Soon after the House of Representatives voted to enact the omnibus bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congressional Quarterly (CQ) published the last of three special reports on lobbying in the 88th Congress. The report posited that “the bipartisan civil rights bill (H.R. 7152) which passed the House Feb. 10 was the subject of some of the most intensive and effective behind-the-scenes lobbying in modern legislative history,” and it went on to describe a robust effort involving an extensive set of organizations and “literally thousands” of individuals who were on hand in the Capitol and House office buildings, acting in coordination with the Democratic Study Group and other congressional champions of the bill to ensure H.R. 7152’s undiluted passage.Footnote 1
This CQ report is cited merely a handful of times in the voluminous literature on civil rights policy development.Footnote 2 Indeed, legislative lobbying is rarely featured in the pre-Voting Rights Act (VRA) civil rights movement’s story at all, let alone as a superlatively “intensive and effective” means for achieving policy victories during the movement’s heyday. Instead, and in line with what Kenneth T. Andrews calls “action-reaction models” of social movement influence,Footnote 3 scholarly and popular accounts alike envision the civil rights movement as a series of direct-action protest events that prompted policymakers to react without further intervention. In these accounts, civil rights movement activity occurs at both geographic and figurative distance from Beltway institutions; consequently, it has “little or no direct influence [on policy] beyond the initial point.”Footnote 4 Meanwhile, institutional political actors—that is, entrepreneurialand pivotal members of Congress, presidents, and other executive branch officials—take center stage. While the reforms they implement are spurred on by extra-institutional social movement activity, interbranch negotiations and legislative maneuvers ensue largely unhindered by nongovernmental actors.
This article seeks to bridge this bifurcated narrative by zeroing in on the Civil Rights Act lobby—that is, on the throng of organizational Washington representatives who worked to strengthen H.R. 7152’s provisions and secure its passage through conventional, institutionally embedded lobbying activity. Drawing on archival records, published biographies and obituaries, and other resources that lend insight into the professional careers of over a hundred men and women who participated in the Civil Rights Act lobby, it supplements the CQ report’s partial enumeration of organizations and individuals who participated in this lobbying campaign to investigate its claim that pro-civil rights organizations brought “superior resources and talent” to the 1963–64 legislative battle.
The questions that motivate this descriptive analysis are simple: Who were the Civil Rights Act’s lobbyists, and what prior experiences did these individuals bring to their efforts to strengthen H.R. 7152 and ensure its passage? Investigating their personal and professional paths to the Civil Rights Act lobby does not merely add color and detail to CQ’s reporting, however. Rather, it provides a window into the civil rights movement’s strategic orientation and capacity, calling into question the received wisdom that the movement exerted pressure through conventional, institutionally embedded advocacy (as opposed to extra-institutional direct-action protest) only after Black voter registration and descriptive representation had increased in the later 1960s.
This study’s principal finding thus challenges conventional periodization of the civil rights movement’s developmental trajectory. Electoral markers of social movement institutionalization were lacking prior to implementation of the VRA of 1965, to be sure. But the present analysis shows that an extensive Beltway network afforded the pre-VRA civil rights movement institutional access through legislative lobbying. Civil rights movement organizations—including those best known for extra-institutional insurgency—lobbied Congress simultaneously with their direct-action protest campaign sponsorship prior to 1965, and they did so in collaboration with an experienced coterie of religious, labor, and other public interest lobbyists. While some Civil Rights Act lobby participants were principally invested in direct-action protest activity, they were outnumbered by a robust network of civil rights and allied lobbyists with extensive policymaking experience and a professional commitment to institutional advocacy.
This finding further challenges scholars to reimagine how nongovernmental activists and institutional incumbents interacted to construct the mid-to-late twentieth-century civil rights state. It complicates state-centered narratives of American political development (APD), shedding new light on ways in which “meaningful political development” does not come about merely through the actions of officeholders “act[ing] in a vacuum,” but “is also a product of … the contestation that happens between those on the sidelines and those in power.”Footnote 5 By drawing attention to lobbyists’ role in bridging the extra-institutional protest and institutional policymaking realms, moreover, it problematizes dichotomous “insider” vs. “outsider” classifications and calls attention to crossover personnel as an important force connecting social movements to policymaking institutions.Footnote 6
A second intriguing finding is that the emergence of the Civil Rights Act’s lobbyist network was intertwined with federal state building in the 1930s and 1940s. While the career paths that brought individuals to the Civil Rights Act lobby varied considerably, a critical mass of those who helped orchestrate the 1963–64 lobbying campaign had cut their teeth in New Deal and World War II agencies some 20–30 years prior. In highlighting the Civil Rights Act lobby’s personnel connections to the FDR and Truman-era administrative state, this finding adds a new dimension to the idea of a “long civil rights movement” that had its roots in pre-1950s political developments. While investigating the substantive impact of these erstwhile administrators’ early-career experiences on the Civil Rights Act and other policy developments is beyond the scope of this article, illuminating these origins should encourage future research on the interconnected development of the administrative and civil rights states.
The article proceeds as follows: The next section situates this study in the context of prior research on social movement institutionalization. After that, I introduce the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR or Leadership Conference), which was the principal coordinating agency for federal civil rights legislative lobbying during the mid-1960s, and describe my efforts to trace the career development of over a hundred organizational representatives who participated in its campaign for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The following two sections discuss the results of these efforts. They reveal considerable investment by civil rights and allied organizations in federal legislative lobbying and a diverse network of civil rights lobbyists, many of whom had deep roots in Washington policymaking circles. The final section explores the implications of these findings and directions for future research.
1. The timing of civil rights movement institutionalization
Social movement theorists have traditionally conceptualized institutionalization as a process some social movements experience late in their development—that is, as part and parcel of their decline after having achieved some success through extra-institutional direct-action tactics.Footnote 7 In this view, social movements are mobilizations of marginalized outsiders who lack access to conventional institutional means for pursuing their political goals. Their “key challenge,” Doug McAdam writes, is “to devise some way to overcome the basic powerlessness that has confined them to a position of institutionalized political impotence.”Footnote 8 And so they deploy extra-institutional tactics—public demonstrations, boycotts, violent or nonviolent resistance, and the like—to disrupt routine politics and prompt powerholders to respond. Often ensuing in tandem with radicalization,Footnote 9 institutionalization is a potential—and controversial—outcome of successful disruption.Footnote 10
While the institutionalization framework generalizes broadly, David S. Meyer has argued that the American political system is especially prone to this outcome.Footnote 11 As envisioned in The Federalist No. 10, he maintains, the United States government’s institutional design “allows, and even encourages, group participation in often ritualized political conflict.”Footnote 12 The result is a pluralist system that incentivizes marginalized groups to “fight for access to the arenas of decision making and the right to engage in institutional politics, essentially seeking recognition as legitimate contenders.” When successful, they “gain access to the system, though generally not the resources to win outright victories within it” and subsequently “accommodate themselves to institutional rules and norms” in pursuit of substantive goals.Footnote 13
The civil rights movement is a frequent exemplar of these dynamics. Drawing on McAdam’s influential Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, Meyer offers the civil rights movement as illustrative of “a pattern of movement decline defined by the fragmentation of political action of a movement coalition, accompanied by the institutionalization of part of the coalition.”Footnote 14 Elsewhere, McAdam himself points to black voter registration and officeholding rates to show that “by any measure of institutionalized political power blacks were almost totally powerless in the middle decades of this [i.e., the twentieth] century.”Footnote 15 Accordingly, he maintains, “any complete account of how blacks were able to mount such a successful insurgent campaign must focus squarely on their willingness to bypass ‘proper channels’ in favor of non-institutionalized form of protest.”Footnote 16 Writing at about the same time, J. Craig Jenkins and Craig M. Eckert note that “virtually all observers agree” that the civil rights movement’s decline in the late 1960s owed to “partial victories” in the form of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, which prompted moderate activists to determine that “insurgency was no longer necessary” and adopt “institutional tactics, especially Congressional lobbying and electoral support of the Democratic Party” while their militant counterparts radicalized.Footnote 17 More recently, Thomas V. Maher and coauthors see institutionalization only in the last of three phases after the civil rights movement’s initial mobilization: “(1) emergence on the national stage and success (1960–68), (2) repression and demobilization (1968–1977), and (3) institutionalization and postmobilization (1978–1995).”Footnote 18
Much as the original institutionalization framework can claim some degree of “theoretical consensus,”Footnote 19 an alternative approach envisions institutionalization as a strategy activists pursue rather than an outcome or evolutionary stage in their movements’ development; as Lorenzo Bosi summarizes, it is “a premeditated action taken by social movements in order to advance their goals.”Footnote 20 Rather than see institutionalization as evidence of social movements’ cooptation by antagonistic governments, this alternative framework suggests that social movement strategists deliberately enter into relationships of “conflictual cooperation” with policymakers—that is, they adopt an “ambivalent strategy of a combination of conflict and cooperation” with state actors, engaging them via conventional institutional channels to advance social movement objectives “at different points in the political process.”Footnote 21 As Doowon Suh emphasizes, moreover, they may opt to do so simultaneously with their participation in the extra-institutional activities that are more commonly associated with social movements’ tactical repertoires.Footnote 22 As he describes with respect to the Korean women’s movement, “institutionalization … does not mean that they became merely an interest group. Instead, the women’s movement pursued a dual strategy, simultaneously retaining the character of social movements and pursuing ‘institutional politics.’”Footnote 23
Yet even when adopting this reconceptualization, scholarship on the civil rights movement still depicts the conventional stagewise progression with institutionalization setting in only after the legislative breakthroughs of the mid-1960s. For example, much as Wayne A. Santoro and Max Fitzpatrick conceptualize institutionalization as “shifting tactics”—and not as a symptom of the civil rights movement “nearing its end”—and challenge the traditional focus on state-centered mechanisms as drivers of institutionalization, their investigation does not alter the conventional timeline.Footnote 24 Tracking Black congressional office-holding and southern Black voter registration rates, they find that “protest decline corresponded to greater political inclusion” only after 1965.Footnote 25 And while they include lobbying in their definition of institutionalization as “the shifting of the movement’s tactical repertoire from nonviolent protest to more routine and legally codified tactics like voting, office holding, litigation, and lobbying,”Footnote 26 they do not investigate whether or when this tactic was in fact employed by civil rights movement organizations.
Although it does not address the timing of the civil rights movement’s institutionalization per se, APD research gives reason to question the social movement theorists’ consensus. Several studies suggest that electoral access has not historically been prerequisite for institutionally oriented advocacy in U.S. politics. For example, Daniel Carpenter’s research on congressional petitions shows that this institutional tactic was used early and often by aggrieved communities and individuals, including some who were fully disenfranchised from electoral politics.Footnote 27 Elisabeth Clemens, meanwhile, contends that it was precisely their exclusion from electoral participation that facilitated Progressive Era women’s organizations’ innovative advocacy in the halls of government—and, through this work, their contribution not only to specific legislative outcomes but to a “broader reworking of the organizational framework of American politics” featuring the rise of the modern interest group as a vehicle for extra-electoral yet institutional grievance representation.Footnote 28
The NAACP was among the wave of associations that emerged during this time, and Megan Ming Francis shows that its leaders combined extra-institutional protest activity with a variegated institutional strategy—including congressional lobbying as early as 1919—to advocate for anti-lynching legislation decades before the VRA.Footnote 29 Desmond King and Robert C. Lieberman similarly highlight the importance of “associational connections between civil society and the state” in the development of state power,Footnote 30 and identify an important role for NAACP advocacy in facilitating the federal government’s forceful intervention in the 1962 integration of the University of Mississippi.Footnote 31 And, in their typology of social movements’ relationship with U.S. presidents, Sidney M. Milkis and Daniel J. Tichenor classify the 1950s–1960s civil rights movement as a “formative movement” that deployed “significant conventional political leverage” through “electoral mobilization, lobbying access, litigation, or formal institutional allies” while mounting a “significant tactical challenge to [the] social, economic or political order.”Footnote 32 For Milkis and Tichenor, it is precisely this combination that renders American social movements “most viable in their pursuit of contentious change,”Footnote 33 and their expansive account of the civil rights movement’s relationship with presidents throughout the twentieth century is replete with instances of insider negotiation between civil rights movement leaders and high-ranking government officials.
Prior APD research thus both disentangles social movements’ strategic orientation from their electoral access and shows that the civil rights movement in particular was inclined to combine direct-action protest with institutional political advocacy, including congressional lobbying, from early on in its development. But there has been little systematic assessment of the civil rights movement’s capacity for institutional advocacy. Regardless of their willingness to pursue a simultaneous strategy, did pre-VRA civil rights forces have the wherewithal to mount an effective lobbying campaign once favorable legislation was in the offing?
This study seeks to fill the lacuna. To my knowledge, it is the first effort to empirically assess the personnel capacity of the civil rights movement’s congressional lobbying forces.Footnote 34 Whereas the measurement of office-holding and voter registration rates is relatively straightforward, reconstructing the Civil Rights Act lobby is akin to piecing together a puzzle whose pieces have frayed, faded, or even gone missing in the passage of time. Yet even the necessarily limited analysis that follows reveals a robust lobbying arm for the civil rights movement that existed prior to—and engaged in institutionally embedded advocacy to facilitate—the legislative achievements of the mid-1960s.
2. Tracing Washington representatives’ paths to the civil rights act lobby
The CQ report on the Civil Rights Act lobby notes that “all major organizations backing the bill participated through the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.”Footnote 35 Currently in its eighth decade as a coalition of more than 200 organizations devoted to the advancement of a broad range of civil and human rights through legislative advocacy,Footnote 36 the Leadership Conference was founded in the early 1950s to coordinate 52 civil rights, labor, religious, civic, and other organizations’ efforts to encourage the Republican and Democratic Parties to adopt strong civil rights planks in their quadrennial platforms, pressure the House and Senate for congressional rules reform, and lobby for federal civil rights legislation.Footnote 37 Though its leadership of the Civil Rights Act lobby was not a foregone conclusion immediately after H.R. 7152’s introduction, the Leadership Conference emerged from a June 22, 1963 White House meeting effectively charged with coordinating advocacy groups’ efforts to promote the administration bill. Shortly thereafter, its officers established and staffed a Washington, DC office to facilitate this work.Footnote 38
The LCCR’s Washington office records are the starting point for my effort to investigate the Civil Rights Act lobby’s personnel, as this office was the site of regular meetings of member and allied organizations’ Washington representatives for the duration of the Civil Rights Act campaign.Footnote 39 These meetings served as the coalition’s principal venue for keeping organizations up-to-date on legislative developments, identifying their consensus on substantive and strategic matters as H.R. 7152 wended through Congress, coordinating a division of labor for direct lobbying by the Washington representatives themselves, and identifying appropriate strategies for engaging grassroots supporters nationwide in the legislative process.Footnote 40
Few records remain of the Leadership Conference’s Washington representatives meetings, as formal minutes were not generally taken. However, the meeting sign-in sheets were retained and are archived in the Library of Congress’ Manuscript Division.Footnote 41 Using these sign-in sheets, I identified 133 individuals who attended at least two of the 44 Washington Representatives meetings that were held in the year leading up to the Civil Rights Act’s passage.Footnote 42 To this initial list, I added five others whom the CQ report names as organizational lobbyists for the Civil Rights Act or whom other documentation suggests were instrumental to the LCCR’s work but don’t meet the two-meeting sign-in threshold.
I used a variety of sources to trace as many of the total list of 138 Washington representatives’ pre-June-1963 professional careers as possible. As the sign-in sheets themselves only list their names and home organizations, they offered a meager starting point for my research. There is no central repository for Washington representatives’ career information and many of the individuals whose names appear with some frequency on the sign-in lists are not household names, even if they represented very prominent organizations. Therefore, reconstructing each Washington representative’s path to participation in the Civil Rights Act lobby was a unique adventure. For a few individuals, a published memoir, biography, or oral history provides ample insight into their personal circumstances and career trajectories. In most cases, however, I resorted to scouring the Internet for obituaries, biographical blurbs, hiring and retirement announcements, genealogical records, and other materials to piece together and corroborate mini-biographies.Footnote 43 For each individual, I sought (with varying success) answers to these questions:
• How old were they during the 1963–64 Civil Rights Act lobbying campaign? Were they emerging adults still settling into a career path, or were they mid-to-late-career professionals?
• Which organization did they represent at Leadership Conference meetings, how long had they been employed or otherwise affiliated with that organization, and in what capacities?
• Apart from representing their organization at Leadership Conference meetings and participating in its lobbying initiatives, did they play any other roles in the civil rights movement?
• When did they move to Washington, DC and for what purpose?
• Did they have pre-1963 lobbying experience? If so, were they registered as a congressional lobbyist and when did they first register?Footnote 44
• Did they have prior federal legislative experience, whether as a member of Congress or as a congressional staffer?
• Did they have prior White House or federal agency experience?
In addition to seeking answers to these questions about individual lobbyists’ professional careers, I used a variety of primary and secondary sources to gain insight into their interrelationships, pre-1963 participation in Leadership Conference and other civil rights lobbying initiatives, and home organizations’ investment in federal legislative lobbying. While I was able to find answers to most of the afore-listed questions for most of the 138 Washington representatives, data limitations preclude quantitative analysis beyond elemental descriptive statistics. As such, while the discussion that follows does provide some numerical information about their demographics and career experiences, my approach aims more to qualitatively identify common patterns and pathways Washington representatives took to the Civil Rights Act lobby. I discuss the results of these efforts in the next two sections, which delve first into the organizational contours of the Civil Rights Act lobbying coalition and then into the career experiences of the personnel who carried out its work during the year it took to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
3. The Civil Rights Act lobby’s organizational landscape
Before turning to the Washington representatives’ individual-level characteristics, this section surveys the landscape of organizations they served. The CQ report states that the Leadership Conference had 79 member organizations in February 1964 and names 51 groups that lobbied for HR 7152’s House passage.Footnote 45 In fact, an even greater number participated in the Civil Rights Act lobby. A total of 86 organizations had formally affiliated with the Leadership Conference by the time the Civil Rights Act was signed into law in July 1964 while others participated in its work without joining the coalition officially. According to the sign-in sheets, 80 organizations were represented at two or more Washington representatives meetings, including about 30 that were not included in the CQ report’s list and 26 that were not LCCR members at the time.Footnote 46 As this accounting suggests, a number of Leadership Conference member organizations had limited involvement in the coalition’s direct lobbying for the Civil Rights Act. Some may not have participated in the LCCR’s efforts at all,Footnote 47 but archival evidence suggests that at least some of them participated in the Civil Rights Act lobby in other ways. While they may not have assigned Washington-based legislative affairs personnel to attend weekly meetings, their executive officers may have participated in the Leadership Conference’s occasional meetings for heads of organizations; they may have contributed financially to support its Washington office; and they may have worked to mobilize grassroots participation in outside lobbying initiatives.Footnote 48 All told, the organizational network that fueled the Civil Rights Act lobby was expansive and diverse.
As the CQ report indicates, basically four types of organizations comprised the Leadership Conference coalition in 1963–1964: (1) “civil rights groups,” including all of the major civil rights movement organizations as well as several less-sung groups that were principally concerned with Black racial equality; (2) “labor unions,” including the AFL-CIO, its Industrial Union Department, and an assortment of its affiliated unions, as well as other workers’ organizations like the Negro American Labor Council and the Jewish Labor Committee; (3) “church groups,” including a variety of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish organizations; and (4) “other groups,” an assortment of fraternal, professional, and civic associations, including the ACLU and Americans for Democratic Action (ADA).Footnote 49
While a comprehensive survey of this organizational landscape is beyond the scope of this analysis, some consideration of the civil rights sector is warranted as it bears on the question of the timing of the civil rights movement’s institutionalization. In fact, all four of the organizations McAdam credits with having initiated most New York Times-reported civil rights protest events from 1961 to 1965 (NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE)Footnote 50 simultaneously participated in institutional lobbying, with three of the four having established a Washington office sometime prior to the Civil Rights Act’s passage.
The most longstanding and influential was the NAACP’s Washington Bureau, which had been established in 1942.Footnote 51 Clarence Mitchell, a former journalist and Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) Associate Director and Director of Field Operations, joined the Washington Bureau staff in 1946 and became its director in 1950, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1978. In 1954, he was joined by J. Francis Pohlhaus, a Georgetown-trained attorney who had worked for the Federal Security Agency and the Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice prior to his hire as the NAACP Washington Bureau’s legal counsel. Both men were seasoned legislative lobbyists by 1963 and both played leading roles in the LCCR’s Civil Rights Act campaign that kicked off that summer. Mitchell chaired the LCCR’s Washington representatives meetings and, along with AFL-CIO legislative director Andrew J. Biemiller and former ADA national director Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., participated regularly in top-level strategy meetings with executive and legislative branch officers.Footnote 52 Working more behind the scenes, Pohlhaus coauthored (with Rauh) the strategy memo that laid the blueprint for the Civil Rights Act lobbying campaign and produced widely circulated legal analyses of HR 7152’s provisions as the bill’s contents changed through the course of the legislative process.Footnote 53
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Southern Christian Leadership Conference both opened their Washington offices during the Civil Rights Act campaign, in October 1963 and February 1964, respectively.Footnote 54 In contrast to the NAACP, which had been founded more than 50 years earlier in the North and had a long track record of institutional advocacy, these organizations were created during the civil rights movement’s heyday—SCLC in the wake of the 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott and SNCC amidst the 1960 sit-in wave—and specialized in direct-action organizing in southern towns and cities. Both nevertheless supplemented on-the-ground work in the South with direct lobbying of executive and legislative branch officials in Washington. This is perhaps less of a revelation for SCLC, as its president Martin Luther King Jr.’s access to and negotiation with U.S. presidents and other high-ranking government officials is well-known. King himself was not involved in the day-to-day work of civil rights legislation, but SCLC maintained a policy-focused Washington presence as early as 1961 under the leadership of Walter Fauntroy, a local Baptist pastor who had longstanding interest in political affairs and would later serve as Washington, DC’s first delegate to the House of Representatives. Records of the first few LCCR meetings for Washington representatives show Fauntroy as a liaison between March on Washington planners and Civil Rights Act lobbyists in the summer of 1963.Footnote 55 After the August 28th march, he continued to participate as SCLC’s Washington representative throughout the year leading up to the Civil Rights Act’s passage, attending nearly half of the LCCR’s meetings during that time.
SNCC is remembered more for youthful militance and deep-rooted community organizing, and so its institutional efforts to influence legislation in Washington come as more of a surprise. Nevertheless, SNCC too saw fit to establish a Washington beachhead in 1963. Frank Tuerkheimer, who did Washington-based legal work for SNCC that summer between his law school graduation and judicial clerkship and attended two Leadership Conference meetings during that time, offers insight into SNCC’s interest in pursuing legislative reform through conventional lobbying:
When SNCC volunteers came to places in the South to register voters they were immediately hit with frivolous law suits which tied up their funds. Since what SNCC volunteers were doing involved an exercise of their First Amendment rights, their defenses raised federal questions and thus permitted removal from the hostile state courts to the federal judicial system. Unfortunately, federal district courts in the South were not … receptive … Thus, the judges regularly remanded cases to the state courts. These remand decisions were not appealable to the far more favorable forum of the Fifth Circuit. My legislative assignment was to try to get that changed.Footnote 56
As this quote suggests, SNCC’s Washington operation was instrumentally focused on supporting its on-the-ground efforts in the Deep South, and so its legislative objectives were orthogonal to those of organizations that viewed civil rights legislation more as an end it itself; in turn, its Washington representatives’ role at LCCR meetings was often tempestuous. SNCC would eventually eschew institutional tactics (and its Leadership Conference affiliation), but in 1963 its leaders still saw promise in pursuing a simultaneous strategy: building SNCC’s own capacity for institutional advocacy and harnessing its goals to established civil rights lobbying resources as a means for advancing the extra-institutional direct action that was its mainstay.
CORE was arguably the most decentralized and extra-institutionally oriented of the four principal civil rights movement organizations. It never did establish a legislative affairs office in Washington or pursue its own lobbying agenda. Nevertheless, CORE participated in the LCCR’s lobbying campaign for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 even as it orchestrated direct-action protest campaigns nationwide.Footnote 57 It was represented at about half of the Washington representatives meetings during the Civil Rights Act campaign, usually by Marvin Rich, CORE’s Community Relations Director since 1959.
Apart from these four movement headliners, several other Black civil rights organizations maintained an active lobbying presence in Washington. In fact, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) was the first African American organization to open a Washington Office. It did so in 1935 and lobbied for civil rights and other legislation affecting Black women and children for decades before the Civil Rights Act campaign.Footnote 58 Several Black fraternities and sororities also began lobbying for civil rights legislation during the 1930s. Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, for example, established its National Non-Partisan Council on Public Affairs in 1938 and opened a Washington office staffed with a full-time legislative representative soon after. Early on, fraternities and sororities coordinated their legislative lobbying efforts through the Nonpartisan Lobby for Economic and Democratic Rights and, subsequently, under the umbrella of the American Committee on Human Rights, both of which had dedicated congressional lobbyists.Footnote 59 Finally, the National Urban League, which had specialized in social work to improve the lot of Black migrants to cities nationwide since its 1910 founding, took increasing interest in federal policy advocacy under Whitney Young’s leadership in the early 1960s. In addition to cultivating personal relationships with top-level Kennedy administration personnel, Young established a Washington Bureau in 1961 and hired Cernoria D. Johnson, a former Works Progress Administration state director and Executive Director of the of the Fort Worth and Oklahoma City Urban Leagues, to serve as the League’s Washington Representative.Footnote 60
In contrast to the usual portrait of a direct action-focused civil rights movement that succumbed to institutionalization only after 1965, this discussion shows that Black civil rights organizations engaged simultaneously in institutional advocacy and extra-institutional protest prior to the Civil and VRAs of the mid-1960s. There was variation in their investment and experience with legislative lobbying, to be sure. SNCC, CORE, and SCLC were newcomers to Washington whose start-up lobbying operations were staffed by Beltway outsiders with limited policymaking background. On the other hand, organizations like the NAACP and NCNW had been at it for decades. By the time the Civil Rights Act campaign began in 1963, their Washington office personnel had ample experience and longstanding relationships with federal policymakers—not to mention with their peers in the labor, religious, and other allied advocacy sectors.
4. Washington representatives’ career experiences
The 138 individuals who served as Washington representatives in the Civil Rights Act lobbying campaign were a diverse crowd whose paths to the Leadership Conference’s weekly meetings varied considerably. They included 93 men and 45 women with ages ranging from as young as 20 (Ron Wilmore, an undergraduate college student who attended two Leadership Conference meetings on behalf of the Washington Human Rights Project) to as old as 73 (Sibyl E. Moses, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs’ legislative representative since 1945 and a frequent participant in the LCCR’s work). Yet within this wide range most were solidly of mid-to-late career age, as figure 1 suggests. About 60 percent (n = 70) of the 116 individuals whose birth years I could identify conclusively were aged 35-to-60 in 1963; in contrast, fewer than a fifth (n = 21) were under 30 years old.
Washington Representative Demographics.
4.1. Pathways to the civil rights act lobby
No two Washington representatives followed identical paths to the Civil Rights Act lobby. Nevertheless, a synoptic look at their experiential trajectories suggests that most can be sorted into three groups.
The first group of Washington representatives corresponds most closely to the conventional wisdom of a civil rights movement that did not yet have a firm foothold in institutional halls of power. These individuals, accounting for perhaps a quarter of the full Washington representatives list, came to the Civil Rights Act lobby by way of extra-institutional civil rights movement activism. A couple—Jerome Smith, who attended two Leadership Conference meetings for CORE, and James P. Breeden, an Episcopal priest based in Massachusetts who attended four Washington Representatives meetings during his visits to Washington—had been Freedom Riders in 1961. Their participation in institutional lobbying for the Civil Rights Act was sporadic and complemented ongoing extra-institutional civil rights protest work in 1963–1964, such as Breeden’s leadership of school boycotts to protest de facto segregation in Boston. Most in this group were students or recent graduates involved in civil rights activism on college campuses. Several were leaders of the Theological Students Vigil for Civil Rights, which coordinated an around-the-clock prayer vigil by seminary students outside the Capitol Building throughout the Senate filibuster of the Civil Rights Act. Others represented organizations such as the Washington Human Rights Project, DC Students for Civil Rights, and the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council that sought to harness students’ academic skills and biographical availability in support of civil rights legislation.
As this description suggests, the Washington representatives in this first group clustered at the younger end of the age spectrum presented in Figure 1. Most did not live in Washington and were at fewer than five Leadership Conference meetings. The meetings they did attend tended to be late in the Civil Rights Act campaign—that is, after H.R. 7152 had already been approved by the House—and so they were generally not involved in committee-stage efforts to lobby for strengthening amendments nor are they listed in the CQ report’s account of those who were involved in the push for House passage. By and large, they were not well connected to federal policymakers or experienced legislative lobbyists. Nor did most of them pursue institutional policy work after the Civil Rights Act campaign; rather, they returned to extra-institutional civil rights activism, completed their studies, and/or settled into a variety of non-political careers.
The second group of Washington representatives consists of Washington natives, civic activists, and clergy who came to the Civil Rights Act lobby through local community organizing and advocacy. Among others, it includes Geneva K. Valentine and Regina Chandler, local realtors who represented the National Association of Negro Business & Professional Women’s Clubs at LCCR Meetings; Philip R. Newell, an Episcopal priest who led an ecumenical ministry at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church and attended Washington representatives meetings on behalf of United Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Interracial Council; and Joy Simonson, a one-time civil servant and labor market analyst who took up social activism during a long childrearing hiatus from the paid workforce and participated in the Civil Rights Act lobby as part of her involvement with the Washington Home Rule Committee.
This second group comprised a relatively small set of Washington representatives, accounting for perhaps a fifth of the full list of 138. In contrast to the first group, its membership skewed older and female. Many were practiced in and comfortable with congressional lobbying, albeit more as an avocation or a resource in their toolkit for pursuing local community objectives than as a mainstay of their professional life. These Washington representatives were utility players who participated in the Civil Rights Act lobby in various ways, whether through direct lobbying of individual Members of Congress, facilitating citizen lobbying visits by out-of-town clergy and grassroots civil rights supporters, or filling gallery seats after the professional lobbyists’ work hours during the long Senate filibuster. While not quite consummate Beltway insiders, their involvement gives some lie to the notion that civil rights movement forces could or would not pursue institutional strategies for achieving their goals.
The third group, easily comprising more than half of the full Washington representatives list, poses an even greater challenge to the conventional view of the pre-VRA civil rights movement as an outsider force relegated to extra-institutional activism for lack of institutional access. These men and women came to the Civil Rights Act lobby in their capacity as full-time, salaried government relations personnel for national advocacy groups, labor unions, and professional associations; in other words, they lobbied professionally for organizations that invested some portion of their budget in salaried staff whose job descriptions included promoting their interests in the halls of government.
The vast majority of this third group had moved to Washington to assume inside-the-Beltway positions at some point prior to the Civil Rights Act campaign; the exceptions include a few DC natives who pursued Beltway careers and individuals who were not based in Washington but commuted frequently to lobby on their home organizations’ behalf. A majority—35 of the 57 for whom I could conclusively identify DC arrival dates—arrived in Washington before 1960, in some cases as early as the 1930s. Most others had been on the scene for at least a year or two before H.R. 7152 introduced. Only six relocated to Washington just in time for the Civil Rights Act campaign, but even most of these had been professionally involved in federal policymaking in some capacity prior to moving there. As far as I can tell, just one individual in this group—Jane O’Grady, who had been recently hired as a legislative representative for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers when she began attending Leadership Conference meetings in December 1963 and would go on to serve a decades-long career as a Washington-based labor lobbyist—was a true Beltway newcomer.
The Washington representatives in this third group were the mainstay of the Civil Rights Act lobby. It is their names that populate the CQ report’s list of Civil Rights Act lobbyists and, in addition to sheer numerical preponderance, they were the ones who attended Leadership Conference meetings most consistently, including in the critical early stages of H.R. 7152’s consideration. They account for all but a handful of individual sign-ins at the LCCR’s July 1963 meetings, where the coalition’s priorities for strengthening amendments were finalized and strategy for mobilizing grassroots pressure and leveraging friendly House members’ support for their incorporation into the bill was developed. As mentioned earlier, several of these Washington representatives were routinely included in top-level meetings with key lawmakers as the bill progressed, but many beyond this select few brought their experience and connections to bear on both direct lobbying and the design of LCCR-sponsored grassroots lobbying initiatives.Footnote 61 Moreover, many of them would continue to collaborate under the Leadership Conference aegis well after the Civil Rights Act’s passage. In addition to regrouping to reprise their 1963–64 routines when the VRA came before Congress in the spring of 1965, they were on hand for interim campaigns to coordinate advocacy for Civil Rights Act enforcement and rules reform at the start of the 89th Congress. Quite a few remained involved for years after the Civil and VRAs’ passage to develop a committee system within the Leadership Conference to monitor and advocate for their robust enforcement and to lobby for additional legislation.Footnote 62
4.2. Previous lobbying experience
Many of the men and women who attended LCCR meetings in 1963–64 had a good deal of prior experience as congressional lobbyists. Twenty-nine had registered as such in compliance with the Federal Regulation of Lobbying Act of 1946, including seven who were among the first registrants in 1947 and nine others who registered during the 1950s. But registration records alone understate the extent of the Washington representatives’ lobbying experience. They obviously do not account for pre-1947 experience. Furthermore, the loophole-ridden 1946 legislation left considerable leeway for organizations to determine that they or their Washington representatives were not “principally” involved in lobbying and opt out of registration.Footnote 63 Archived organizational records confirm that the question of whether and how to comply with the legislation was a matter of consternation for some LCCR-affiliated groups that worried about the implications of registration for their tax-exempt status.Footnote 64 While some did have their Washington representatives register immediately, others held off a few years or avoided registering altogether. Manually exploring individual career paths reveals even more extensive lobbying experience—both among those who had officially registered as lobbyists and within the Washington representatives list more broadly.
As noted earlier, NAACP Washington Bureau Director Clarence Mitchell, who chaired the Washington representatives meeting, had lobbied for the NAACP since 1946—that is, for 6 years prior to his initial lobbyist registration in 1952 and nearly two decades prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 campaign.Footnote 65 He was not unique in this regard; in fact, some twenty Washington representatives had at least a decade of continuous congressional lobbying experience in 1963. At least 17 others had lobbied continuously since the mid-to-late 1950s, and another 15 began lobbying in 1960 or 1961, and so would have had at least one full legislative session under their belts when the 88th Congress opened. Yet others—like CORE’s Marvin Rich, who had lobbied Congress on behalf of Teamsters local during the 1950s, and Ruth Kingman, who had lobbied Congress on behalf of interned Japanese Americans as Executive Secretary of the Pacific Coast Committee on American Principles and Fair Play during World War II—had occasional congressional lobbying experience during the 1940s or 1950s even if they did not pursue such work continuously in the lead-up to the Civil Rights Act campaign.
Practically across the board, Washington representatives’ pre-1963 lobbying work was on behalf of either the same organizations they worked for in 1963–64 or other organizations that comprised the Leadership Conference’s expanded coalition that year. That is, they were seasoned labor, religious, and public interest lobbyists who were accustomed to and skilled at advancing their home organizations’ interests in a political arena that that systematically favored their lavishly moneyed industrial and trade association counterparts. While a full accounting of their experiences and achievements is beyond the scope of this (and probably any) paper, three biographical blurbs serve as illustrations:
• John Edelman began his congressional lobbying career as a Pennsylvania-based hosiery workers union’s research director in 1926, nearly four decades before the Civil Rights Act campaign. He moved to Washington in 1939, where he worked for several government agencies prior to a 20-year stint as Washington office director for the Textile Workers Union of America. Among other accomplishments, he was instrumental in shaping New Deal-era public housing policy. He had recently retired from labor lobbying when the Civil Rights Act campaign got underway in 1963, but remained active in the federal policymaking scene and attended Leadership Conference meetings in his capacity as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Consumers League.
• Olya Margolin was hired as the National Council of Jewish Women’s (NCJW) first Washington representative in 1944, just over 19 years before the Civil Rights Act campaign got underway. In the late-wartime and early postwar context, her work included legislative lobbying on a variety of employment and consumer issues, as well as collaboration with the War and State Departments to help shape the UN charter and advocate for creation of the State of Israel. Margolin was also a regular participant in racial civil rights lobbying, initially through the National Council for a Permanent FEPC, which coordinated efforts to secure employment discrimination laws during the 1940s, and later alongside Clarence Mitchell and other LCCR affiliates’ lobbyists in support of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, filibuster reform, and other civil rights priorities.
• Mike Masaoka moved to Washington in 1945 to represent the west coast-based Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), which had not previously had any Washington presence. By the end of that decade, Reader’s Digest hailed him as “Washington’s Most Successful Lobbyist” for his postwar work on an array of laws to assist displaced Japanese Americans.Footnote 66 Masaoka was also instrumental in securing inclusion of a path to U.S. citizenship for Japanese immigrants in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. These early achievements established him as a savvy legislative advocate with an impressive beltway network and, soon after, he opened an independent lobbying and public relations firm (Mike M. Masaoka Consultants, later Masaoka & Associates, Inc.). While JACL remained its principal client into the 1960s, Masaoka’s expertise and clientele broadened to encompass a variety of domestic and international interests.
A number of Protestant church lobbyists—by many accounts an essential force in persuading Midwest and Mountain State representatives and senators to support the Civil Rights ActFootnote 67—were either themselves very longstanding participants in or inheritors of long traditions of church lobbying that had their roots in the Temperance and Prohibition movements, wartime advocacy for conscientious objector draft exemptions, and the peace movement.Footnote 68 These included Helen Lineweaver, a researcher for United Presbyterian Church since 1939; Olinda Roettger, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod Board of Public Relations’ Washington Secretary since 1948; Ed Snyder, a Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) lobbyist from 1955 to 1962 and subsequently FCNL’s Executive Secretary; and James A. Hamilton, Associate Director of the Washington Office of the National Council of Churches since 1958.
In addition to their individual insider knowhow and efficacy, many of the more experienced Washington representatives were well-accustomed to working together in pursuit of their home organizations’ shared legislative objectives. These collaborative relationships feature prominently in lobbyists’ own accounts of their careers. For example, Edelman’s memoir lists “enlarg[ing] the concept of coalition lobbying” as the first of “three constructive things” he achieved as a labor lobbyist in the wake of World War II. Several of the individuals he recalls in recounting his coordination efforts had since retired or moved on to other employment by 1963, but others—Margolin (NCJW), Biemiller (AFL), Evelyn Dubrow (International Ladies Garment Workers Union), and Mary Alice Baldinger (then of the ACLU; later executive director of the National Civil Liberties Clearinghouse)—were active participants in the Leadership Conference’s Civil Rights Act campaign.Footnote 69 Masaoka’s daily activity log and Margolin’s NCJW Washington Office files similarly attest to their cultivation of longstanding working relationships with many of these same individuals, as well as others who appear in the Civil Rights Act Washington representatives list.Footnote 70
The Leadership Conference itself grew out of a series of efforts to coordinate civil rights lobbying during the 1940s.Footnote 71 Though these early postwar coalitions (and the Leadership Conference itself) featured long organizational membership rosters to signal broad-based support for civil rights reform, their policy work was carried out by smaller cohorts of Washington representatives who were well acquainted with both each other and the federal policymaking scene. Within the Leadership Conference, this collaboration crystalized in 1957 when Clarence Mitchell convened a group of fifteen Washington representatives for weekly coordinating meetings in the months leading up to passage of the Civil Rights Act that was enacted that year. Most participants in this working group had retired or moved on to other employment by the mid-1960s, but five—Mitchell, Margolin, Snyder, Annalee Stewart (the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s legislative secretary since 1949), and Herman Edelsberg (Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Washington office director since 1948)—were still on hand for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 campaign.Footnote 72 Several others on the 1963–1964 Washington representatives list appear in archival records of subsequent coordinated lobbying activity, including unsuccessful campaigns to restore the 1957 Act’s excised Part III during the 1958 legislative session and secure legislation to restrict literacy tests for voting in 1962.
4.3. A revolving door
As the foregoing suggests, many of the men and women who attended the LCCR’s Washington representatives meetings in 1963–1964 had extensive experience as in-house organizational lobbyists. Some pursued this line of work directly out of college or law school, or transitioned to it from other roles within their home organizations. Others were recruited following employment in journalism, academia, or private legal practice. But of particular interest for purposes of this study are the approximately 25 Washington representatives who were “revolving door” lobbyists; that is, they either became government relations professionals after earlier career experiences in government service or moved back and forth between the government and government relations sectors over the course of their careers.Footnote 73
Relatively few Washington representatives had direct legislative experience through prior service as members of Congress or congressional staffers, though there are a handful who did. The only former member of Congress was AFL-CIO Legislative Director Andrew J. Biemiller, who had served two non-consecutive terms (1945–46 and 1949–50) as representative of Wisconsin’s 5th congressional district.Footnote 74 Several others had experience in congressional staff positions: ADL Washington Office Director Herman Edelsberg had been counsel to Senate Subcommittees on Foreign Trade and War Contracts during World War II; Roy Millenson had about a decade of experience on the staff of Jacob K. Javits (R-NY) in both the House and the Senate before becoming the American Jewish Committee’s Washington National Representative in 1959; Felix Putterman of the Jewish War Veterans had been an administrative assistant to Rep. John Foley (D-MD) from 1956 to 1961; and Violet Gunther, the Leadership Conference’s Washington office administrator, began her Washington career in 1940 as a legislative assistant to Rep. Frank Hook (D-MI) prior to becoming a lobbyist for ADA.
In contrast, quite a few Washington representatives had prior experience in federal government agencies. Some gained this experience only shortly before the Civil Rights Act campaign. For example, Jack Conway, who had been a Detroit-based organized labor official since the mid-1940s, served 2 years as a Kennedy administration appointee to the Housing and Home Finance Agency prior to becoming the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department’s executive director in March 1963. Morag Simchak, who attended LCCR meetings on behalf of the National Women’s Committee on Civil Rights,Footnote 75 began working as a legislative assistant in the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor in 1961 after some 15 years on the United Rubber Workers’ government relations staff. Most, however, served during the FDR or Truman administrations in New Deal, World War II, and early postwar agencies.
The FEPC, which was established in 1941 and existed for the duration of World War II, was a particularly important site for Civil Rights Act lobbyists’ early career development.Footnote 76 As noted earlier, NAACP Washington Bureau Director Clarence Mitchell began his Washington career as the FEPC’s Associate Director and soon became its Director of Field Operations. He assumed the latter position when its original incumbent, Will Maslow, left to become the American Jewish Congress’s General Counsel and Director of its new Commission on Law and Social Action—and, in these capacities, a key player in the LCCR’s early organizational development and legislative activity. Boris Shishkin, director of the AFL-CIO’s Civil Rights Department and a LCCR Executive Committee member from 1955 until midway through the Civil Rights Act campaign, had been a FEPC member for 3 years during his long tenure as an AFL economist. Bruce Hunt, an attorney who signed into LCCR meetings as a Washington Representative for the American Jewish Congress, had been a southern regional director and member of the FEPC’s Legal Division. Harry Kingman, who co-founded the Citizens Lobby for Freedom and Fair Play with his wife, Ruth, after moving to Washington at Clarence Mitchell’s behest in 1957, had been the FEPC’s West Coast Regional Director in 1943–45.Footnote 77
While the FEPC was an especially formative hub, Civil Rights Act lobbyists worked or consulted for a number of other New Deal, World War II, and postwar agencies, as well. A few were attorneys for the National Labor Relations Board—two (Maslow and Hunt) prior to their service at FEPC and a third (Ed Rovner of the International Union of Electrical Workers) during the 1950s after a brief stint at the War Stabilization Board. Besides Maslow and Hunt, at least three others were among the influx of young lawyers into Washington as the New Deal’s regulatory infrastructure took shape in the 1930s and 1940s. Herman Edelsberg, the ADL lobbyist who had also served as legal counsel to two Senate subcommittees, got his start in Washington in 1941 working for the Board of Economic Welfare and Office of Price Administration (OPA). His colleague, ADL Washington counsel David Brody, served several years in the Rural Electrification Administration. Joe Rauh, an ADA founder who collaborated with Clarence Mitchell at the helm of the Civil Rights Act lobby, came to Washington upon graduation from Harvard Law School in 1935 for a Supreme Court clerkship. Later that decade and into the 1940s, he worked with FDR’s “Brains Trust” attorneys to draft New Deal legislation and served as counsel to several regulatory agencies, including the Wage and Price Administration, the Office for Emergency Management, and the Lend-Lease Administration. Several organized labor lobbyists—Biemiller, Edelman, and Shishkin among them—were involved in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations’ economic management efforts, including both domestic agencies such as the Housing Authority, OPA, and the War Production Board and postwar initiatives to stimulate recovery abroad through the Marshall Plan’s Economic Cooperation Administration and State Department productivity projects in Europe and Japan. Several women who participated in the Civil Rights Act Lobby, too, had early career experiences in federal agencies. For example, Joy Simonson of the Washington Home Rule committee had been War Manpower Commission labor analyst during the early 1940s; Sherley Koteen, who represented the National Council of Jewish Women at several Leadership Conference meetings, had come to Washington in 1941 as a Works Progress Administration intern and subsequently worked for nearly a decade in the Civil Service Commission; and Frances Neely, a legislative assistant for the FCNL, had served as a Housing Agency economist during the early 1950s.
5. Discussion and conclusion
Though largely overlooked in popular and scholarly accounts of the civil rights movement, a vibrant lobbying sector facilitated the historic legislative achievements of the Second Reconstruction. As this study has shown, civil rights organizations that are better known for litigation strategies and protest leadership during the 1950s and 1960s simultaneously engaged in legislative lobbying. Their Washington representatives collaborated within a vast network of organizational lobbyists representing a variety of labor, religious, civic, and other interest groups. And while the Civil Rights Act lobby did include some newcomers to the legislative scene in 1963, it was led and well-populated by men and women who had years—even decades in some cases—of experience in federal policymaking circles.
Acknowledging this wealth of Beltway experience complicates traditional portrayals of the pre-VRA civil rights movement as an outsider force relegated to using only disruptive, extra-institutional tactics. To be sure, other markers of institutionalization had yet to materialize. Black officeholding was still very limited. There were only five Black members of the 88th Congress—just one more than there had been in the preceding several Congresses where initial “semi-successes” in civil rights legislation set the stage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 campaign.Footnote 78 To the extent that Black legislators facilitate lobbying by civil rights organizations,Footnote 79 their scarcity prior to implementation of the VRA of 1965 added to the challenges civil rights advocates faced in building support for their concerns in the halls of Congress. Southern Black citizens’ disenfranchisement and their ostensible representatives’ investment in sustaining Jim Crow likewise eliminated a conventional pressure point for enjoining congressional action. Nor were national policymakers—even many of those who were purportedly pro-civil rights—committed to prioritizing legislative civil rights reform, especially when it threatened to derail progress in other policy areas. In this context, direct-action protest tactics were essential for placing and keeping civil rights legislation on the agenda—and, as Kenneth Andrews and Sarah Gaby have shown, for bringing half-hearted executive branch officials around to sponsoring far-reaching reform.Footnote 80
But the civil rights movement’s role in the development of civil rights policy in the mid-1960s did not end with extra-institutional disruption. Once protest activity inspired policymakers to act in June 1963, tens of institutionally oriented advocates were on hand to shepherd H.R. 7152 through the legislative process.Footnote 81 As my prior research on the Leadership Conference’s coordination capacity has shown, these advocates’ work was sustained throughout the year it took from the bill’s introduction to its enactment, and they were multifaceted in their efforts to press for specific strengthening amendments and persuade ambivalent legislators not only to vote for the bill itself but to support its progress by signing discharge petitions, showing up for quorum calls, and otherwise protecting it from obstruction.Footnote 82 The present study’s focus on the qualifications of the advocates themselves—as opposed to the LCCR’s coordinating mechanisms—brings an additional dimension of the civil rights movement’s propensity and capacity for institutional action to the fore: Not only did the civil rights movement have an effective organizational vehicle for bridging the protest and policymaking spheres in 1963–64, but its principal organizations invested in lobbying personnel who collaborated to develop and implement the Civil Rights Act lobbying campaign within an extensive network of experienced government relations specialists.
These findings resonate with social movement scholarship that sees institutionalization as a strategic orientation that activists employ simultaneously with direct action protest. They also dovetail with Milkis and Tichenor’s characterization of the pre-VRA civil rights movement as one that could—and did—marshal “significant conventional political leverage” prior to the suffrage and office-holding breakthroughs that are traditionally thought of as prerequisites for institutionally embedded advocacy.Footnote 83 But whereas Milkis and Tichenor highlight emergency interventions by high-profile movement leaders to enjoin presidential action, this study’s findings shift the focus to routine lobbying by lesser-known men and women whose institutional experience and relationships enabled them to navigate the legislative process and sustain pressure on Congress throughout the year it took to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In turn, these findings highlight the need for closer attention to the civil rights movement’s simultaneous deployment of protest and lobbying strategies, as well as the impact of this combination of outsider and insider approaches—not only on the achievement of civil rights legislation per se, but on the contents of the civil rights laws that were enacted.
Finally, in addition to its contribution to research on the civil rights movement’s institutionalization, this article’s analysis sheds new light on the notion of a “long civil rights movement” that was seeded well before the high-profile protest events of the mid-1950s and 1960s.Footnote 84 Classic studies of the civil rights movement’s origins have established that indigenous organizing was underway in southern black communities for many years, setting the stage for robust mobilization during the civil rights movement’s heyday.Footnote 85 APD research, meanwhile, has highlighted various ways in which prewar and World War II-era developments primed the federal government for the momentous reforms of the 1960s.Footnote 86 In tracing the professional careers of the men and women who lobbied for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this paper shows that the civil rights movement’s lobbying arm was similarly incubated long prior to its contributions to the Second Reconstruction’s legislative achievements. While the impressive lobby the CQ report described in February 1964 was unprecedented, many of those who worked together that year to secure the Civil Rights Act’s passage had come to know one another, the vicissitudes of the legislative process, and the folkways of the Washington policy community through many years of congressional lobbying experience and early-career work in New Deal, wartime, and postwar administrative agencies.
These findings raise questions for future research. For example, to what extent and how did FDR- and Truman-era agency work shape civil rights lobbyists’ policy sensibilities and, in turn, their substantive interventions in the development and enforcement of legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964? While the present study’s resumé tracing does not afford insight into Washington representatives’ policy tastes, it stands to reason that prior agency experience would have had some impact on their work beyond insider relationship-building and system knowledge, especially as research in other contexts shows that biographical experiences, including career trajectories, can have substantive effects on policymaking behavior.Footnote 87 More generally, these findings should encourage APD research on interconnections between administrative and civil rights state development—and, especially, on the role personnel movement between the state and nongovernmental advocacy sectors played in their cross-pollination.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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