unrelated bill extending the commission’s life for another two years. Despite vocal opposition from powerful southern senators, the bill passed and was quickly agreed to by the House.

Even with ongoing uncertainties about its continued existence, the commission forged ahead with its work, following the pattern of investigations and hearings it had established in its early voting rights efforts. Upon Commissioner Battle’s resignation in 1959, President Eisenhower nominated Robert S. Rankin, a political scientist from Duke University, as a replacement. More moderate than Battle, Rankin enabled the commission to move toward an increasing consensus on the civil rights issues confronting it. ⁴³ Meanwhile, in 1960, Congress enacted a civil rights bill sent by President Eisenhower, again extending the life of the commission and incorporating commission recommendations to help secure voting rights for African-Americans citizens, including the appointment of federal voting referees and a prohibition on destroying registration and voting records.

Next Section: The 60s: Laying the Foundation for Legislation

31. Id. at 28, quoting The New York Times, April 27, 1958.

32. Id. at 33, quoting the Montgomery Advertiser. December 6, 1958.

33. Id. at 37-38.

34. Id. at 38.

35. Id. at 39.

36. In re Wallace, 170 F. Supp. 63 (1959).

37. Dulles, note 23 above, at 41

38. Hannah v. Larche, 363 U.S. 420 (1960).

39. Id. at 441.

40. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, With Liberty and Justice For All (1959).

41. Id. at 6-7.