1964
THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964
Following the Civil War, a trio of constitutional amendments abolished slavery (the 13th Amendment), made formerly enslaved people citizens (the 14th Amendment), and gave all men the right to vote regardless of race (the 15th Amendment).
Nonetheless, many states—particularly in the South—used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other measures to keep their Black citizens essentially disenfranchised. These states also enforced strict segregation through “Jim Crow” laws and were hotbeds of violence by white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.
For decades after Reconstruction, the U.S. Congress did not pass a single civil rights act. Finally, in 1957, it established a civil rights section of the Justice Department, along with a Commission on Civil Rights to investigate discriminatory conditions.
Also in 1957, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and began lecturing nationwide, urging active nonviolence to achieve civil rights for Black Americans. In 1960 he returned to Atlanta to become copastor with his father of Ebenezer Baptist Church. He was arrested and jailed for protesting segregation at a lunch counter; the case drew national attention, and presidential candidate John F. Kennedy interceded to obtain his release.
Congress in 1960 provided for court-appointed referees to help Black people register to vote.
When John F. Kennedy entered the White House in 1961, he initially delayed supporting new anti-discrimination measures. But with protests springing up throughout the South—including one in Birmingham, Alabama, where police brutally suppressed nonviolent demonstrators with dogs, clubs, and high-pressure fire hoses—Kennedy decided to act.
In 1963 King helped organize the March on Washington, an assembly of more than 200,000 people at which he made his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. In June 1963 Kennedy proposed by far the most comprehensive civil rights legislation to date, saying the United States “will not be fully free until all of its citizens are free.” The March on Washington influenced the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and King was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for Peace.
Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963 in Dallas, after which new President Lyndon B. Johnson immediately took up the cause. “Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined,” Johnson said in his first State of the Union address.
During debate on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Southerners argued, among other things, that the bill unconstitutionally usurped individual liberties and states’ rights. In the end, the House approved the bill with bipartisan support by a vote of 290-130.
The bill then moved to the U.S. Senate, where southern and border state Democrats, arguing that the bill unconstitutionally usurped individual liberties and states’ rights, staged a 75-day filibuster—among the longest in U.S. history. On one occasion, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former Ku Klux Klan member, spoke for more than 14 consecutive hours. But with the help of behind-the-scenes “horse-trading,” the bill’s supporters eventually obtained the two-thirds votes necessary to end debate. One of those votes came from California Senator Clair Engle, who, though too sick to speak, signaled “aye” by pointing to his own eye.
Having broken the filibuster, the Senate voted 73-27 in favor of the bill, and Johnson signed it into law on July 2, 1964. “It is an important gain, but I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,” Johnson, a Democrat, purportedly told an aide later that day in a prediction that would largely come true.
King said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was nothing less than a “second emancipation.”
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