(7 of 7)
In this sort of strategic situation, the civil rights forces are bound to keep coming on, this year, next year, year after next, inexorably. Even now Dick Russell's rearguard is fighting from a line set back more deeply in the Southern heartland than ever before. For all of his brilliant strategic success in breaking the back of the civil rights bill of 1957, some sort of civil rights bill, however scrawny, will almost surely be enacted one day soon, and the fact of the passage may, in the long perspective of history, count for more than the substance.
Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia, quiet, able, dedicated defender of the old cause, knows this too. "You're just fighting a delaying action," a philosophical friend in Georgia once observed. "I know," said Dick Russell. "But I am trying to delay it—ten years if I'm not lucky, 200 years if I am." But Dick Russell does not really trust to luck in fighting his Senate campaigns. He believes, as he told his Southern colleagues at their secret caucus, in fighting a "case on the merits." And over the long pull, Dick Russell does not have much of a case.