Special Message to the Congress Proposing Further Legislation To Strengthen Civil Rights

To the Congress of the United States:

Last year I came before the Congress in an hour of crisis to recommend new and powerful guarantees of the right to vote.

Americans faced again the ancient questions:

Who shall take part in the process of democracy?

Shall it be only those born with white skins?

If a man's color should not be the sole criterion for determining his right to vote, how shall we make sure that Negroes are not denied the ballot?

I asked the Congress, on that March night in 1965, to strike down all restrictions to voting in all elections--Federal, State and local--which have been used to deny Negroes the right to vote.

Less than five months after I spoke, the Congress perfected and passed our Voting Rights Act of 1965.

I said then that the challenge of voting discrimination had been nothing less than a test of our faith in democracy. Congress met that test. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 reaffirmed the equality of man and government by all the people.

The fruits of the Voting Rights Act and of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are already impressively apparent.

Discrimination in places of public accommodation-perhaps the most unbearable insult to Negro citizens--has been made unlawful. The mandate of that law has spread faster and more effectively than its most optimistic supporters believed possible.

Discrimination in employment is now illegal. Opportunities closed to Negroes in the past have begun to open.

The discriminatory use of federal funds has been prohibited. The effect of that prohibition--strengthened by new federal procedures--is now being felt in schools, hospitals, welfare programs and in many other areas once blighted by racial bias.

The Community Relations Service has helped to bring new understanding to areas where community tensions have threatened to disrupt peaceful progress. Now that the Service has been integrated with other civil rights facilities in the Department of Justice and is being enlarged, we expect it to be even more effective.

In the five states where voter discrimination was once most severe, Negro registration has increased by 50%. Voter registration by local officials and federal examiners appointed under the Act has exceeded 330,000.

At the time of the 1964 national election, less than 25% of the Negro citizens of voting age in those five states were registered to vote. We expect that by the time of the next elections in these states the figure will reach 50%. It is already over 40%.

This achievement serves to renew our faith in the ultimate triumph of a Government in which all free men can participate. It strengthens our resolve to extend the franchise to all who are eligible.

For a democracy cannot be fully realized, when in these five states more than a million eligible Negroes remain unregistered. The challenge to them--and to those in government and private life who labor with them for their just share in the electoral process--is as critically important as the legislative need to enact today's civil rights laws. The statutes now on the books have given Negro Americans the key to freedom. Now it must be used.

I

Once more this year I am asking the Congress to join in an attack on the discrimination that still afflicts our land.

Four times in nine years the representatives of the people have labored through days and nights--through weeks and months-toward the passage of civil rights legislation.

I was part of each of those efforts. I know the fatigue and the triumph that accompanied them. Thus I do not ask for new laws lightly.

Yet discriminatory racial practices still exist in many American communities. They deny the Negro his rights as a citizen. They must be ended.

I ask the Congress:

First, to reform our federal criminal statutes to provide Negroes and all who labor or speak for racial justice the protection of stronger and more effective criminal laws against interference with the exercise of long established rights.

Second, to establish detailed procedures of jury selection in federal courts so that discrimination may be banished--and to create forceful guarantees that state court juries also will be selected without discrimination of any kind.

Third, to broaden the Attorney General's authority to bring suit for the desegregation of schools and public facilities--enabling him to commit the government's legal resources where they are most critically needed.

Fourth, to declare a national policy against racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, and to create effective remedies against that discrimination in every part of America.

II

Perhaps the most evident threat to civil rights in 1966 is the danger that recently secured rights may be violently denied by a relatively few racial fanatics.

Citizens who honor the law and who tolerate orderly change--a majority in every part of the country--have been shocked by attacks on innocent men and women who sought no more than justice for all Americans.

The effect of that violence extends far beyond individual victims. Every assault or murder that goes unpunished reinforces the legacy of violence--the knowledge that it is dangerous for a Negro to assert his rights, or even for others to stand up for those rights.

Our federal system assumes that local law enforcement will extend protection to all. Yet the speed with which the fanatics strike has made the work of prevention extremely difficult--even for zealous local police authorities. In some areas, local authorities have been slow or even unwilling to act against the most brazen violence.

So it is that new measures are essential if rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution to every citizen are to be protected.

Laws enacted a century ago to contain racial terror and Klan violence are now clearly inadequate. One of the most important of these statutes requires proof not simply of an act violating a person's civil rights. It also requires the often-difficult showing of specific intent to do so and proof of a conspiracy.

Further, no matter how brutal the crime and no matter what the motive of the criminal, it is possible that the courts will conclude that some degree of involvement by local officials may well be required by these ancient statutes.

And, finally, though offenses may range from threats to murders, only a single set of penalties is provided, and those may be inadequate to suit the gravity of the crime.

Law enforcement authority so restricted cannot be effective. And if that authority is lacking, so is justice. What gain is there for either conscience or country if we proudly affirm human rights and then permit those rights to be swept aside by lawless fanatics?

Accordingly, today I propose the enactment of legislation to make our authority against civil rights violence clear and sure. The legislation I offer is designed to prohibit any interference with the exercise of fundamental rights by threats or force, by any person--whether as an individual or in a group and whether privately or officially.

The measure enumerates these rights, including voting, education, housing, employment, jury service, and travel. And it provides for graduated penalties, permitting our courts to make appropriate responses to differing degrees of interference or intimidation.

Further, we shall ask for an expansion of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, specifically to permit it to increase its effective role in the enforcement of civil rights laws.

At times in the recent past, as many as one-third of the Bureau's agents have been assigned to the investigation of civil rights matters. The number of civil rights complaints the Bureau investigated in the last fiscal year was 143 percent more than the figure for 1961. These responsibilities place a heavy burden on the Bureau's field staff.

On the advice of Attorney General Katzenbach and FBI Director Hoover, I recommend that Congress authorize an appropriation providing for another 100 FBI agents and additional supporting personnel--to strengthen our capacity to deal with civil rights crimes.

In every city and town and rural community, law-abiding men and women must look for protection primarily to improved local law enforcement. But the federal government has its responsibilities to see that federal rights are secured and their transgressors brought to justice.

We shall meet these responsibilities.

III

The fabric of law enforcement extends from the police patrol to trial and correction. Racial discrimination in any part of this fabric can spoil the rest.

It is necessary that we improve our investigative resources. It is necessary that we strengthen federal authority against interference with basic rights and impose meaningful sanctions on those who violate them.

Yet if we go only this far--and permit racial discrimination to corrupt the selection. on juries--we shall leave at the center of our legal system a potential for injustice that mocks our hopes for a great and just society.

Trial by a freely selected jury of one's peers is not a new right. It has its roots in the Magna Carta. Blackstone described it as the "grand bulwark" of man's liberties.

Yet we have been reminded in recent months that in many areas the exclusion of minority groups from jury service remains systematic and complete.

Denying jury service to any group deprives it of one of the oldest and most precious privileges and duties of free men. It is not only the excluded group which suffers. Courts are denied the justice that flows from impartial juries selected from a cross section of the community. The people's confidence in justice is eroded.

Jury discrimination takes many forms, open and subtle, intentional and inadvertent:

--Many jury officials may compile their basic list of potential jurors from membership lists, clubs and civic organizations that tend to exclude minority groups.

--Some state laws require jury officials to make highly subjective judgments of a juror's "integrity, good character and sound judgment."

--Even when the list of qualified jurors has been fairly compiled, officials in many areas are still free to exclude a particular class of citizens arbitrarily when they make assignments to particular juries.

None of today's civil rights laws give sufficient protection against these practices.

An 1875 statute makes it a Federal crime for officials in either Federal or State courts to exclude jurors because of their race. But criminal sanctions operate only upon individuals-not upon an entire system.

What is required is not the punishment of individuals. It is the restoration of integrity in the system itself.

The time has come for new legislation redeeming the promise made to every American: a fair trial by a jury of his peers.

I recommend legislation stating explicitly for all our courts that the right to serve on grand or petit juries shall not be denied on the basis of race or color, religion, sex, national origin, or economic status.

For Federal courts, the legislation will carefully prescribe each step of the jury selection process.

In state courts, the Attorney General and private citizens will be empowered to sue wherever discrimination in jury selection exists. Federal courts will have broad authority to grant relief.

IV

Ten years after the Supreme Court of the United States declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, the Congress found it necessary to give new force to the Court's decision.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided that all programs receiving Federal financial assistance--including public education-must be administered on a non-discriminatory basis. The Act called for withdrawal of funds where discrimination remained. It also gave the Attorney General authority to file and intervene in suits to desegregate schools.

Enforcement of the 1964 Act has brought more progress in real integration in one year than in all the preceding nine years.

While there are still far too few Negro children in desegregated classrooms, the number has multiplied several times. It must and will grow substantially again in the fall.

In providing financial assistance, this Administration has insisted on an end to discrimination. But whether or not our assistance is accepted, the requirements of the Constitution must still be met. Segregated schools are still illegal. The law of the land must be and will be upheld.

Thus the Department of Justice has insisted, in more than 40 school suits under the 1964 Act, that whether or not school boards receive financial assistance, desegregation must proceed.

Despite marked gains of the last two years, the fact remains that today--twelve years after the Supreme Court's decision on segregation in schools--only one in thirteen Negro school children in the South attends classes with white children.

Two amendments to the 1964 Act are needed to strengthen the campaign against racial discrimination in the schools.

One would enlarge the Attorney General's initiative under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

That Act authorized the Attorney General to file suits to help communities where severe local pressure and the poverty of aggrieved citizens made private suits impossible. Yet this authorization was qualified by the requirement that the Attorney General first receive a complaint from a parent unable to sue on his own before the government's legal resources could be brought to bear.

Although the Attorney General can move directly against discrimination in voting, in employment or in public accommodations, with respect to school discrimination he must first receive a complaint before acting. In communities where the atmosphere of intimidation and ignorance of the law's protection is most severe, the filing of a complaint is most unlikely.

Thus where the need of the Attorney General's intervention is the greatest, his help is least likely to become available.

Accordingly, I propose that the Act be amended to allow the Attorney General to file suit directly, without waiting for a complaint, against discrimination in public schools or public facilities.

The second amendment would give the Attorney General the tools to deal with interference against voluntary school desegregation--the same tools that he now has when school desegregation comes under a court order.

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 included provisions to protect court-ordered desegregation from interference. These provisions were reasonably adequate when the desegregation of difficult areas was begun under court order.

But today, principally because of wide acceptance of the Office of Education's desegregation standards, many school districts are desegregating for the first time without the direct compulsion of court orders.

This is a hopeful sign--and one that imposes a new obligation on the government. We must provide adequate assurances against interference to parents and children eager to desegregate schools, and to people siding with and encouraging them in the exercise of their rights.

The criminal legislation I have already described dealing with intimidation would apply to any violent obstruction of school desegregation. But I also recommend civil injunctive procedures against violence, threats of violence or any other interference with school desegregation.

The day has long since passed when problems of race in America could be identified with only one section of the country. The social and economic toll exacted by discrimination in employment, for example, is felt in all sections.

The Federal government has worked strenuously to bring leadership to a national effort against such discrimination through the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, Plans for Progress with industry, and establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Other specific legislative steps can now be taken to bolster this effort. The first year's experience of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission suggests that it should be endowed with enforcement power and that its coverage should be broadened.

Proposals focussing on these purposes are already before the Congress. l urge that these needs be given the fullest legislative consideration, and that the Senate complete action on the Bill passed by the House of Representatives yesterday.

Freedom from discrimination is not enough. There must be freedom from the disadvantage that 200 years of discrimination helped create. There must be freedom of opportunity, freedom to work.

We look to those at the White House Civil Rights Conference this June and to private employers across America to help us find new ways to match the Nation's promise of Civil Rights by the fact of civil results--in full and equal employment opportunity.

VI

We undertake to expand and reform the civil rights laws this year with the clear understanding that legal reforms can be counted only a small part of a national program for the Negro American.

We know that the more important challenges of racial inequality today are emphatically national.

Negro ghettos indict our cities North and South, from coast to coast. Hope of cutting back the severe unemployment rate among Negroes is tied directly to the expansion of our national economy. And the ultimate need in human terms--of a more generous idea of brotherhood and a more responsible conception of equality--are part of the unfinished business in every state.

The time has passed when we could realistically deal effectively with racial problems by the passage of what could be strictly defined as civil rights laws.

In fact the most disturbing current measures of the impact of discrimination are economic facts that cover the entire nation:

--Non-white Americans constitute only 11 percent of the national labor force, but they make up 20 percent of the unemployed. They take home less than 7 percent of the total personal income of all Americans.

--One-fifth of the entire population lives in poverty. One-half of non-white Americans live in poverty.

--In junior high schools across the country, 12 percent of white children are in school grades below their age level-compared to 30 percent of Negro children.

Poor housing, unemployment and poverty, while they affect racial minorities particularly, will not be defeated by new civil rights laws. Thus, the programs that Congress has adopted go far beyond the vindication of civil rights.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 will enrich the quality of our public schools.

The Housing Act of 1965 will provide part of the decent low and middle-income housing our cities desperately need. Beyond this, adoption of the Demonstration Cities Act this year will launch a major attack on the blight of urban ghettos.

Amendments to the Manpower Development and Training Act adopted in 1965 will help unskilled Negroes, as well as whites, prepare for a role in the economies of today and tomorrow.

The Economic Opportunity Act of 1965--the Anti-Poverty Act--is reaching out with new hope for the disadvantaged--for those pre-school children, teenagers, and older men and women who have never before had cause to hope.

We do not call any of these "civil rights programs." Nevertheless, they are crucial, and perhaps decisive elements in the Negro American's long struggle for a fair chance in life.

It is self-evident that the problems we are struggling with form a complicated chain of discrimination and lost opportunities. Employment is often dependent on education, education on neighborhood schools and housing, housing on income, and income on employment. We have learned by now the folly of looking for any single crucial link in the chain that binds the ghetto.

All the links--poverty, lack of education, underemployment and now discrimination in housing--must be attacked together. If we are to include the Negro in our society, we must do more than give him the education he needs to obtain a job and a fair chance for useful work.

We must give the Negro the right to live in freedom among his fellow Americans.

I ask the Congress to enact the first effective federal law against discrimination in the sale and rental of housing.

The time has come for the Congress to declare resoundingly that discrimination in housing and all the evils it breeds are a denial of justice and a threat to the development of our growing urban areas.

The time has come to combat unreasoning restrictions on any family's freedom to live in the home and the neighborhood of its choice.

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the first statute enacted by the Congress in an attempt to deal with discrimination in housing. It reads:

"All citizens of the United States shall have the same right, in every State and territory, as is enjoyed by white citizens thereof to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property."

For 100 years this law has reflected an ideal favoring equality of housing opportunity. Acting under this statute and the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has invalidated state and local laws prohibiting the sale of houses to Negroes. It has prohibited the enforcement of racially restrictive covenants. It has struck down state legislation imposing undue burdens upon minority groups with respect to real estate transactions.

There is nothing novel about the Congressional concern with housing that I now ask you to expand. Programs enacted by Congress have, for more than three decades, stimulated the development of private housing, and directly financed hundreds of thousands of public housing units.

The historic Housing Act of 1949 proclaimed a national goal for the first time: "a decent home and suitable living environment for every American family."

The great boom in housing construction since the Second World War is, in large part, attributable to Congressional action to carry out this objective.

Yet not enough has been done to guarantee that all Americans shall benefit from the expanding housing market Congress has made possible.

Executive Order No. 11063, signed by President Kennedy on November 20, 1962, prohibited housing discrimination where Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration insurance programs are involved. That Executive Order clearly expressed the commitment of the executive branch to the battle against housing discrimination.

But that Order, and all the amendments that could validly be added to it, are inevitably restricted to those elements of the housing problem which are under direct executive authority.

Our responsibility is to deal with discrimination directly at the point of sale or refusal, as well as indirectly through financing. Our need is to reach discrimination practiced by financial institutions operating outside the FHA and VA insurance programs, and not otherwise regulated by the government.

Our task is to end discrimination in all housing, old and new--not simply in the new housing covered by the Executive Order.

I propose legislation that is constitutional in design, comprehensive in scope and firm in enforcement. It will cover the sale, rental and financing of all dwelling units. It will prohibit discrimination, on either racial or religious grounds, by owners, brokers and lending corporations in their housing commitments.

Under this legislation, private individuals could sue in either state or federal courts to block discrimination.

The Attorney General would be empowered to sue directly for appropriate relief, wherever he has reasonable cause to believe that a pattern of discrimination exists.

The legislation would direct the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to make factual studies, and to give technical assistance to the Community Relations Service and all other public and private organizations working to eliminate discriminatory housing patterns.

The bill I am submitting to the Congress this year would leave in effect the many state laws that have preceded the Federal government in the field of fair housing. We would hope to enact a law that will not only open the fight against discrimination where there are no state laws against it, but also strengthen the enforcement efforts of states which have fair housing programs now.

The ghettos of our major cities--North and South, from coast to coast--represent fully as severe a denial of freedom and the fruits of American citizenship as more obvious injustices. As long as the color of a man's skin determines his choice of housing, no investment in the physical rebuilding of our cities will free the men and women living there.

The fair housing law I propose this year is an essential part of our attempt to rejuvenate and liberate America's growing urban areas--and more importantly, to expand the liberty of all the people living in them.

A nation that aspires to greatness cannot be a divided nation--with whites and Negroes entrenched behind barriers of mutual suspicion and fear. It cannot tolerate:

--overcrowded ghetto schools, producing new thousands of ill-trained citizens for whom the whole community must be responsible.

--rising health hazards and crime rates

in the ghettos' ugly streets and homes.

--the failure of expensive social programs, such as urban renewal, where there is no way out and up for Negro residents.

The truly insufferable cost of imprisoning the Negro in the slums is borne by our national conscience.

When we restrict the Negro's freedom, inescapably we restrict a part of our own.

Negro Americans comprise 22% of the enlisted men in our Army combat units in Vietnam--and 22% Of those who have lost their lives in battle there. We fall victim to a profound hypocrisy when we say that they cannot buy or rent dwellings among citizens they fight to save.

VII

No civil rights act, however historic, will be final. We would look in vain for one definitive solution to an injustice as old as the nation itself--an injustice that leaves no section of the country and no level of American life unstained. This Administration has pledged that as long as racial discrimination denies opportunity and equal rights in America, we will honor our Constitutional and moral responsibility to restore the balance of justice.

Yet no amount of legislation, no degree of commitment on the part of the national government, can by itself bring equal opportunity and achievement to Negro Americans. It must be joined by a massive effort on the part of the States and local governments, of industry, and of all citizens, white and Negro.

Hundreds of thousands of Negro Americans in every part of the country are making that effort now. They know that the responsibilities of citizenship follow inevitably from the achievement of civil rights and economic opportunity.

They know that an obligation lies before them, to take full advantage of the improved education and training that is now becoming available to them--in the public schools, in vocational training, in the universities.

They know that it is their task to lead others in the quest for achievement and social justice--to inspire them with confidence, with perseverance, with the mutual forbearance on which our democracy depends.

VIII

We are engaged in a great adventure--as great as that of the last century, when our fathers marched to the western frontier. Our frontier today is of human beings, not of land.

If we are able to open that frontier, to free each child to become the best that is in him to become, our reward both spiritual and material--will exceed any that we gained a century ago through territorial expansion.

Whether we shall succeed is an issue that rests in the heart of every American. It rests in the determination of Negro Americans to use the opportunities for orderly progress that are now becoming--at last--a reality in their lives. It rests in our common willingness to expand those opportunities in the years ahead.

That issue can and will be decided in only one way. For we have not come this far to fail within sight of our goal.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON

The White House

April 28, 1966