Civil Rights Act Signed: Johnson Bans Discrimination Forever

The United States Senate passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on June 19, ending a filibuster that had consumed fifty-four working days, the longest in Senate history. The bill, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, had cleared the House in February but faced determined opposition from Southern Democrats who understood that its passage would dismantle the legal architecture of Jim Crow segregation. President Lyndon Johnson signed the act into law on July 2, using seventy-five pens that he distributed to supporters. Johnson had taken up the civil rights cause after President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, making passage of the bill a memorial to the slain president and a moral imperative for the nation. Kennedy had introduced the legislation in June 1963, prompted by the violence in Birmingham, Alabama, where police commissioner Bull Connor had turned fire hoses and attack dogs on child demonstrators. The bill faced certain death by filibuster until Johnson enlisted Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, whose support brought enough Republican votes to invoke cloture and cut off debate. The act's provisions were sweeping. Title II prohibited discrimination in public accommodations: restaurants, hotels, theaters, and gas stations. Title VII banned employment discrimination and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce it. Title VI prohibited discrimination in federally funded programs, giving the federal government leverage over schools, hospitals, and other institutions receiving public money. Southern resistance was immediate. Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, decided in December 1964, upheld the act's constitutionality under the Commerce Clause. Johnson told his aide Bill Moyers after signing the act: "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come." The political realignment he predicted has lasted sixty years.