Progress Against the Odds

It has been said that it was the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights’ good fortune and Ralph Neas’ unhappy fate that he took office as LCCR’s executive director soon after President Reagan won the presidency.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights had been founded in 1950 by three visionaries — A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Arnold Aronson — who were grounded in the firm conviction that the struggle for civil rights would be won not by one group alone, but through a coalition of groups working together. Merging two existing coalitions — the National Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization, led by Wilkins, and the National Council for a Permanent FEPC (Fair Employment Practices Commission), led by Randolph — Aronson called for a meeting in Washington, D.C. to keep up the momentum for civil rights legislation. He termed it a “Leadership Conference on Civil Rights,” which became the name, commonly referred to as LCCR, under which the national coalition would operate from then on.

For its first 13 years, LCCR was housed in a desk drawer and filing cabinet in Arnold Aronson’s Manhattan, New York office. LCCR would later set up a small lobbying office in Washington, D.C., headed up by two legendary civil rights lobbyists, Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., LCCR’s general counsel, and Clarence Mitchell, Jr., the LCCR’s legislative chairman and director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau. Although Aronson continued to exercise oversight over the direction of LCCR operations, a Washington-based director — Marvin Caplan, a journalist and civil rights advocate — was hired to run day-to-day operations.

During the 1980s, Aronson, Mitchell, and Caplan would retire, and new leaders would emerge. In 1981, LCCR would select a new executive director, Ralph Neas, who had previously served as a legislative assistant for two Republican senators — Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Dave Durenberger of Minnesota — who had been strong advocates of civil rights. Joining Neas in guiding LCCR was Benjamin Hooks, who, having succeeded Roy Wilkins as executive director of the NAACP, became LCCR’s new chairperson.

Hooks, Neas, and everyone in the LCCR would need all the resources of experience and commitment they could muster to deal with the crises that now confronted them.

Kicking off his general election campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered during Freedom Summer in 1964, Ronald Reagan had used the phrase “states’ rights,” echoing the rhetoric of segregationists. When he was elected president in 1980, together with a more conservative Senate and House, civil rights activists feared for the future — echoing the fears that many are rightly experiencing today.

And there were setbacks. In a capsule view of the Reagan administration’s assault, Neas would note: “It tried to secure tax-exempt status for racist schools, fought effective remedies for unlawful school desegregation, opposed until the last moment a strong and effective extension of the Voting Rights Act, destroyed an independent Civil Rights Commission, attempted to outlaw all types of affirmative action, defied laws passed by Congress and interpreted by the Supreme Court, and opposed legislation prohibiting the federal funding of discrimination.”

Nonetheless, under the leadership of Neas and Hooks and their LCCR colleagues, the coalition defended against attacks on civil right victories, while pushing forward on new protections for the communities it represented.

Most notably, in 1987, the Senate rejected President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court after a broadscale public campaign coordinated by LCCR. Bork had opposed the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which would have overturned a harmful Supreme Court decision, and espoused other controversial views on issues of civil rights, women’s rights, and civil liberties.

In addition, the coalition was able to help block William Bradford Reynolds’ nomination to be associate attorney general. Reynolds would go on to be confirmed as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, where according to Neas, his views helped lead to a backlash that strengthened the nation’s commitment to such laws. “Ironically, his lasting legacy may be that because of his views, he contributed greatly to the reaffirmation of civil rights laws and remedies that has occurred over the last eight years,” Neas said.

In 1981, Senators Strom Thurmond and Orrin Hatch replaced Senators Edward Kennedy and Birch Bayh as chairs of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, respectively. The year before, Senator Hatch had successfully filibustered a top LCCR priority, the Fair Housing Act of 1980.  Many feared that the same fate would await LCCR’s top priority in the 97^th Congress, the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, which was to be introduced in early April 1981. But in an 18-month campaign, LCCR advocates demonstrated the continuing need for federal control over local voting processes, and their efforts helped lead to passage of the extension by votes of 389 to 24 in the House and 85 to 8 in the Senate, leaving President Reagan no choice but to sign the bill into law in 1982.

In another victory that signaled the centrality of the civil rights struggle to American history, in 1983, Congress passed, and President Reagan signed, a bill to make Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a national holiday.

During this period, LCCR engaged members of the executive branch, members of Congress, Leadership Conference member organizations, Black Republican organizations, and the business community in a significant and successful campaign against the Reagan administration’s (specifically Attorney General Ed Meese’s) attempts to gut Executive Order 11246.

In a September 12, 1985 statement from the LCCR executive committee regarding the Reagan administration’s efforts to rescind the goals and timetables program for federal contractors, the executive committee states: “The Administration’s proposed action is still a dagger pointed at the heart of efforts pursued by Republican and Democratic presidents for almost half a century to remove discrimination from American society.”

In 1988, the civil rights coalition helped to redress a decades-old injustice. Congress passed, and President Reagan signed into law, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, granting reparations to Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II. The law was a victory for a founding member of LCCR, the Japanese American Citizens League.

LCCR also coordinated the legislative campaign to pass the Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988, which provided an effective enforcement mechanism and also prohibited discrimination against people with disabilities and families with children.

Another LCCR legislative success was passage of the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1988, which overturned the Supreme Court’s Grove City College decision and restored the broad coverage of four major civil rights laws. When President Reagan vetoed it (the first civil rights measure in 122 years), Congress overrode his veto.

In the 101st Congress and the final weeks of the Reagan presidency, LCCR helped pave the way for the eventual enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (which provided civil rights protections in employment, transportation, communications, and public accommodations for 49 million Americans with disabilities), the Hate Crime Statistics Act, and the minimum wage increase.

That such victories as these could have been won over the opposition of the Reagan administration and the growing insensitivity of the Supreme Court suggested to longstanding members of the LCCR that predictions of the decline and even the demise of the civil rights movement were overstatements.

Over the next several decades, the civil rights movement would continue to defend past gains and win new victories. But that progress is now being threatened by a dangerous national agenda from the new administration and Congress that is tearing at the very fabric of what has made America so strong for so long.

Since its first day in office, the Trump administration has turned the machinery of government on its head to the benefit of a small, mega-wealthy, and powerful elite. At the same time, the administration is using the wheels of government to attack schools and teachers rather than invest in them; to make it harder for workers to organize rather than protect them; and to let tech companies loose to do as they please, rather than ensuring guardrails that safeguard our children, our communities, and our individual rights and privacy. They are attacking our nonpartisan elections and threatening voters rather than defending them. They are trying to redefine equal opportunity initiatives as discriminatory and bullying organizations committed to fostering diversity and inclusion, creating an atmosphere of fear. Through it all, they are making it clear that they will ignore the Constitution and lawbreaking when doing so hurts the policies, programs, and people they don’t like.

Recently, senators confirmed a new leader of the Civil Rights Division — the “crown jewel” of the Justice Department — over the objections of civil rights organizations, much like they did with Reynolds’ nomination decades ago. And much like then, the coalition is ready to hold leaders accountable, defend past gains, and work to advance the rights and protections our communities deserve.

That is what The Leadership Conference and our coalition have done time and time again, and it’s what we will continue to do. We will not allow this administration to erase decades of progress that has helped get millions of people closer to an equal opportunity for a better future. Looking to our history is instructive and may help us prepare for what’s next. The landscape may seem uncertain, but the legal grounds upholding equal opportunity remain firm. In our 75-year history, we have never stopped fighting for an America that is more just, fair, inclusive, and free, and we are not about to stop now.