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Because there is no filibuster rule in the United States House of Representatives, the southerners opposed to civil rights had no way of stopping the Eisenhower civil rights bill in the House. All four of Herbert Brownell's recommended provisions were, with only minor amendments, passed by the House on June 18, 1957.
Easy passage in the House of Representatives became, from this point on, one of the established principles of legislative strategy-making for enacting civil rights bills. By the early 1960s civil rights supporters assumed passage in the House was a foregone conclusion. They would schedule a civil rights bill for passage in the House when it suited their strategy for getting the bill through the Senate, which was much more difficult. When the bill that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964was before the House of Representatives in February 1964, civil rights strategists added and deleted provisions according to how it would effect passage in the Senate rather than the House of Representatives.
The first major problem confronting the Eisenhower civil rights bill was the Senate Judiciary Committee and its strongly segregationist chairman, James O. Eastland of Mississippi. Eastland had used his powers as committee chairman to kill every civil rights bill that came to the committee during the 1950s. Eastland and his Judiciary Committee thus were famous as the "burial ground" in the Senate for civil rights bills.
The strategy devised in 1957 for bypassing the Senate Judiciary Committee was used repeatedly with civil rights bills during the 1960s. The House-passed civil rights bill was intercepted at the moment a clerk carried it over to the Senate from the House of Representatives. Before the bill could be routed to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate leadership took the bill and put it directly on the Senate calendar for debate at a future time.
The vote to bypass the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1957 received only lukewarm support from Democratic senators. Only ten of them voted to bring the bill directly to the Senate floor for debate. The Republicans in the Senate were virtually unanimous in their support for the 1957 bypass motion, however, and that support is what enabled it to be narrowly adopted. Senate Republicans probably supported the bypass motion so strongly because it was a Republican president's civil rights bill.
This technique for bypassing the Senate Judiciary Committee, pioneered in the Eisenhower years, was quite well established by 1964. When the bill that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reached the Senate from the House, the southerners decided to filibuster the motion to bypass the Judiciary Committee. Incredibly to civil rights supporters, this southern filibuster of the motion to bypass the committee lasted for almost three weeks. Then the filibuster of the civil rights bill itself began.
The southern attack on President Eisenhower's 1957 civil rights billcentered on Part III, the provision permitting the attorney general to file suits in civil rights cases. Georgia Senator Richard Russell, the post-World War II leader of the pro-segregation southern Democrats in the Senate, condemned Part III as an all-out invasion of states' rights. Russell told the Senate:
"The bill is cunningly designed to vest in the attorney general unprecedented power to bring to bear the whole might of the federal government, including the armed forces if necessary, to force a commingling of white and Negro children in the state supported schools of the South."
Russell concluded his speech by noting that many Americans living outside the South "would not approve of another reconstruction at bayonet point of a peaceful and patriotic South."
In this speech, Senator Russell established the expansion of U.S. Government power as the principal issue on which civil rights bills would be opposed during the late 1950s and 1960s. This issue had particular appeal to pro-segregationists because it rested on constitutional grounds - the U.S. Government should not be given too much power at the expense of the states - rather than on racial segregation as such. By the early 1960s Russell was referring to the tendency of all civil rights bills to expand the powers of the national government over the state governments as the "Federal blackjack."
Russell's attack on Part III in the 1957 bill was successful. Even President Eisenhower, after analyzing Russell's interpretation and seeing its effect on public opinion, told a news conference he could not support giving the attorney general such vast powers. With Part III eliminated, the southerners no longer considered the bill a threat and let the other three provisions pass into law without a filibuster. Russell called the removal of Part III "the sweetest victory in my twenty-five years as a senator."
The most important lesson learned from the 1957 Civil Rights Act by civil rights supporters was that any deal with the southern senators on a civil rights bill would result in "cutting the heart out" of the bill. By the early 1960s, this had produced a "no compromises" attitude on the part of civil rights supporters where the southerners were concerned. The lesson of 1957 was that any bill that the southerners approved of would not be worth having. A favorite expression at the time was that the bill would have been "gutted." In both 1964 and 1965, pro-civil rights forces adopted the strategy that a meaningful civil rights bill would have to undergo a determined southern filibuster in the Senate and that filibuster would have to be ended by a successful cloture vote (2/3 of senators present and voting).
President Eisenhower's 1957 Civil Rights Act should not be regarded as a failure, however. The new law established a Civil Rights Commission to study racial problems in the United States and, based on the results of the study, make recommendations to Congress. In 1961 the Commission issued a major report to Congress thoroughly documenting the effects of racial segregation and oppression in the South. The Commission's findings served as the basis for the Kennedy administration civil rights bill that eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Equally important in the 1957 Civil Rights Act was the creation of the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice. Under both President Kennedy and President Johnson, the Civil Rights Division worked to further the civil rights of blacks in the American South and sought to reduce the conflict and violence produced by civil rights demonstrations. Under the leadership of Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, a Kennedy appointee, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department accomplished many important civil rights tasks in the early 1960s..
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