US Civil Rights Act
The Civil Rights Act was signed on 2 July 1964 after the longest filibuster in the Senate's history. The bill had been proposed by Kennedy in June 1963 after Birmingham, where police dogs and fire hoses had been used on schoolchildren, and it was stalled in committee when he was killed. Johnson made it his first legislative priority, told Congress that no memorial oration could honour Kennedy's memory more than passing it, and then spent seven months applying the techniques he had perfected as majority leader. The obstacle was his own party. Southern Democrats held the committee chairmanships by seniority, and eighteen of them, with one Republican, held the Senate floor for sixty working days; Robert Byrd spoke for over fourteen hours in a single stretch. Cloture had never been achieved on a civil rights bill. It was achieved on 10 June 1964, on a vote assembled by Hubert Humphrey and by the Republican leader Everett Dirksen, whose support was the necessary condition and who quoted Victor Hugo about ideas whose time has come. Title II ended segregation in public accommodations, Title VI cut federal funds to any programme that discriminated, and Title VII prohibited employment discrimination — with the word sex inserted into it by a southern opponent, possibly to sink the bill, which is how American women acquired the strongest legal instrument they have. Johnson is said to have remarked that the Democrats had lost the South for a generation. He was optimistic. The act's reach came from an unlikely constitutional hook. Public accommodations were desegregated under the commerce clause rather than the Fourteenth Amendment, because an 1883 precedent had held that the amendment reached state action only, and the Supreme Court upheld it that December in a case about a motel in Atlanta.
- Year: 1964 CE
- Category: Political
