FDR’s Court-packing and the Struggle for Civil Rights

and safety from racial violence into a coherent package. Davis, a thirty-two-year-old Harvard Law graduate and the first full-time civil rights lobbyist in American history, was no stranger to the ritualized sparring of congressional testimony.4 Introduced by the Committee Chairman as “a witness who represents a large number of colored people,” Davis was a widely recognized spokesman for the Black left and national secretary of the National Negro Congress (NNC).5 Although little known today, he was a towering civil rights figure during the 1930s, described by one biographer as “inspir[ing] more excitement, energy, and protest at the black grassroots level than any African American since Marcus Garvey.”6 In his testimony, he laid out detailed arguments for his position, directly cited and harshly criticized specific Supreme Court precedents, and deftly parried the “vicious questions” of pro-segregation Southern senators.7 Although his remarks, ignored by the On April 16, 1937, a radical young lawyer named John P. Davis testified before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary in favor of President Roosevelt’s Courtpacking plan.1 As the only Black witness to testify over nearly five weeks of hearings, Davis argued that increasing the size of the Supreme Court would push the United States towards racial equality while protecting the civil rights of Black Americans.2 When white witnesses touched briefly on Black issues, they almost uniformly argued against Courtpacking and advocated the so-called bulwark theory of civil rights, expressed in some quarters of the Black community, that the Court was a final refuge for vindicating the rights of individual Black Americans targeted by the oppressive racial violence of Southern states and denied justice by Southern courts.3 But Davis represented a very different vision of civil rights, originating in left-wing parts of the Black community, that integrated labor and economic issues, citizenship rights, FDR’s Court-packing and the Struggle for Civil Rights