At 75, Our Work Continues
This year, we mark the 75th anniversary of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the nation’s oldest, largest, and most diverse civil and human rights coalition. Our coalition stands as an exemplar of what the United States should be — a multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multireligious country in which we see our fates as linked together and with a government that works for the good of all.
Today, that vision is threatened by a national agenda by the new administration and Congress, and a tone and tenor in our civic discourse, which tear at the very fabric of what has made America so strong for so long. But as our history demonstrates, while governments may change, our values do not — and the coalition will not back down in the face of these threats. Through our 75 years, what has remained constant is the common purpose that is our coalition’s inheritance and living legacy that binds us together.
In 1950, the nation was slowly beginning to pay attention to the pervasive patterns of discrimination in all aspects of American life, facilitated by codes and statutes in the South and customs and indifference in the North. The formation of The Leadership Conference was an outgrowth of this changing national post-war mood. In January 1950, the NAACP and Roy Wilkins, joined by Arnold Aronson, program director of the National Community Relations Advisory Council (a coalition of major Jewish organizations), called more than 4,000 delegates to Washington to take part in the National Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization.
For three days, delegates urged Congress to pass civil rights legislation. Though every bill challenging the grip of white supremacy died on the Senate floor, the organizers believed they had too much momentum to turn around — and so created the beginnings of the Leadership Conference coalition.
This mobilization was described in a press report as the greatest mass lobby in terms of numbers and geographical distribution that had ever come to Washington on behalf of any legislation. While the Emergency Mobilization was originally intended to be a one-time effort, the enthusiastic response of the national organizations that participated in it, as well as the favorable publicity surrounding the event, encouraged civil rights leaders to keep the momentum going. Merging two existing coalitions — the National Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization, led by Roy Wilkins, and the National Council for a Permanent FEPC (Fair Employment Practices Commission), led by A. Philip Randolph, Arnold Aronson called for another meeting in Washington, DC — a “Leadership Conference on Civil Rights,” which became the name, commonly referred to as the LCCR, under which the national coalition operated from then on.
The national civil rights, labor, religious, and civic groups that participated in the now-merged coalition recognized the need for one coalition that would be able to deal on a continuing basis with the whole range of civil rights issues rather than with a single one. Their purpose was to achieve together what they could not accomplish alone — the enactment of laws that would break down the walls of segregation and discrimination and win for millions of Americans their full rights of citizenship.
For its first 13 years, LCCR was housed in a desk drawer and file cabinet in Arnold Aronson’s NYC office. In 1963, our founders began taking steps to open a Washington office to lobby on the new civil rights bill President John F. Kennedy had sent to Congress and had enlisted civil rights leaders to support. Though the bill still fell far short of what LCCR considered to be essential, Roy Wilkins invited current and potential members of LCCR to meet for a strategy session on July 2, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. announced that A. Philip Randolph had called for a March on Washington. Randolph would chair the event, with Bayard Rustin as his deputy. Rustin would go on to be the first chair of LCCR’s Executive Committee.
Working out of a few rooms in the Mills building on 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue that were leased by Walter Reuther of the AFL-CIO, LCCR’s team of seasoned Washington lobbyists kicked off the legislative campaign for what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Heading the team were Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. (LCCR’s general counsel) and Clarence Mitchell (LCCR’s legislative chairman and director of the NAACP’s Washington office). Although Arnold Aronson continued to exercise oversight over the direction of LCCR operations, a Washington-based director — Marvin Caplan — was hired to run day-to-day operations.
As Caplan described in his memoir “Farther Along: A Civil Rights Memoir,” hundreds of LCCR representatives took turns sitting in the House spectator galleries during the debate to check on whether members were present for quorum calls and how they were voting on amendments. Another arm of this operation — termed “O’Grady’s Raiders” for its leader Jane O’Grady, a legislative representative for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers — included about a dozen people covering all floors of the House office buildings. When alerts came through that a vote was called, the “Raiders” dashed off to canvas the offices of every member who they presumed was in favor of the bill.
Once the bill was before the Senate, the challenge of ensuring quorum in the chamber — in order to avoid adjournment and further delay of the bill — led LCCR to establish a “Quorum Boxscore” in its newsletter, noting which senators were absent and urging supporters to congratulate or express regret and disappointment depending on whether their senators were showing up. Following near-daily lobbying visits, letter writing campaigns, LCCR publications about the bill, and intense negotiations, on June 10, 1964, the Senate — for the first time in its history — voted to limit debate on a civil rights bill. The bill still faced some hurdles but would go on to pass both chambers, and as Caplan wrote, “It seemed as if the Old South was crumbling before our very eyes.”
In the end, the bill that finally emerged from Congress reflected the effectiveness of LCCR’s campaign strategy. The intensive lobbying on the Hill, together with grassroots mobilizations like the August 28 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that attracted a crowd of 250,000, resulted in a final bill that was much stronger than the one that President Kennedy had originally sent to Congress.
The old Mills building was knocked down only a few months after President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It seemed appropriate to LCCR leaders that the old building from which the year-long campaign to destroy many forms of discrimination was waged would itself be demolished after this momentous achievement. By then, the 83 organizations that made up the LCCR were convinced of the need to have a permanent Washington office, eventually moving to a space on K Street in downtown D.C.
The momentum created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act campaign led to cascading civil rights wins over the next few years, from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The legislative successes of the 1960s presented LCCR with a new objective — to ensure that the laws, once passed, were enforced — which led to the creation of a committee on Compliance and Enforcement.
Organized into issue-based task forces, the Compliance and Enforcement Committee soon became an integral and indispensable part of LCCR. Concurrent with the Compliance and Enforcement Committee’s oversight activity, LCCR released a critique of members of Congress — a congressional voting record. Over the years, the growing complexity of civil rights law and policy gave rise to a need for improved capacity for research and the dissemination of information. The response was the launch in 1969 of our sister organization as the education and research arm of the coalition.
The success of the movement for the civil rights of Black Americans provided a model for other groups fighting discrimination. New groups advocating for the rights of women joined the long-established women’s organizations, like the YWCA, Black sororities, and the various Councils of Negro, Catholic, and Jewish Women that were among the founders of LCCR. Hispanic American organizations took up membership, as did groups representing the growing Asian American population, which took their place alongside the Japanese American Citizens League, which had been in the coalition from the very beginning. Organizations representing people with disabilities, older Americans, and LGBTQ people also joined.
This pivotal advocacy moved LCCR to hold onto core members while broadening the coalition and the communities we represented. The new organizations strengthened LCCR by working both to advance the general goals of and to fill gaps in the civil rights protections enjoyed by particular groups.
Over the next several decades, political climates would shift and national support for civil rights would ebb and flow. Batons would be passed to new leaders, including Dr. Dorothy Height and Judith Lichtman (who would chair the coalition) and Ralph Neas, Wade Henderson, Vanita Gupta, and Maya Wiley (who took the helm of the coalition’s day-to-day work over time). And names would be changed. In 2010, our name would change to The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a move designed to reflect the founding principles of The Leadership Conference and recognize the central importance of both “civil rights” and “human rights” in the work of the coalition.
Today, in the face of intense threats, it remains to be seen whether an America true to its promise of equal justice, equal opportunity, and mutual respect will exist for everyone — or for only some. But in our 75-year history, we have never stopped fighting for an America that lives up to its ideals. Our coalition will oppose any efforts by the new administration and Congress to dismantle or undermine civil and human rights and intend to meet every challenge with the values and principles that animate our cause.
“The struggle for civil rights cannot be won by any one group acting by or for itself alone but only through a coalition of groups that share a common commitment to equal justice and equal opportunity for every American.” -Arnold Aronson, cofounder of The Leadership Conference