In an era of renamings and heightened sensitivity to the moral failings of once celebrated figures, it is both baffling and troubling that the name of the most adroit segregationist of the civil rights era remains on the Russell Senate Office Building.
During Russell’s nearly four decades in the Senate, from 1933 until 1971, journalists consistently portrayed the Georgia senator as a pillar of integrity, an unchallenged master of the Senate’s arcane precedents, and a stalwart supporter of massive military spending to combat the Soviet Union. As Newsweek put it in a fawning 1963 cover story, “Senator Russell … is a courtly, soft-spoken, cultured patrician, whose aides and associates treat him with deferential awe. Modest, even shy, in manner, devastatingly skillful in debate, he has a brilliant mind [and] encyclopedia learning.”
Sounds like a model midcentury senator. Except for one thing: Whether he was filibustering an anti-lynching bill in the 1930s or trying to block the historic civil rights legislation in the 1960s, Russell was not just at the forefront of the segregationist Southern Caucus; he was its chief strategist. In Russell’s mind, the fight against civil rights was the Lost Cause of the Confederacy all over again, and he stood stalwart, like his hero Robert E. Lee.
When the 1964 Civil Rights Act finally passed, despite Russell’s 60-day filibuster, his fellow segregationist Senator John Stennis of Mississippi wrote him a letter of consolation: “Except for you and your fine leadership, a strong civil rights bill would have been passed—at least one with major provisions—as early as 1948 … or certainly soon after the unprecedented Supreme Court decision of 1954.”
Gilbert C. Fite, in his 1991 biography, calls the Stennis letter “an accurate assessment of Russell’s influence.”
Think of it. If it weren’t for Richard Russell, the United States would have had a strong civil rights bill immediately after World War II, or certainly following the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Justice was denied for nearly two decades—an entire generation of Black citizens—because of Russell’s legislative guile and inflated moral reputation. And this is the man whose name adorns a Senate office building.
Russell was able to wield as much power and influence as he did because he cultivated an image not as a demagogue, like some Southern senators, but as a principled believer in constitutional government and states’ rights. As Robert Caro writes in Master of the Senate, the third volume of his monumental Lyndon Johnson biography, Russell “convinced northern liberals that he was not a racist, that he didn’t hate the Negro, that he was a moderate who truly wanted progress in racial relations.”