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Two Southerners were not so sure: South Carolina's Strom Thurmond, hero of the Dixiecrat uprising in the Democratic Party in 1948, suggested that they march in a body down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House to see Eisenhower and tell him they would not back down; his stalemate Olin ("the Solon") Johnston had a 40-hour speech ready for one of the biggest filibusters of all time. Calmly Russell argued Thurmond out of his proposal. He told Olin the Solon to keep his speech handy, just in case. Then Virginia's Harry Byrd summed up the sense of the meeting. "Dick," he said, "it's up to you."
"Let's Keep Germane." Dick Russell got down to the business of detail. A master of legal terrain, with uncanny insight into the minds of his adversaries, he knew where the weak spots lay. The Justice Department had advertised the civil rights bill as "moderate right-to-vote legislation," but had written into it complex injunctive powers that rested, so said the Southerners, on the "Force Acts" of Reconstruction. Dick Russell defined two outstanding targets: the bill's Part III, which granted authority for the U.S. Attorney General to get injunctions from Federal Courts to prevent abuses of all kinds of Negro rights; Part IV, the specific "right to vote" clause, which could be undermined by a jury-trial amendment that would ultimately leave Southern defendants in the hands of Southern white juries.
Then Russell assigned the sectors—North Carolina's genial Sam Ervin, who had sat on the subcommittee hearings on the legislation, would scout the overall area; Arkansas' Bill Fulbright (the darling of Northern literary liberals) and Alabama's John Sparkman, another man of liberal repute and Adlai Stevenson's running mate in 1952, would concentrate on jury trial; Alabama's Lister Hill, a liberal in good standing with labor, would ring the alarm bells in the ranks of organized labor, which is historically opposed to the use of Federal Court injunctions in strike situations; Arkansas' John McClellan, noted by television and general repute across the whole country for his stern morality, would stress the immorality of Part III. Russell's fellow Georgian, Herman Talmadge, proposed that the Southerners take every opportunity to get onto TV-radio forums like Face the Nation and Meet the Press; Russell quickly endorsed the idea.
Lawyer Russell handed out a word of caution to all: "We've got a good case on the merits. Let's keep the argument germane. Let's see if we can keep our speeches restrained, and not inflammatory."