Howard W. Smith/Comments - Congressional Career - Civil Rights

Civil Rights

As chairman of the all-powerful United States House Committee on Rules after 1955, Smith controlled the flow of legislation in the House. An opponent of racial integration, Smith used his power as chairman of the Rules Committee to keep much civil rights legislation from coming to a vote on the House floor. When the Civil Rights Act of 1957 came before Smith's committee, Smith said "The Southern people have never accepted the colored race as a race of people who had equal intelligence ... as the white people of the South." Speaker Sam Rayburn tried to reduce his power in 1961 with only limited success. Smith delayed passage the Civil Rights Act of 1964. One of Rayburn's reforms was the "Twenty-One Day Rule" requiring a bill to be sent to the floor within 21 days. Under pressure, Smith released the bill.

Two days before the vote, Smith offered an amendment to insert "sex" after the word "religion", adding gender as a protected class of Title VII of the Act. The Congressional Record shows Smith made serious arguments, voicing concerns that white women would suffer greater discrimination without a protection for gender. Liberals—who knew Smith was hostile to civil rights for blacks—assumed that he was hostile to rights for women, unaware of his long connection with white feminists.

In 1964 the burning national issue was civil rights for blacks. Liberals argued that it was the Negro's hour, and that women should wait their turn, but the National Woman's Party (NWP) found a way to include sex as a protected category, and thus achieved one of the main goals of the movement.

The prohibition of sex discrimination was added on the floor by Smith. While Smith was a conservative who strongly opposed civil rights laws for blacks, he supported such laws for women. Smith's amendment passed by a vote of 168 to 133. Historians debate whether Smith's motivation was a cynical attempt to defeat the bill by someone opposed to both civil rights for blacks and women or an attempt to improve the bill by broadening it to include women. Smith expected that Republicans, who had included equal rights for women in their party's platform since 1940, would probably vote for the amendment. Historians speculate that Smith was trying to embarrass northern Democrats who opposed civil rights for women because labor unions opposed the clause.

Smith asserted that he sincerely supported the amendment and along with Rep. Martha Griffiths was the chief spokesperson for the amendment. For twenty years Smith had sponsored the Equal Rights Amendment—with no linkage to racial issues—in the House. He for decades had been close to the NWP and its leader, Alice Paul, one of the leaders in winning the vote for women in 1920 and the chief supporter of equal rights proposals since then. She and other feminists had worked with Smith since 1945 trying to find a way to include sex as a protected civil rights category. Griffith argued that the new law would protect black women but not white women, and that was unfair to white women. Furthermore, she argued that the laws "protecting" women from unpleasant jobs were actually designed to enable men to monopolize those jobs, and that was unfair to women who were not allowed to try out for those jobs. The amendment passed with the votes of Republicans and Southern Democrats. Republicans and Northern Democrats voted for the bill's final passage.