Denton L Watson, project director and editor of the Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. project, which is sponsored by SUNY College at Old Westbury, established in 2000 the only documentary editing project whose roots are embedded in the foundations of the congressional legislative process. The project is an extension of his biography, Lion in the Lobby, Clarence Mitchell, Jr.’s Struggle for the Passage of Civil Rights Laws, which was first published in 1990. 

A journalist-historian, Watson has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Hartford, and a MSc. degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He also studied Latin American History at the Catholic University in Chile under a scholarship from the Inter American Press Association. He was a reporter for the Hartford Courant, United Press International, and the Washington Star, a writer for Time magazine in the Nation and World sections, and an editorial writer with the Baltimore Sun, specializing in civil rights, the Caribbean and Latin America, Africa, and south Asia.  

Hired by Roy Wilkins, NAACP executive director, in 1971, he began an intense and prolonged study of the Association’s history under the tutelage of, in addition to Wilkins, Henry Lee Moon, director of public relations and editor of the Association’s Crisis magazine, and other members of the staff who all participated in implementing the NAACP’s mission in the modern civil rights struggle and thus making the Association the flagship of the movement. Especially notable among these NAACP staffers were Clarence Mitchell, Jr., director of the Washington Bureau, popularly known as the “101st senator,” and his wife Juanita, who, working through the Baltimore NAACP Branch, and the Maryland State Conference of NAACP Branches, used her legal training to lead in desegregation the entire state. 

Watson’s creation of the Papers of Clarence Mitchell, Jr., project, resulted from his study of how the lobbyist led the struggle for passage of the civil rights laws. The principal structure of the project is based on the NAACP’s struggle to fulfill its mission by getting Congress to pass civil rights laws under Mitchell’s leadership.  

Mitchell’s role in leading the struggle in Congress was pivotal. In addition to having the support of the NAACP national network of branches, which served as a mighty political phalanx, he led the lobbying activity of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights as its legislative director. Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, was chairman of the then 86-member LCCR coalition, which was composed of the other principal civil rights groups, as well as labor, religious, civic, and fraternal organizations. Joseph L. Rauh, a founder of Americans for Democratic Action, was LCCR general counsel.  

Mitchell’s wife Juanita, who established the NAACP’s youth department in 1935, along with her mother Lillie Jackson, led its Baltimore branch and the Maryland State Conference of NAACP Branches in desegregating the state. Juanita Mitchell was another of Watson’s unrelenting tutors and a fierce inspirational force. Upon Mitchell’s death in 1984, Juanita gave Watson full access to the lobbyist’s personal collection of papers further detailing how he lobbied Congress from 1950 to 1978, when he retired from the NAACP.  

Along with the NAACP Washington Bureau collection, which is stored at the Library of Congress, Mitchell’s papers were the wellspring from which Watson drew the primary information that enabled him to construct Lion in the Lobby over five years of research and five years of straight writing, seven days a week. Being published are Mitchell’s monthly and annual reports. The other five categories of his papers – his memoranda, letters and telegrams, congressional testimonies and statements, newspaper columns and scholarly articles, and speeches – are used in the annotation and supporting narratives.

Following completion of Lion in the Lobby in 1990, Watson launched the nine-volume Clarence Mitchell, Jr., historical documentary editing project in 2000 under the sponsorship of SUNY College at Old Westbury, where he is a member of the American Studies Department. The project is funded principally by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York have also provided significant funding. Ohio University Press is publisher of the papers  

The purpose of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., a nine-volume documentary edition, is to facilitate scholarly study of the long-ignored legislative phase of the modern civil rights movement by making readily available selected annotated records that Mitchell, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, prepared at (1) the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) when he worked there during World War II to enforce President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy to end discrimination in the defense industry; and (2) the Washington Bureau of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People during the struggle he led from 1946 to 1950 to end discrimination in labor unions, and from 1950 to 1978 to get Congress to pass civil rights laws and the Administrative Branch of Government to promulgate and enforce policies to protect the constitutional rights of African Americans and other citizens against discrimination. (Please see website: www.clarencemitchellpapers.com) 

The records comprising the edition:  

• Show how the NAACP launched its legislative struggle in Congress, first to block passage of laws harmful to blacks, and then to pass laws to protect the civil rights of black citizens. 

• Show how African Americans forced President Roosevelt to begin the practice of providing the leadership of the federal government in ending discrimination against black workers in war industries through his creation of the FEPC, an agency in which blacks for the first time began to define racial discrimination in federally funded programs and industries.  

•  Show how the FEPC functioned as a dynamic social crucible that significantly defined the role of Clarence Mitchell, Jr., as a civil rights lobbyist in Congress.  

• Document Mitchell’s historical contributions as director of the NAACP Washington Bureau and legislative chairman of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights coalition, in a manner that recognized his uncontestable leadership in the development and execution of the legislative program and strategy that made the civil rights revolution an epic landmark in American history. 

• Are organized and edited in order to inspire interest in the legislative history of the modern civil rights movement as central to the struggle to end America’s Jim Crow society and protect civil rights. 

• Document the struggle to pass civil rights laws by upholding the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which held that the “separate but equal doctrine” was unconstitutional. 

• Are the only comprehensive resource that exist for facilitating the study at all levels of education of the legislative phase of the civil rights movement to foster a more complete understanding of how the civil rights revolution was achieved. 

• Are being organized and published in print and e-book, and digitally to facilitate the universal scholarly study of the legislative phase of the modern civil rights movement. 

Obtaining the leadership of the president was central to Mitchell’s struggle in Congress to pass civil rights laws. The archives of the wartime FEPC, a federal agency, documenting the struggle that began during World War II to define and end under presidential authority discrimination in the defense industry that was based on race, creed, color or national origin, and of the NAACP Washington Bureau are the only existing ones that provide comprehensive documentation of the modern struggle to pass civil rights laws. Upon its creation in 1909, the NAACP made this struggle for Congress to pass civil rights laws central to its mission. Appreciating Roosevelt’s unprecedented leadership, the NAACP’s Crisis magazine editorialized, “For the first time in their lives, government has taken on new meaning and substance for Negroes.” 

After southerners in Congress killed the wartime FEPC in 1946, the NAACP merged the struggle for a permanent agency fully into its own. The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. documents the leadership of eight presidents in the civil rights struggle. Recognizing the value of President Roosevelt’s leadership of the FEPC, Mitchell subsequently worked to obtain the leadership of the other seven presidents for the NAACP’s struggle in Congress. While the NAACP, overall, led in getting Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy to strengthen that leadership, Mitchell, in particular, was most influential in making his relationship with President Johnson the most pronounced example of that involvement. 

Four volumes of the edition have been published. Most encouraging has been a review of volumes III and IV by Philip F. Rubio of North Carolina A&T State University, in the Journal of Southern History LXXVI (August 12, 2012): 706-708. Volumes V and VI have been completed and are being prepared for publication as one unit. In addition to those volumes, Ohio University Press will publish volumes V and VI within the next two years. To achieve this goal, OUP assisted the Mitchell Papers in finding a worthy project editor. He is Dr. David T. Terry, assistant professor, coordinator of Museum Studies & Historical Preservation, Department of History and Geography at Morgan State University. The project, furthermore, has concluded work on concluding volume VII, covering Mitchell’s leadership of the struggle to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act. We are also proceeding with work on volume VIII. This volume is composed of Mitchell’s 1965 reports covering his leadership of the struggle in Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and of his 1966, 1967 and 1968 reports, covering his struggle to pass a law to protect civil rights workers in the South from violence, along with another barring discrimination in the rental and sale of housing. These two measures combined are the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Instrumental to these struggles, as it was to the struggle to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was the lobbying by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), the 86-member coalition that served as the NAACP’s political fulcrum in Washington. Through this coalition, the Association exerted its political might to win passage of not only the 1964, 1965 and 1968 civil rights laws, as well as the supplementary Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, which strengthened the EEO Title VII of the 1964 Act.  

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A comprehensive division in the NAACP’s legislative history encompasses the period following its founding in 1909, when it absorbed the Niagara Movement and launched the civil rights struggle in Congress under the “separate but equal” doctrine, and subsequently, after the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation was discrimination, and thus unconstitutional. The NAACP Washington Bureau archive encompasses those two phases of the political struggle for the passage of civil rights laws from 1942 to 1978, when there was a marked distinction in the Association’s legislative strategy up to 1954, and afterward when it sought passage of the laws to enforce the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment rights of blacks prohibiting disfranchisement at the polls.  

In the period prior to Brown, southerners in Congress frustrated Mitchell by insisting that their region was not discriminating by practicing segregation. He thus faced a constitutional impediment to winning passage of a civil rights law. Subsequently, free of the “separate but equal” shackles, he consolidated his strategy by creating bipartisan coalitions of liberals and conservatives in both houses of Congress to lead the struggle there, as well as by redoubling his efforts to win the leadership of the Executive Branch for the legislative struggle. 

The records additionally show how Mitchell helped to merge the struggle for a permanent FEPC with the NAACP’s to implement the Association’s egalitarian philosophy through the Congress and the Executive Branch by seeking passage of new laws to reinvigorate, strengthen, and broaden those that had been enacted during Reconstruction between 1866 and 1875. 

The roots of the NAACP legislative struggle that Mitchell led were established in the “Declaration of Principles” of the Niagara Movement, which urged “upon Congress the enactment of appropriate legislation for securing the proper enforcement of those articles of freedom, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments of the Constitution of the United States.” With their merging of the Niagara Movement into the newly created NAACP, the Association’s founders emphasized legal redress as a defining feature of its function. 

It was on the foundations of those tentative beginnings that the NAACP in 1918 launched its epic struggle in Congress to win passage of a bill to end lynching by making it a federal crime. That initial effort involved the NAACP’s teaming up with Representative L.C. Dyer, and then with subsequent sponsors. Against insurmountable odds in those early years, southerners used the filibuster and other parliamentary maneuvers to kill similar anti-lynching bills or resolutions that were identified progressively by the names of their sponsors in subsequent biennial Congresses, such as Costigan-Wagner, McKinley, Van Nuys, or Gavagan. 

Other top NAACP goals in Congress were passage of anti-poll tax and related voting rights legislation, and enactment of a permanent FEPC as a replacement for the temporary war-time agency. During this phase of the struggle, Mitchell kept the FEPC idea alive by embarking on a grail, in which he struggled to get Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy to issue consecutive, related executive orders, accordingly: Executive Order 9980, issued on July 26, 1948, prohibiting  discrimination in federal employment and creating a Fair Employment Board to review discrimination complaints by federal employees; Executive Order 9981, also issued on July 26, creating the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment in the Armed Forces; Executive Order 10308, issued on December 3, 1951, creating a Committee on Government Contract Compliance that would ultimately assume a permanent place within the Department of Labor as the Office of Federal Contract Compliance; Executive Order 10479, issued on August 13, 1953, creating a Committee on Government Contracts, which replaced President Truman’s Committee on Government Contract Compliance; Executive Order 10590, issued on January 18, 1955, creating the President’s Committee on Government Employment Policy; a watchdog committee having oversight of federal agencies and replacing Truman’s Employment Board, which had been functioning within the Civil Service Commission; Executive Order 10925, issued  on March 6, 1961, strengthening the President’s Committee on Government Contracts and the President’s Committee on Government Employment Policy by combining them into one President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. This became Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Also fulfilling the goals of a struggle that began at the FEPC was the inclusion of Title VI barring discrimination in federal spending, into which the Powell Amendment principle was finally incorporated into law. In all, except for the Public Accommodations Title II, the other provisions of the law were also central to the struggle that Mitchell had been leading from the previous decade.  

Additionally, the records document his prolonged struggle to end segregation on army posts and military facilities, and in schools on military bases in a manner that enabled President Eisenhower to complete the desegregation of the army in 1954. In addition to fighting discrimination in labor unions, Mitchell similarly struggled to end discrimination at large-scale employment firms like atomic energy complexes, at the U.S. Employment Service, and to obtain Social Security coverage for domestic workers. Passage of Title VII in the 1964 Civil Rights Act provided the comprehensive coverage of employment areas that he had long sought. 

Volume VIII (covering the struggles for the 1965 and 1968 Acts), documents through Mitchell’s reports his struggles for passage of an effective voting rights law and an anti-discrimination law in housing. The struggle for an effective voting rights law has been symbolized by the explosive and bloody Selma to Montgomery March of March 7, 1965. The goals of the march, however, were not implemented then, but in the subsequent struggle in Congress, which Mitchell led through the NAACP and the LCCR. At that time the LCCR was composed of 86 members.  

The struggle for federal protections of the right to vote reached its first peak since Reconstruction with passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. This was the first such measure passed by Congress in 82 years. Its noteworthy benefits were that it elevated the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department to a Division with an assistant attorney general in charge. It also created a fact-finding United States Commission on Civil Rights. This was especially important because it was similar to the first such fact-finding commission that President Truman’s Commission on Civil Rights created in 1947. That commission was intended to be permanent. Regarding the voting rights provisions in the 1957 Act, the Eisenhower Justice Department acknowledged that the problem of ending the disfranchisement of blacks in the South was not due to the lack of laws in the region, but to “the inadequacy of the judicial process to deal effectively and expeditiously with a problem so deep-seated and so complex.” The problem revealed was much more than voting discrimination and litigating delay. It was considerable fear, which was a much deeper and more subtle obstacle than had previously been accepted in struggles going back to the period leading up to passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. The Selma March revealed the fear for the world to see. The problems were the difficulty of getting some southern judges to enforce the laws, the refusal of voting registrars in Selma and other pockets of resistance to enroll blacks in sufficient numbers, and the continuing use of the poll tax in state and local elections. 

Next, following passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, President Johnson early in 1966 issued a call for the passage of a law to end discrimination in the rental and sale of housing. Mitchell was the only civil rights leader who supported Johnson. Fearing that Congress would never pass such a law because it was the toughest and most sensitive issue – especially since like the EEO Title VII law its coverage was concentrated on the North -- the other leaders opposed this effort. They insisted that Johnson instead issue an executive order barring such discrimination that was stronger than the one President Kennedy had issued in 1962 to bar discrimination in government-sponsored housing programs and federally insured mortgages. 

Mitchell’s reports document how the lobbyist worked with Johnson to develop the legislation the president deemed necessary to meet the problem, and how he also developed and guided the struggle through Congress to obtain passage of the act. Johnson’s housing legislation was more comprehensive than that proposed by those who favored an executive order. In his civil rights message on April 28, 1966, the president also asked Congress to provide blacks and civil rights workers with the protection of much more effective criminal statutes than existing ones; to prohibit racial discrimination in the selection of federal juries, and to empower the attorney general to sue to end similar bias in state courts; and to broaden the attorney general’s authority to sue to end discrimination in public schools. Under the national policy he sought, the government would create effective remedies against racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. Johnson tied his housing discrimination proposal to his broader Great Society program, which contained elements that were not technically civil rights for ensuring equality of all citizens. 

As this editor, Mitchell’s biographer, details in Lion in the Lobby, the lobbyist was oblivious to the strong national tide that was rising against further civil rights legislation. He was similarly oblivious to the fierce reactionary climate that the widespread urban riots, the anti-Viet Nam War protests, and the student movement protests were sparking. Regarding the first attempt, he was certain that the Civil Rights Act of 1966 would pass if all who wanted to end housing discrimination got behind the president, “one of the most remarkable men of our times.” He was certain Johnson would “do his part to get the bill passed.” On April 11, 1968, two days after the funeral of the martyred Rev. Martin Luther King., Jr., in Atlanta, and following final passage of the bill by the House, President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act of 1968 into law. In an editorial, the Washington Post commented that the real heroes of the legislative battles were often unsung while others who were most visible got the hurrahs. So a “special salute” was in order for Mitchell “for the part he played in bringing the latest civil rights bill to enactment – and for the part he played in the adoption of every civil rights measure for more than a decade past.” His faith in the Congress and the American people, the Post said, “steadfastly thwarted and denied failure” in the long struggle for such legislation. “All Americans are in debt to him.”  In a follow-up article, the Post noted Congressional Quarterly’s extensive documentation of the lobbyist’s key role in passing the law.   

Noting the extent to which passage of the law was unexpected, Congressional Quarterly reported that it learned from “many of the individuals who followed the three-month battle” for its passage, “the transformation was due in large part to the efforts of Clarence Mitchell Jr., the chief lobbyist for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. Seldom has an individual lobbyist been accorded so much credit for the outcome of a bill as was Mitchell, who was Washington director” for the NAACP. These were the long and laborious struggles that the Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. project is documenting. The following is the: 

Clarence Mitchell Jr. Papers Edition Structure 

Volumes I (1942-1943), Volume II (1944-1946): Establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee Foundation for the Modern Civil Rights Movement 

Volume III (1946-1950), Volume IV (1951-1954): Consolidating the FEPC Legacy at the NAACP  

Volume V (1955-1957), Volume VI (1958-1960): Struggles to Pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act and the 1960 Civil Rights Act 

Volume VII (1961-1964): Struggle to Pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act 

Volume VIII (1965-1968): Struggles to Pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act 

Volume IX (1969-1978): Struggle to Pass the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, and Consolidating the Legacy of the 1957 Civil Rights Act; the 1960 Civil Rights Act; the 1964 Civil Rights Act; the 1965 Voting Rights Act; the 1968 Fair Housing Act Through Adoption of Enforcement Policies by the Executive Branch 

Denton L. Watson, Project Director and Editor, Papers of Clarence Mitchell, Jr., Historical Documentary Editing Project