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Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dawkins, Wayne, author.
Title: Emanuel Celler: immigration and civil rights champion / Wayne Dawkins.
Description: Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020017652 (print) | LCCN 2020017653 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496805355 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496829870 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496829887 (epub) | ISBN 9781496829894 (epub) | ISBN 9781496829900 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496829863 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Celler, Emanuel, 18881981. | Jewish legislatorsUnited StatesBiography. | LegislatorsUnited StatesBiography. | PoliticiansUnited StatesBiography. | Civil rightsUnited States. | Emigration and immigration lawUnited States.
Classification: LCC E748.C4 D39 2020 (print) | LCC E748.C4 (ebook) | DDC 328.73/092 [B]dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017652
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017653
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Preface
Emanuel Celler was floor manager for four constitutional amendments, and he is the godfather of civil rights legislation, a major player in the 1957, 1960, and landmark 1964 Civil Rights Acts. Most of all he was cosponsor of late twentieth-century immigration reform, now a hot-button twenty-first-century topic. I accomplished a few things, US representative Emanuel Celler told Washington Post reporter Richard Lyons in 1972. The congressman accomplished much more than a few things. During fifty years of public service Celler had a hand in the enactment of at least four hundred laws.
The history of twentieth-century America can be divided into two eras: pre-1965 immigration reform and post-1965 immigration reform. In the first two-thirds of the century, America was perceived as a European-stocked nation dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Because of 1960s voting rights and immigration reform laws, a majority-white Democratic-red South changed into a white Republican-red South. The changes opened up the Democratic Party in the North, and in the South, southern blacks emerged in the blue Democratic Party.
Those two decisionsimmigration and voting rightscreated the America we have now. We know about President Lyndon B. Johnsons 1960s-era accomplishments. But few know the less grandiose, yet crucial, accomplishments of a forgotten man, Emanuel Celler. One duty of the historian is to reintroduce and reappraise the forgotten elements of the past.
By 1953, Emanuel Celler had served less than four years as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. A liberal Democrat, he had experienced plenty as an elected official: the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal, and World War II. Celler unequivocally supported the postwar establishment of a state of Israelan issue close to Cellers heart both because of his personal background and because of the ethnic composition of his Brooklyn district. In 1953 Celler published You Never Leave Brooklyn, an autobiography that covered his first thirty years as a congressman. Cellers primary accomplishments in the House by that time included modest immigration reforms and a mixed record of placing regulatory controls on corporate monopoly power.
Although Celler, who was sixty-five at the time of You Never Leave Brooklyn, had much to say in his autobiography, his best legislative work still lay ahead of him. A dozen years later Celler cowrote revolutionary immigration reform that in the final three decades of the twentieth century altered the racial and ethnic demographics of America. Celler legislated tenaciously and boldly when discriminatory ethnic- and race-based immigration policy became a foreign policy liability.
A dozen years before four decades of Euro-specific immigration policies began in the 1920s, one out of seven Americans was foreign born. By 1970, such social engineering widened the ratio to one out of twenty Americans being foreign born. After 2010 and four decades of immigration reform, the gap narrowed again and returned to one of every seven Americans being foreign born. Eighty-one percent of immigrants now come to the United States from Latin America and Asia. Thats the reverse of fifty years earlier when 85 percent of all foreign-born immigrants were from Europe and Canada.
In addition, Celler was a behind-the-scenes change agent in a handful of 1950s and 1960s civil rights milestones. President Lyndon B. Johnson and before him aides to presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy urged Celler to hold prompt hearings regarding civil rights and voting rights bills. Furthermore, the Judiciary Committee chairman was the lead writer and floor manager of these bills.
After four decades of portrayals as a white, European-heritage America, the United States of post-1960s immigration reform is an undeniably multiracial and multicultural representative of every continent on earth. Until the policies were changed, it would have been unimaginable to witness the elections of South Asiandescent governors of Louisiana and South Carolina, US senators of Cuban descent from Florida, Texas, and New Jersey, a biracial president who is the son of a Kenyan college student who married a white Kansan in Hawaii, a non-mainland US state.
Celler also took pride in being the lead House author of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution that abolished poll taxes, a tool that southern segregationists had used for generations to disenfranchise black voters. Celler was also lead writer of two other constitutional amendments, the Twenty-Third that granted voting rights to residents of the District of Columbia, and coauthor with Senator Birch Bayh, D-Indiana, of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment that established an orderly succession if the president were unable to function. For all these reasons, this is a good time for a biography of Celler (18881981), an important, unsung American leader.
I found the congressman while conducting research nearly a decade ago for a 2012 biography of voting rights champion and journalist Andrew W. Cooper, another little-known hero from Brooklyn. Cellers district was among five gerrymandered districts that were redrawn after Coopers 1966 voting rights lawsuit, which resulted in Shirley Chisholm, Americas first black congresswoman, winning one of the redrawn congressional seats. Cooper became an irascible political journalist whose words raised the profile of Brooklyn at the end of the twentieth century.
