[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 32 (Wednesday, March 16, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E447-E448]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                ENACTMENT OF THE 1965 VOTING RIGHTS BILL

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN

                              of maryland

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, March 15, 2005

  Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to draw the attention 
of the House to a significant event in civil rights history which took 
place in this very chamber on March 15, forty years ago. It was on that 
evening, that President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of the 
Congress to seek the enactment of the 1965 voting rights bill he was 
about to submit. It was the first time in nineteen years that a 
president had addressed a joint session to request domestic 
legislation.
  Tumultuous events taking place in Selma, Alabama, had influenced the 
timing of the President's request. In one of the most stirring appeals 
of his Presidency, Johnson said:

       At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single 
     place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for 
     freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord . . . So it was 
     last week in Selma, Alabama . . . What happened at Selma is 
     part of a far larger movement which reaches into every state 
     and section of America. It is the effort of American Negroes 
     to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. 
     . . . Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not 
     just Negroes, but really all of us who must overcome the 
     crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
       And we shall--overcome!

  Those exalted words drawn from the freedom hymn of the civil rights 
movement, spoken by the President of the United States, to the 
resounding ovation of the Congress, carried by television around the 
nation and around the world, marked the crossing of a watershed of 
civil rights history. It was a clear affirmation that the heart and 
soul of American leadership was at last committed to the fight for 
unqualified freedom for all Americans.
  Among those seated in the Presidential box that evening of the joint 
session was LeRoy Collins, the former Governor of Florida, who, with 
his wife, had been guests of the President and Mrs. Johnson at dinner 
that evening. This distinction was the President's way of acknowledging 
the special service rendered by Collins and the little known Federal 
agency he headed--the Community Relations Service--which had played an 
important behind-the-scenes role in Selma, helping to advance the civil 
rights goals of the protesters, and, at the same time, working to 
restrain the violence of resistance.
  Just nine months earlier Congress had created the Community Relations 
Service as a part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title Ten of that 
act called into being a special agency composed of civil rights peace-
makers--mediators who would go into troubled communities to conciliate 
racial conflict and promote voluntary compliance with civil rights 
laws. Such legislation had first been proposed by Senator Lyndon 
Johnson seven years earlier.
  In the years since Selma, the Community Relation Service, ``CRS'', 
has helped every major city and thousands of smaller communities, to 
resolve tens of thousands of confrontations involving school 
desegregation, police-minority relations, church burnings, urban 
violence and countless acts and allegations of racial and ethnic 
discrimination.
  Nevertheless, because this division of the Department of Justice 
relies on quiet persuasion and skillful negotiation it takes special 
effort to avoid the limelight. As a result the American public has had 
little opportunity to know of its extraordinary achievements. In 
effect, the work of the Community Relations Service has been a missing 
chapter in America's civil rights history.
  I am pleased to report, however, that this oversight has at last been 
rectified thanks to the efforts of Bertram Levine, a long-time resident 
of my district, whose history of the Community Relations Service has 
just been published by the University of Missouri Press. The book is 
entitled, Resolving Racial Conflict: The Community Relations Service 
and Civil Rights (1964-1989).

  [From the 2004 Fall-Winter Catalogue of the University of Missouri 
                                 Press]

 Resolving Racial Conflict: The Community Relations Service and Civil 
                           Rights (1964-1989)

                          (By Bertram Levine)

       In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, Congress 
     wisely created an agency based in the U.S. Department of 
     Justice to help forestall or resolve racial or ethnic 
     disputes evolving from the act. Mandated by law and by its 
     own methodology to shun publicity, the Community Relations 
     Service developed self-effacement to a fine art. Thus the 
     accomplishments, as well as the shortcomings, of this federal 
     venture into conflict resolution are barely known in official 
     Washington, and even less so by the American public. This 
     first written history of the Community Relations Service uses 
     the experiences of the men and women who sought to resolve 
     the most volatile issues of the day to tell the fascinating 
     story of this unfamiliar agency. This multiracial cadre of 
     conciliation and mediation specialists worked behind the 
     scenes in more than 20,000 confrontations involving racial 
     and ethnic minorities.
       From Selma to Montgomery, at the encampment of the Poor 
     Peoples' Campaign in Resurrection City, to the urban riots of 
     the sixties, seventies, and eighties, from the school 
     desegregation battles north and south, at the siege of 
     Wounded Knee, and during the Texas Gulf Coast fishing wars 
     between Southeast Asian refugees and Anglos, these federal 
     peacemakers lessened the atmosphere of racial violence in 
     every major

[[Page E448]]

     U.S. city and thousands of small towns. These confrontations 
     ranged from disputes that attracted worldwide attention to 
     the everyday affronts, assaults, and upheavals that marked 
     the nation's adjustment to wider power sharing within an 
     increasingly diverse population. While Resolving Racial 
     Conflict examines some of the celebrated breakthroughs that 
     made change possible, it also delves deeply into the 
     countless behind-the-scenes local efforts that converted 
     possibility to reality.
       Among the many themes in this book that provide new 
     perspective for understanding racial conflict in America are 
     the effects of protest and conflict in engineering social 
     change; the variety of civil rights views and experiences of 
     African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and Hispanics; 
     the role of police in minority relations; and the development 
     and refinement of techniques for community conflict 
     resolution from seat-of-the-pants intervention to 
     sophisticated professional practice. Resolving Racial 
     Conflict will appeal to students of civil rights and American 
     history in both the general and academic communities, as well 
     as students of alternative dispute resolution and peace and 
     conflict studies.

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