A rare survival critical to the passing of the Civil Rights Act through Congress. Slip bills were printed in limited numbers for use within Congress and are rarely seen in commerce. This bill in particular proved important in the Kennedy government’s legal strategy and the passing of the Act.
Martin Luther King Jr.‘s Birmingham campaign in the spring of 1963 proved a watershed moment in the civil rights movement, leading directly to President John F. Kennedy’s changing position on the issue. In a televised address on June 11, 1963, the President announced the urgent need for legislation.
A week later, Kennedy sent his civil rights bill to Congress, calling for the enforcement of voting rights, equal accommodations in public facilities, provisions for the Attorney General to initiate school desegregation suits, new programs to ensure fair employment practices such as support of a Fair Employment Practice Committee, the establishment of a Community Relations Service, and the granting of authority to the federal government to withhold funds from programs and activities in which discrimination had occurred.
Senate Majority leader Mike Mansfield (D, Montana) immediately took on Kennedy’s proposal and on June 19 introduced it as three bills within the Senate. The first, S. 1731, comprising the exact text of the administration’s proposal, was read twice and referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The second, S. 1732 [i.e. the present printing], included only the second article of the administration’s proposal, i.e. the section regarding discrimination in public accommodations, which was read twice and referred to the Senate Commerce Committee. The final bill, S. 1750, containing the text of S. 1731 but without the text of S. 1732, was likewise read and referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Importantly, bill S.1732 was to be cited as the “Interstate Public Accommodations Act of 1963” rather than the Civil Rights Act. One might assume the civil rights of non-white citizens might have been protected by the Thirteenth amendment, but its scope was, in fact, quite narrow. “What the newly freed slaves gained by way of the positive right to make and enforce contracts, they lost by way of the negative implication that others could refuse to enter into contracts with them. Civil rights were a two-edged sword that did not guarantee social equality” (Rutherglen, 1557). Indeed, decisions from the Warren Court proved that “Congress could accomplish under the Commerce Clause what it could not under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments” (ibid, 1553) As such, the Attorney General sought to minimize the role of the Thirteenth Amendment, instead favouring the Commerce Clause which “was far superior to the former because of the freedom it gave Congress to legislate pragmatically and incrementally, without the risk of contravening established judicial precedent” (ibid, 1562).
Indeed, it was this bill (S.1732) which became the “key document making the case for this strategy … and served as the basis for testimony by the Attorney General in Senate hearings on a predecessor to the 1964 Act“ (ibid). It focuses specifically on allowing universal access to goods and services: Section 2 states: “The American people have become increasingly mobile during the last generation and millions of American citizens travel each year from State to State by rail, air, bus, automobile, and other means. A substantial number of such travelers are members of minority racial and religious groups. These citizens, particularly Negroes, are subjected in many places to discrimination and segregation, and they are frequently unable to obtain the goods and services available to other interstate travelers.”
This allowed for a shift in the debate where both civil rights and economic rights were seen as integral to freedom of contract and thus the basis of equal opportunity.
The Judiciary Committee held hearings on S. 1731 from July to September 1963, and made some amendments, but neither S.1731 nor S.1750 were ever reported out of committee. The Senate Commerce Committee held their hearings on S. 1732 from July to August 1963, and reported the bill out of committee with various amendments on February 10, 1964. But with the House version of the Civil Rights Act (H.R. 7152) proceeding through its process, the Senate chose to wait for its passage to consider amending that bill before taking up its own.
The present June 19, 1963, slip bill printing of the Senate bill respecting discrimination in public accommodations was among the earliest Congressional drafts of what would become the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Not catalogued separately on OCLC.
Rutherglen, G., “The Thirteenth Amendment, the Power of Congress, and the Shifting Sources of Civil Rights Law” in Columbia Law Review, Vol. 112, No. 7 (November, 2012), pp.1551-1584.
