Rights and Representation

Support for the passage of major civil rights legislation grew in Congress during the mid-1950s as the nonviolent civil rights movement transformed public opinion. In Montgomery, Alabama, local activists led by 27-year-old Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. launched a boycott of the city’s segregated bus system. The protest began after the arrest of NAACP activist Rosa Parks, who defied local ordinances in December 1955 by refusing to yield her seat on the bus to a White man. The year-long—and, ultimately, successful—boycott brought national attention to the struggle and launched King to the forefront of a grassroots, nonviolent humanitarian protest movement.⁷⁰

Much like the NAACP in the 1920s, the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s pressured Congress to pass legislation to address racial inequality in the United States. This time, however, the protest movement benefited from voices in the halls of Congress. Black Members, though few, were poised to contribute to this effort on Capitol Hill.

Civil Rights Act of 1957

Despite the many obstacles to passing civil rights legislation, a reform bill began to move through Congress in 1956. Its progress was partly the result of pressure by advocacy groups such as the NAACP, proposals by President Eisenhower’s Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., and the growing presidential ambitions of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson.⁷¹

In a November 1956 letter to President Eisenhower, Charles Diggs called for immediate action on civil rights legislation in the 85th Congress (1957–1959). Diggs also addressed a letter to Democratic Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas and House Majority Leader John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, denouncing “conservative elements of our Party,” including “your Colleague, Senator Eastland,” who had been able to “stifle liberal legislation, especially Civil Rights.” He asked Democratic leaders if they were prepared to join the fight to end the filibuster in the Senate, “the chief weapon of the Dixiecrats to kill civil rights?” He also urged the passage of “right to vote, anti-poll tax, antilynching measures” at the beginning of the new Congress.⁷²

On May 17, 1957—on the three-year anniversary of the Brown decision—more than 20,000 people attended a rally at the Lincoln Memorial urging the federal government to protect Black civil and political rights. Representatives Powell and Diggs joined Martin Luther King Jr. in addressing the crowd.⁷³

A month later, Powell and Diggs argued for a strong bill on the House Floor. Powell aimed his remarks at amendments that preserved trials by local juries. Since southern states prevented Black citizens from serving on juries, White defendants accused of crimes against African Americans were often easily acquitted. The Harlem lawmaker stressed that these local infringements had international implications. “America stands on trial today before the world and communism must succeed if democracy fails,” he said. By the mid-1950s, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union had pushed the U.S. government to reckon with continued racial inequity at home, which threatened to undermine the federal government’s claims to global leadership. The U.S. Department of State tried to assuage the concerns of potential allies, particularly among the increasing number of independent African nations—emphasizing the freedoms inherent in American society as well as the dangers of Soviet totalitarianism. “Speak no more concerning the bombed and burned and gutted churches behind the Iron Curtain when here in America behind our ‘color curtain’ we have bombed and burned churches and the confessed perpetrators of these crimes go free because of trial by jury,” declared Powell.⁷⁴

Diggs informed his colleagues that on a recent congressional delegation to the African continent, “we were constantly questioned about the treatment of minority groups and peoples here in the United States.” The stories of disenfranchisement and segregation, Diggs said, were detrimental to “the prestige of the United States in the Free World.” Diggs also responded to congressional opponents of the bill, who incredulously called for evidence of disenfranchisement. He listed many of the tactics used by local officials to deny African Americans the ability to register to vote, actions which he characterized as “intimidation, coercion, and subterfuge.” He singled out specific counties in several southern states in which no Black residents were registered to vote. “The reason that we are here today seeking relief on the Federal level is because the offending States are not protecting the right to vote,” Diggs told his colleagues.⁷⁵

A majority of the House agreed, passing the bill by a vote of 286 to 126 on June 18, 1957. But the bill that passed the House in June did not survive Senate consideration intact. In the Senate, Democrat Paul Howard Douglas of Illinois and Republican Minority Leader William Fife Knowland of California circumvented Eastland’s Judiciary Committee and got the bill onto the floor for debate. Senator Johnson played a crucial role, too, discouraging an organized southern filibuster while forging a compromise that appeased southern Members by preserving local juries in any civil rights case. Sent back to the House shorn of important voting protections, it was approved on August 27. A day later, Senator Thurmond held the floor for more than 24 hours in a personal filibuster against the bill. Nevertheless, on August 29, the Senate approved the Civil Rights Act of 1957 by a vote of 60 to 15.⁷⁶

The resulting law, signed by President Eisenhower in early September 1957, was the first major civil rights measure passed since 1875. The act established a two-year U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (CCR) to investigate and report on civil rights infringements and created a civil rights division in the Department of Justice. But the law was unable to enforce voting requirements and punish the disenfranchisement of Black voters. Three years later, the Civil Rights Act of 1960—again significantly weakened by southern opponents—expanded the powers of the CCR and stipulated that voting and registration records in federal elections must be preserved.⁷⁷

A Movement for Change on Capitol Hill

By 1958, four Black Representatives were taking on new positions within House leadership and experimenting with ways to exercise more power within the institution. But Black Members of Congress were too scarce to form a voting bloc powerful enough to change how the institution worked. It would be five more years before Gus Hawkins of California joined the House and a year later John Conyers of Michigan was elected. Every one of the Black Members in the House in 1965 would go on to hold office for at least 20 years, so they all eventually earned a committee chairmanship. Conyers became the longest-serving Black Member in congressional history—and the third-longest tenured of all House Members—with nearly 53 years in office before he resigned in 2017. But in the early 1960s, there simply were not enough African-American lawmakers to drive a policy agenda.

In the 87th Congress (1961–1963), Powell ascended to chair the House Committee on Education and Labor, a post he held for three terms. Only the second Black American to chair a standing committee in Congress, Powell set a new standard for Black Americans exercising power on Capitol Hill. His panel reviewed and approved legislation that formed core components of President Johnson’s Great Society agenda in the mid-1960s, including the Higher Education Act of 1965.⁷⁸

Powell used his position as chair of the committee’s Ad Hoc Subcommittee on the War on Poverty to continue his work highlighting the issues facing urban communities in the North. A subcommittee hearing on de facto segregation tried to shift the focus of Congress to northern cities. “A far more difficult social problem to solve,” Powell said, “is the form of racial segregation whose roots are not nourished in the law, but instead germinate in the soil of social mores and custom.”⁷⁹

The War on Poverty Subcommittee conducted a hearing on urban poverty in the middle of West 114th Street in Harlem. Powell led the open-air meeting on a sweltering summer day in New York City, calling witnesses to discuss the need for quality housing and an end to persistent employment discrimination. “All of you out there are the best experts on black problems because you are black,” Powell told the crowd of more than 200 spectators. On August 7, 1965, the subcommittee held hearings on the need for community action programs in Los Angeles. Only days later, violence and civil unrest swept through the city’s Watts neighborhood.⁸⁰

While Powell’s chairmanship demonstrated the expanded possibilities for Black Members to exert power in Congress, the collective agenda of Black Representatives in the early 1960s prioritized federal civil rights and voting rights legislation to undercut the pillars of the Jim Crow South. To achieve these goals, they needed broad support in the House and Senate as well as reforms to congressional procedures that could allow legislation to circumvent long-standing obstacles laid by southern Democrats.

At the start of the John F. Kennedy administration in 1961, Speaker Sam Rayburn sought to revise House Rules, directly challenging the entrenched power of Rules Committee Chair Howard Smith. Rayburn proposed adding three more Members to the panel, a move he believed would break Smith’s stranglehold over civil rights legislation. Rayburn recruited a group of roughly two dozen northern Republicans who supported the expansion and declared their intention to “repudiate” a GOP alliance with southern Democrats, which they called an “attempt to narrow the base of our party, to dull its conscience, to transform it into a negative weapon of obstruction.” Republican votes proved decisive as the changes were approved by a margin of 217 to 212. The rules change was a key first step in creating the possibility for new legislation, but more importantly, the support of northern Republicans presaged the development of a coalition that would undercut the power of southern segregationists and pass sweeping civil rights laws.⁸¹

In 1962, Congress approved a constitutional amendment to prohibit the poll tax. Ratified by the states in 1964, the Twenty-fourth Amendment was a significant addition to the Constitution and proved effective in eliminating one of the main components of Jim Crow disenfranchisement.⁸²

The postwar civil rights movement had slowly built support for legislative reform and directed pressure at lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Protests at lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 gained national and international attention. They were followed in 1961 by a campaign to desegregate interstate buses by the Freedom Riders, who were beaten and arrested at several stops as they tried to complete a trip from Washington, DC, to New Orleans, Louisiana. In April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. led a large protest in Birmingham, Alabama, at which Birmingham police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor unleashed police dogs and high-powered hoses on the peaceful protesters. Television cameras captured Connor’s brutality, and network newscasts broadcast it to shocked national and global audiences.⁸³

On August 28, 1963, Randolph, activist Bayard Rustin, King, and other civil rights leaders organized what was to that point the largest ever demonstration in the capital: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The event brought together more than 250,000 people on the National Mall to demand civil rights laws and economic justice. Around 150 Members of Congress attended, although the march organizers would not allow elected officials to address the crowd. Randolph, who had called off the planned march on Washington in 1941, hoped the crowd would spur legislators to act. “Legislation is enacted under pressure,” he insisted. “You can’t move senators and congressmen just because every one thinks a measure is right. There has got to be pressure.”⁸⁴

Nix spoke on the House Floor a week before the planned march. While many Members of Congress were anxious about the upcoming event, if not hostile toward it, he defended the protest. For Nix, the march was one front in the struggle to “realize the full promise of democracy which has been withheld cruelly and deliberately” since emancipation. In the previous century, Nix said, Black Americans had been “teased with mere tastes of freedom.” They were now using the “traditional American medium of protest” to take their case directly to Congress and the American people.⁸⁵

Over the previous six decades, a grassroots movement for change had ebbed and flowed in the United States. But this time the scale and scope of the protest movement and the impact it had on the burgeoning cohort of allies within the halls of Congress led to a far different outcome.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

As activists maintained pressure on President John F. Kennedy to act, the administration began coordinating with congressional allies to pass a significant reform bill. Black legislators, of course, had their own ambitions for the bill. First-term Representative Gus Hawkins observed in May 1963 that the federal government had a special responsibility to ensure that federal dollars did not underwrite segregation in schools, vocational education facilities, libraries, and other municipal entities, saying “those who dip their hands in the public treasury should not object if a little democracy sticks to their fingers.” Otherwise “do we not harm our own fiscal integrity, and allow room in our conduct for other abuses of public funds?” After Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, his successor, President Johnson, invoked the slain President’s memory to prod reluctant legislators to produce a civil rights measure.⁸⁶

In the House, a bipartisan bill supported by Judiciary Chair Emanuel Celler and William Moore McCulloch of Ohio, the committee’s top Republican, worked its way to passage. McCulloch and Celler forged a coalition of moderate Republicans and northern Democrats while deflecting amendments designed to undermine the bill.

Black legislators used their committee positions to dramatize the need for a major set of reforms and to debate just how best to accomplish those goals. Powell’s House Committee on Education and Labor, for instance, held hearings on components of the civil rights bill in 1963. Hawkins was part of the subcommittee hearings on the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, which became Title VII of the proposed legislation. The Californian used his position on the panel to raise important questions about the need for some type of federal oversight to prevent discriminatory hiring. He also presided over a hearing in Los Angeles on discrimination in education programs funded by the federal government.⁸⁷

On February 10, 1964, Hawkins spoke on the floor urging his colleagues to support the bill. He also denounced its opponents, who he said were relying on the outmoded ideas at the heart of the 1896 Plessy decision to resist progress in 1964. The dramatic changes of the postwar decades, Hawkins said, had set the stage for revolutionary departures from the old ways, at home and abroad. “Today the free peoples of the world are on the march—everywhere,” Hawkins declared. “In Europe, Asia, and Africa as in our country, and in Mississippi as well as California, people yearn for freedom, security, self-government, and human dignity.”⁸⁸

William Dawson emphasized the domestic implications of this legislation. “These problems are not confined to any one section of the country. They are national,” he reminded his colleagues. Dawson dismissed those who urged time-consuming lawsuits to remedy the situation—only federal action could initiate real change. He acknowledged that the bill was not “a panacea” but stressed that it would produce “a major step toward the achievement of full equality for all Americans.”⁸⁹

Later that day, the House voted 290 to 130 to approve the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So many members of the Democratic majority opposed the legislation that House leaders needed the votes of 138 Republicans—nearly 80 percent of the GOP conference—to pass the bill. The measure was among the most far-reaching pieces of legislation in U.S. history. It contained sections prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations and in state and municipal facilities, including schools. It applied the Powell amendment to any program receiving federal aid and barred discrimination in hiring and employment based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. It also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to investigate workplace discrimination.⁹⁰

President Johnson worked with Senate Democratic leadership to build support for the measure and fend off the efforts of a determined southern minority to kill it. By allowing influential Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois to weaken the enforcement powers of the EEOC, bill proponents were able to attract support from a large group of midwestern Republicans who followed Dirksen’s lead. On June 10, 1964, for the first time in its history, the Senate invoked cloture on a civil rights bill, and did so by a vote of 71 to 29, cutting off debate and ending a 60-day filibuster—the longest in the chamber’s history. On June 19, 1964, 46 Democrats and 27 Republicans joined forces to approve the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 73 to 27. President Johnson signed the bill into law on July 2, 1964.⁹¹

Voting Rights Act of 1965

A day later, on July 3, Representative Gus Hawkins visited Mississippi along with his California colleagues Phillip Burton and William Donlon “Don” Edwards, as well as William Fitts Ryan of New York. In 1964, a popular movement for voting rights coalesced across the South, directly targeting the Black disenfranchisement efforts at the heart of the Jim Crow system. The Representatives stayed with local families, observed the voter registration process, and commended voting rights campaigners. Mississippi Governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. advised the group not to test any of the provisions of the new Civil Rights Act. Johnson also warned that they may be subjected to violence because Hawkins was Black. In fact, the home Edwards was staying in was bombed the day after he left. After his trip, Hawkins declared that the noble work of the volunteers would “have a lasting effect on Mississippi even if it does no more than arouse national concern over the state.” Over the next calendar year, Americans across the country would be confronted with the struggle for Black voting rights in the South.⁹²

In Mississippi, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality had organized Freedom Summer, a joint effort to staff a voter registration drive and establish “freedom schools” in Black communities. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 included a provision regarding voting rights but limited enforcement powers, and continued resistance by southern state and local governments led many to call for more effective voting rights legislation almost immediately.⁹³

In the early 1960s, the movement for voting rights coincided with several Supreme Court rulings, such as Brown, that overturned existing precedent and fundamentally changed the voting landscape, particularly in the South. In a string of decisions known as the “reapportionment cases,” the court required representation in federal and state legislatures to be based substantially on population. Baker v. Carr (1962) upheld lawsuits that challenged districts apportioned to enforce voting discrimination against minorities. In Gray v. Sanders (1963), the court asserted the concept of “one man, one vote” by invalidating Georgia’s county unit voting system, which used county boundaries to disproportionately empower lightly populated rural areas at the expense of the more heavily populated urban regions. Two decisions in 1964, Wesberry v. Sanders and Reynolds v. Sims, proved seminal. In Wesberry, the Court declared that the equal distribution of population must be a factor in drafting district lines for seats in the U.S. House. In Reynolds, the Supreme Court solidified the “one man, one vote” concept in an 8 to 1 decision that expressly linked the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause to the guarantee that each citizen had equal weight in the election of state legislators.⁹⁴

The voting rights movement and the Supreme Court decisions on apportionment affected the elections process, from the drawing of districts to the casting of ballots. But Black Americans in the South remained restricted, and Democrats in the region filled state and local offices with little to no Black participation and only minimal Republican opposition. In Mississippi, for example, the Democratic slate was always full of segregationists. In August 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) challenged the seating of the so-called “Regular Democrats” at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and activist from Ruleville, Mississippi, emerged as the group’s leader. The MFDP pointed to the inequities in voter registration, district composition, and electoral procedures in state elections as evidence that the Regular Democrats were not the true, democratically elected representatives of their constituents. After tense negotiations at the convention, the credentials committee refused to seat the MFDP delegates, instead offering the dissident faction two seats—which the MFDP refused.⁹⁵

Five months earlier, Hamer and four other Black candidates had decided to run for House seats in the November 1964 elections, challenging Mississippi’s five incumbent Representatives. Hamer went up against Jamie Lloyd Whitten, the 12-term incumbent from the Second District. After each challenger lost by significant margins in the June Democratic primary, election officials in Mississippi kept the MFDP candidates off the ballot for the general election. Four of the Democratic incumbents won unopposed in November. One Republican, Prentiss Lafayette Walker of the Fourth District, defeated Democrat William Arthur Winstead, who was attempting to win his twelfth term in the House. The MFDP challengers decided to contest these election victories with the hopes that the House would seat them instead of the segregationists.⁹⁶

On January 4, 1965, as the 89th Congress (1965–1967) convened, 600 MFDP supporters arrived from Mississippi to demonstrate peacefully at the Capitol. MFDP candidates Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Grey tried to access the House Floor but were turned away by security. Protesters stoically lined the tunnel between the House office buildings and the Capitol, forcing Members to walk by their silent protest as they made their way from their offices to the floor. William Fitts Ryan backed efforts to block the seating of the Mississippi delegation. Edith Starrett Green of Oregon forced a roll call vote on a proposal to bar the Mississippi Representatives-elect until an inquiry was completed, but they were seated despite the protests. Hamer and other candidates formally contested the election, and their cases were sent to the Committee on House Administration for review.⁹⁷

Black Members of Congress embraced this spirit of democratic participation as protests intensified in early 1965. Representatives Conyers, Diggs, and Hawkins visited the city of Selma, Alabama, on February 5, 1965, as part of a 15-Member congressional delegation that investigated voting discrimination.⁹⁸

Four days later, several Black Members of Congress spoke on the House Floor and patiently explained the situation to their colleagues. Prior to the trip, Members had stated their desire to “listen and learn” about the situation in Alabama. Diggs printed in the Congressional Record a voter registration application from Alabama, laying before the House the difficulties faced by prospective voters in the state. Hawkins described the delegation’s activities in Selma, particularly their use of a federal building to accept testimony from residents regarding their difficulties trying to register to vote. Hawkins reminded his colleagues that “the constitutionality of this right to vote cannot be disputed. Legally, it does not have to be earned.” But Hawkins noted that the law did not apply in much of the South “from a practical standpoint,” and he and others recognized that Selma represented one front in an ongoing battle to win this right.⁹⁹

Hawkins printed some of the testimony received by the committee in the pages of the Congressional Record, including a brief excerpt from the statement of Launsey West, a U.S. Navy veteran who worked as a house painter. West described specific incidents of police violence against those attempting to register, including several Black women. He also spoke of the devastating personal toll of his participation in the voter registration drive, such as the jobs he had been denied since trying to register. Representative Jeffrey Cohelan of California asked West if he had sought to register earlier. West recalled that other Selma residents warned him that he “might be whipped” if he tried. Cohelan asked, “Well, then, why did you get courage in 1963?” “Because I felt more stronger with others with me,” West declared.¹⁰⁰

Conyers said he returned from Selma convinced that there was “no alternative but to have the Federal Government take a much more positive and specific role in guaranteeing the right to register and vote in all elections.” Without federal intervention, the vast power of state and local governments went unchecked in places like Dallas County, which encompassed Selma. “But surely this Government cannot relax,” Conyers insisted, “if even one single American is arbitrarily denied that most basic right of all in a democracy—the right to vote.”¹⁰¹

On March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers savagely beat protestors marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. “It was the most disciplined march that I’ve ever been a part of, walking in twos, not interfering with traffic, not talking loud, not any singing,” recalled future Representative John Lewis, who led the marchers. Many of the protestors were kneeling in prayer when the troopers clubbed and gassed them on what would later be known as “Bloody Sunday.” Lewis was one of many to be hospitalized; as television cameras captured the onslaught, and networks beamed images into the homes of millions of Americans.¹⁰²

After President Johnson addressed a Joint Session of Congress on March 15 about the events in Selma, legislative action was swift. The bill that quickly moved through both chambers prohibited discrimination at the polls and directly involved the federal government in election oversight. The measure suspended the use of literacy tests for a five-year period and stationed federal poll watchers and voting registrars in counties with persistent patterns of voting discrimination. It also included a “preclearance” provision, which required the Department of Justice to approve any change to election law in counties with a history of discrimination and disenfranchisement. Finally, the bill made obstructing an individual’s right to vote a federal crime.¹⁰³

Unlike the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act cleared the Senate first, on May 26, 1965, by a vote of 77 to 19. As the House debated the bill, Conyers also stressed the Cold War foreign policy implications of denying one group of citizens the right to vote: “We are weak before our enemies if our goals abroad are so shamelessly ignored and subverted here at home.” The House passed the bill by a vote of 333 to 85 on July 9, 1965. An amended conference report passed both chambers by wide margins, and President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965.¹⁰⁴

When taken together, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—arguably the most significant pieces of legislation in the twentieth century—profoundly reshaped American politics and society. The antidiscrimination provisions in the Civil Rights Act took aim at the Jim Crow system that had dominated southern life for decades, desegregating public spaces and affording Black Americans access to new opportunities. The federal government took an active role in prohibiting employment discrimination and extending workplace protections to women. The Voting Rights Act enabled voter registration in the South and provided oversight for counties across the nation where discriminatory practices restricted access to the polls.

These changes spurred significant resistance throughout the country. Southern schools, for instance, did not immediately desegregate. But these legislative achievements were influential in making American government and society more democratic. Black voters elected a new generation of political leaders to state and local offices. In the 1970s, groundbreaking electoral victories sent Black Representatives to the House from southern congressional districts for the first time since the nineteenth century. The lasting effects of these landmark laws extended far beyond the South, however. In the ensuing decades, the number of Black Members of Congress grew exponentially. In the 65 years prior to the Voting Rights Act, eight African Americans were elected to the House. In the six decades that followed, 145 Black Members served in Congress, including nine Black Senators. These changes were the product of a historical moment in which lawmakers were once again willing to use the power of the federal government to guarantee individual rights, thereby vindicating a century-long effort by Black Americans to resurrect the spirit of Reconstruction on Capitol Hill.

“No Contest Without a Contestant”

A month after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Elections held hearings on the Mississippi election cases, welcoming testimony from the state’s sitting Representatives. William Meyers Colmer of Mississippi argued that there had been “no legal, bona fide contestant” in each of these cases because the MFDP candidates were not on the ballot in November. Colmer pointed to past precedent to declare there can be “no contest without a contestant.” In Mississippi, this was a high bar to meet; the candidates attempted to run in the Democratic primary, but the vast majority of Black voters sympathetic to their cause had been unable to register to vote.¹⁰⁵

The subcommittee also heard from the contestants, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Augusta Wheadon. They spoke of the violence and intimidation that kept many Black voters from the polls in their home state. Wheadon listed the incidents of violence against Black political activists in the months prior to the election. She explained that this overwhelming tide of violence kept her from filing the paperwork to have her named placed on the ballot. “I did not wish to risk my life to get certified to run against Mr. Thomas Abernathy, of the First Congressional District, but I did file notice of contest.”¹⁰⁶

On September 15, the committee issued a report regarding the Mississippi Freedom Democrats’ attempts to contest the elections of the state’s congressional delegation. The committee sided with the incumbent Mississippi lawmakers and ruled that since the contestants had not been on the ballot, they could not formally challenge the election results. But the committee also pointed to the recently enacted Voting Rights Act, which it claimed would provide “thorough and complete remedies” to the problems Black voters faced in Mississippi.¹⁰⁷

The matter was not over, however. On September 17, the House engaged in an extended debate on the floor, with Gus Hawkins, a member of the Committee on House Administration, calling for further investigation into the issue given the evidence of disenfranchisement in Mississippi. John Conyers echoed Hawkins’s call. Even the normally cautious William Dawson asked the House to unseat the Mississippi Representatives. Dawson rooted his support in House precedent, citing more than 40 contested election cases from 1867 to 1901 in which the House unseated a Representative because Black citizens were barred from voting.¹⁰⁸

Hamer, Devine, and Gray were granted House Floor privileges during the debate, a welcoming gesture that suggested a formidable segment of the House membership acknowledged the deep-rooted problems facing African Americans in the South. Nevertheless, the committee’s report stood as the final word. The House voted to dismiss all five contests.¹⁰⁹

The events on the House Floor that September day presented a stark reminder of the past, even as they offered a glimpse of the future. The committee’s majority relied on procedure and precedent to maintain barriers that had long denied the rights of Black Americans. At the same time, the democratic movement, rooted in the South and led by Black women, that brought the protest to the House Chamber was gaining allies from across the country.

One month after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and more than a year after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, Black Americans were at a critical juncture. With the federal government willing to intervene to protect their civil and political rights for the first time since Reconstruction, a key advance had been achieved in the long struggle for representation. The next step was to seize the opportunity and achieve what Robert Nix had called “the full promise of democracy” by electing Black Members of Congress in greater numbers than ever before.¹¹⁰

Next Section: Permanent Interests