By Regi Taylor
“Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our nation whole. Let us hasten that day when our unmeasured strength and our unbounded spirit will be free to do the great works ordained for this nation by the just and wise God who is the Father of us all.”
President Lyndon Baines Johnson upon signing the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964
As the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act is recognized on July 2, 2024, a cursory web search of the occasion will likely yield a paragraph that identifies Martin Luther King Jr and former New Jersey congressman, Peter Rodino, as present when LBJ signed the legislation on Capitol Hill. Over time the history of who persisted to make the landmark act a reality have become increasingly obscure.
Although Martin Luther King Jr was pivotal to the passage of the legislation, there was a coterie of stalwart, African American men who worked in concert to lobby the president, the congress, the media, organized religion, labor unions, and the public at-large against daunting opposition intent on upholding a legal racial hierarchy of oppression and exploitation developed over a century of Jim Crow and two-and-a-half centuries of slavery.
MLK was one of nine civil rights leaders who were instrumental to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, five of whom were present to witness President Johnson sign it. These men were an eclectic bunch from varying backgrounds, ages, and experiences who pursued this legislation with what Dr. King would describe as “the fierce urgency of now.” Here’s some little-known facts about their histories:
Martin Luther King Jr delivered his I Have A Dream speech ten months before he joined President Johnson to witness the Act’s signing. He was 35 years old. Although Martin was highly educated, reared in middle class circumstances, like most African Americans he descended from slavery. He is the 4th generation of ministers in his family. His great-grandfather, Willis Williams, was a slave on a plantation in Penfield, Greene County, Georgia, owned by William Nelson Williams, where began preaching.
Roy Wilkins was born in August 1901, in St. Louis and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he attended an integrated high school and graduated from the University of Minnesota. Wilkins succeeded W. E. B. Du Bois as The Crisis editor, the NAACP’s magazine. He led the NAACP for 22 years, 1955 to 1977. He was 40 years old when he attended the Civil Rights Act signing in 1964.
Whitney M. Young Jr was born in Kentucky in July 31, 1921. His dad was the president of the Lincoln Institute, a Black boarding school, then president of the Kentucky Negro Educational Association. His mom, Laura, was a teacher who later served as the first female postmistress in Kentucky, appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940.
Young earned a BS in social work from Kentucky State University, and was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, where he served as the vice president, and senior class president. During World War II, he was trained in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He led the National Urban League from 1961 to 1971 and was 43 years old when he joined LBJ for the Civil Rights Act signing.
- Phillip Randolph was deemed to be the “most dangerous Negro in America” by Alexander Mitchell Palmer, the U.S. Attorney General under Woodrow Wilson. Randolph is responsible for far more achievements in the civil rights space than he is credited for. He further inspired Martin Luther King Jr’s activism when he gave a speech at Morehouse College during MLK’s freshman year in 1945.
- Philip Randolph, perhaps, does not get the props he deserves in comparison to some of his higher profile colleagues like MLK. Randolph was a prodigious achiever for civil and labor rights on behalf of Black folk, while at the same time a political and social enigma. A. Philip had a reputation as both a radical and a statesman, a “rabblerouser” and a negotiator.
Becoming a Harlemite in 1911, when as a child he moved from Jacksonville, Florida with his parents, an ordained minister and a seamstress, during the Great Migration of African Americans fleeing the South from Jim Crow. Mr. Randolph’s political power accrued from his founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters labor union, with more than 15,000 members at its height in the 1940s.
On August 10, 1918, A. Philip Randolph was arrested for distributing copies of his magazine, The Messenger, and charged with treason for violating the Espionage Act due to encouraging Black men not to fight in World War I because of their treatment under Jim Crow.
Mr. Randolph had vocal public disputes with Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. Du Bois over their differences in philosophies and tactics in the furtherance of Black liberation. He felt that Garvey should take a stand in America instead of repatriating to Africa, and that Booker T. and Du Bois were too acquiescent to whites regarding integration.
Likewise, he had no fear to confront U.S. presidents over civil rights policy either, forcing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with threats of mass demonstrations, to desegregate the federal government. Randolph muscled President Harry Truman to desegregate the U.S. military, warning him that Black people would not fight in his war unless he did.
It is little known fact that A. Philip Randolph originated the idea, strategized the logistics, assembled the participants, and was the principal spokesman for the1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Martin Luther King Jr delivered his iconic, I Have A Dream speech. It is not clear whether Randolph attended the Civil Rights bill signing in 1964.
Bayard Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1912, the ninth of twelve children to Florence Rustin and Archie Hopkins, but raised by his maternal grandparents, Julia (Davis) and Janifer Rustin, local well-to-do caterers. Rustin’s grandmother was a member of the NAACP and frequently welcomed leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson in her home, influencing Bayard early in life to campaign racial discrimination.
In 1932, Rustin attended Wilberforce College, an HBCU in Ohio, actively engaging in various organizations on campus, then later continued at Cheyney State Teachers College. In 1937, Bayard Rustin moved to Harlem. He became active in the Young Communists League at City College of New York, enticed by their vocal opposition to racial injustice.
He was musically talented, participating in a short-lived Broadway production, then becoming a regular performer in Greenwich Village’s Café Society nightclub. In 1941, he met and befriended A. Philip Randolph, after joining the Socialist Party.
Bayard became Randolph’s chief lieutenant, and the main point man in the arrangement of the March on Washington under his direction. He also worked closely with A. Philip in cooperation with other Black leaders and the White House to develop the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is not clear whether he attended the signing ceremony on Capitol Hill.
James Farmer was born in Marshall, Texas, in 1920 to James L. Farmer Sr. and Pearl Houston, both educators. His dad was a professor at Wiley College, an HBCU, and a Methodist minister with a theology Ph.D. from Boston University. His mom was a graduate of Bethune-Cookman Institute and a homemaker.
Farmer was a highly intelligent child. In 1934, at 14 years old, he was admitted as a freshman at Wiley College, where his father taught, joining the debate team. When he was 21, James was invited to the White House by first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, to speak with President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of a small group of students. James earned a B.S. degree from Wiley College in 1938, and in 1941, a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Howard University School of Religion. He sat out World War II as a conscientious objector.
In 1942, James Farmer co-founded the Congress Of Racial Equality, C.O.R.E., along with George Houser, a white Methodist minister and civil rights activist, and Bernice Fisher, a white civil rights activist and union organizer in Chicago.
Farmer, who also worked with the NAACP, coined the phrase, Freedom Rides, and was active in civil disobedience by testing anti-discrimination laws in the deep South by organizing interracial bus trips into states that continued illegally to uphold Jim Crow, targeting Greyhound and Trailways bus companies. In 1961, James was arrested on a Freedom Ride in Jackson, Mississippi.
In 1963, James Farmer narrowly escaped death when Louisiana state troopers conducted a door-to-door search for him for staging a protest. A quick-thinking funeral director had him pose as a corpse in a hearse that got him out of town using back roads. He was later arrested for disturbing the peace.
Farmer worked closely with other prominent civil rights organizations in the lead up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was present when President Johnson signed it July 2nd.
John Lewis was the baby of the bunch among civil rights leaders during the height of the struggle in the 1950’s and ‘60’s. He was born February 21,1940 in Troy, Alabama, the third of ten children to sharecroppers Willie Mae and Eddie Lewis.
Lewis heard Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio when he was 15 years old, the same year he preached his first public sermon. He began to closely follow King’s activities, including the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. Two years later, at 17, John met Rosa Parks, and a year later met Dr. King for the first time.
He was involved in the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, participated in the Freedom Rides, and co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, where he was chairman from 1963 to 1966. SNCC was one of the “Big Six” civil rights groups that organized the 1963 March on Washington.
In 1965, John Lewis led the first of three Selma to Montgomery, Alabama protest marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge where, on one occasion which became known as Bloody Sunday, state troopers and local police attacked Lewis and the other marchers, fracturing Lewis’ skull and nearly killing him.
Lewis’ participation was critical to the evolution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and he was present at the signing ceremony with his fellow activists. He went on to become a congressman representing Atlanta where he served from 1988 to 2018.
Clarence Mitchell Jr (full disclosure: Mitchell was a family friend whose backyard was adjacent to my family’s backyard when I was a young child) was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1911 to working poor parents who struggled to provide decent clothes for him to attend school. During his elementary school years, he was taught by the mother of his friend, Thurgood Marshall.
Clarence was an exceptional student who worked his way through Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, becoming a writer at the Baltimore Afro-American Newspaper, before returning to school at the University of Maryland School of Law school where he graduated.
MLK was one of nine civil rights leaders who were instrumental to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, five of whom were present to witness President Johnson sign it. These men were an eclectic bunch from varying backgrounds, ages, and experiences who pursued this legislation with what Dr. King would describe as “the fierce urgency of now.” Here’s some little-known facts about their histories:
Adam Clayton Powell Jr was the only son of a prominent pastor who stewarded the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. When Adam followed his dad into the ministry and inherited his father’s church in 1937 the congregation had grown to over 13,000 members.
Rev. Powell was the first African American member of congress elected from New York State where he served for 24 years after gaining tremendous power as a civic and political activist in Harlem.
Powell rose to become chairman of the House Ways and Means committee where he got major legislation passed that empowered Black people and became a personal confidante and collaborator of President Lyndon Johnson. Congressman Powell was integral to the development and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but did not attend the signing due to his attendance at the International Labor Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.
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