July 2, 1964: The Civil Rights Act Becomes Law

July 2, 1964, 50 years ago: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. Among those attending the signing ceremony is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then the nation's leading civil rights activist.

Angry over various events holding African-Americans back, President John F. Kennedy gave a nationally-televised speech on June 10, 1963, asking Congress for a bill that would ban racial and religious discrimination "in facilities which are open to the public: Hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments."

There were 3 key hurdles to the bill's passage. Many Congressional committees were then chaired by powerful Southern Democrats, unwilling to help civil rights. The bill had to pass the House Judiciary Committee. Fortunately, it was then chaired by Emmanuel Celler, a Jewish New Yorker, who got it through. The next step was being passed by the House Rules Committee, then chaired by Howard W. Smith, a racist from Virginia.

And before that could happen, Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Johnson, his Vice President and a Texan who favored the bill, became President, and demanded that the bill pass.

Smith knew the rules of the U.S. House of Representatives as well as anyone. But so did Celler, who had a plan: He filed a petition to discharge the bill from the Rules Committee, and move it directly to the House floor, for a vote by the full House. That required the support of a majority of House members.

When the Winter recess began, Celler was 50 votes short, but letters, telegrams and phone calls were coming in to members on the fence. Smith "read the room," and realized that he would be utterly humiliated if the bill was discharged, so he told the Rules Committee members they could vote their conscience, and it passed.

On February 10, 1964, the full House voted 290-130 to pass it. It went on to the Senate, and Southern Democrats filibustered it for 54 days. But Northern and Western Democrats, and Republicans who were conservative but believed that civil rights could be good for business, worked on breaking the filibuster. In particular, 2 Senators led the way: Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the Democrats' "Whip"; and Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Republicans' Leader. Each man's personal popularity was enough.

On June 19, 1964, the Senate passed the bill. The vote was 73-27. The Senators who voted No:

* Democrats: Lister Hill and John Sparkman of Alabama, William Fulbright and John McClellan of Arkansas, Spessard Holland and George Smathers of Florida, Richard Russell and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, Allen Ellender and Russell Long of Louisiana, James Eastland and John Stennis of Mississippi, Sam Ervin and Everett Jordan of North Carolina, Strom Thurmond and Olin Johnston of South Carolina, Albert Gore and Herbert Walters of Tennessee, Harry Byrd and Willis Robertson of Virginia, and Harry's cousin Robert Byrd of West Virginia.

* Republicans: Norris Cotton of New Hampshire, Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, Edwin Mechem of New Mexico, John Tower of Texas, Milward Simpson of Wyoming, and Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

The only Southern Senator of either Party to vote for the bill was Ralph Yarborough of Texas, an ally of LBJ's, who was with him in the car behind the one carrying JFK, Governor John Connally, and their wives when JFK was assassinated in Dallas. One of the reasons JFK went to Dallas in the first place was because, after Tower won LBJ's Senate seat, becoming the 1st Republican Senator in the South since Reconstruction, Texas' Democrats were split between factions led by Yarborough (a liberal) and Connally (a conservative who would later switch to the Republicans).

Robert Byrd, the Senate Majority Leader from 1977 to 1988, would later renounce his racist past. Ervin didn't, but redeemed himself somewhat with his Chairmanship of the Select Committee investigating Watergate in 1973 and '74.

Thurmond had been Governor of South Carolina in 1948, and briefly left the Democratic Party to run for President on the ticket of the States' Rights Party, all former Democrats. From that point onward, Southern Democrats who opposed civil rights were known as "Dixiecrats." Thurmond launched a filibuster designed to stop the Civil Rights Act of 1957, lasting a little over 24 hours, setting a record previously held by Huey Long of Louisiana, Russell's father. When the CRA of 1964 became law, Thurmond became the 1st major Democratic official in the South to switch to the Republican Party.

Gore, whose son Al would also be elected to both houses of Congress, serve as Bill Clinton's Vice President, and be the Democratic nominee for President in 2000, was running for re-election, and was, by his own admission, afraid to vote for the bill. He had previously voted for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. His re-election secure, he went on to vote for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the confirmation of Thurgood Marshall as the 1st black Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. He lost his next bid for re-election in 1970, but that's been attributed to his opposition to the Vietnam War, rather than to his pro-civil rights votes.

Robertson was the father of Marion G. "Pat" Robertson, the Virginia Beach-based televangelist who ran for the Republican nomination for President in 1988, and has been a major figure in "Christian" conservatism ever since, often on the back of various forms of bigotry.

Cotton -- no relation to current Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas -- also ended up voting for every other Civil Rights Act from 1957 to 1968, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the 24th Amendment, banning poll taxes. (Gore was not present for the vote on that.) He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he said, on the grounds that part of it was unconstitutional.

Goldwater, like Cotton, claimed the bill was unconstitutional. Although he was the conservative movement's favorite son at the time, he had never previously been accused of racism. Indeed, in Arizona, a State then with few Black people, Hispanics and Native Americans praised him for his efforts on their behalf.

Hickenlooper was the great-uncle of John Hickenlooper, now a Senator from Colorado, previously that State's Governor and Mayor of Denver -- and a Democrat. Simpson was the father of a later Senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson.

The bill the Senate passed was slightly different from the one passed by the House, so the House had to approve it again. That took until July 2, and the vote was 289-126. Now, it headed to the President's desk, and LBJ wasted no time: He called in the media, and he called in key figures, including Dr. King, and the Attorney General, who was also the previous President's brother, Robert F. Kennedy.

It was Johnson who began the tradition of the President using a different pen to sign each letter of his name, including the period after the middle initial B. This way, he could give out 15 ceremonial pens -- 6 for "Lyndon," 2 for "B.," and 7 for "Johnson" -- and 15 different people could truthfully say, "I have the pen that made this bill a law.

On the film, he can be heard telling RFK to give pens to his deputies, Nicholas Katzenbach and Burke Marshall, as well as to take one for himself. The best-known photograph of the ceremony, shown above, shows LBJ giving a pen to MLK.

A generous gesture, given that LBJ and RFK couldn't stand each other, for reasons that don't matter here. Soon, RFK would resign as Attorney General -- he probably would have if his brother lived, anyway, to run the re-election campaign -- and ran for a U.S. Senate seat from New York. He won it -- but won by a smaller margin than Johnson did in the State.

By this point, Goldwater had already secured the Republican nomination for President, beating out pro-civil rights candidates like Governors Nelson Rockefeller of New York and William Scranton of Pennsylvania, and former Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts.

But people who cared about civil rights -- for or against -- didn't care why Goldwater voted against the Act, only that he did. Southerners who would never have voted for the nominee of "the Party of Lincoln" before voted for Goldwater. And Midwestern and Western States that would have normally voted Republican went for Johnson.

On Election Day, November 3, Johnson won 61.0 percent of the national popular vote, still an all-time record, while Goldwater got just 38.4 percent. Johnson won 44 States with 486 Electoral Votes, Goldwater 6 with 52. Goldwater won Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, all in the South; and his home State of Arizona, barely, with 50.4 percent, a winning margin of 4,782 votes.

He came close in some other Southern States. He got 48.8 percent in Florida, 46.1 in Virginia, and was the 1st Republican in the 20th Century to top 40 percent in Tennessee, Oklahoma, North Carolina and Arkansas.

He also got 49.1 percent in Idaho, 47.4 in Nebraska, 45.1 in Utah and 45.0 in Kansas. But if he had won every State where he got at least 45 percent, that still would have given him only 98 Electoral Votes. Even if he had won every State where he got at least 40 percent, including California (40.8, then with 40 EVs) and Illinois (40.5, 26), he still would have had only 199, well short of the necessary majority of 270.

To be fair, the false perception that Goldwater was racist was not the only reason he lost. But it didn't help. As no less than Jackie Robinson, a Republican who had worked for Rockefeller, put it, "It would make everything I worked for meaningless if baseball were integrated, but America's political parties were segregated."

Johnson knew it, too: "I think we have just given the South to the Republican Party for a generation." It's now been 3 generations. There have been blips since, but:

* Virginia has voted for the Democratic nominee for President in every election since 2008. But, before that, it hadn't voted for one since 1976, Jimmy Carter; and not for a non-Southern Democratic nominee since 1948, Harry Truman.

* Georgia voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Other than that, they haven't voted for the Democratic nominee since Bill Clinton in 1992.

* Florida last voted for the Democratic nominee in 2012, Barack Obama.

* North Carolina last voted for the Democratic nominee in 2008, Obama. Other than that, they haven't voted for the Democratic nominee since 1976; and not for a non-Southern Democratic nominee since 1948.

* Arkansas, Tennessee and Louisiana last voted for the Democratic nominee in 1996, Bill Clinton. Arkansas last voted for a non-Southern Democratic nominee in 1956, Adlai Stevenson; Louisiana in 1952, Stevenson; and Tennessee in 1948. Tennessee didn't even vote for native son Al Gore in 2000.

* Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina last voted for the Democratic nominee in 1976, and haven't voted for a non-Southern Democratic nominee since 1960, John F. Kennedy.

* Oklahoma, last voted for the Democratic nominee in 1976, and haven't voted for a non-Southern Democratic nominee since 1948.

We will never know how many of the 21 Democrats who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would have done so if they weren't afraid of their respective electorates dumping them for more racist candidates in Democratic Primaries, or switching to Republican candidates.

What we do know is that racism, like all other forms of bigotry, is an inherently conservative trait, and the American Southeast remains conservative. And when conservatism meant switching from Democratic to Republican, they did, and have stayed as such.

And what has voting Republican gotten them? Extended poverty and lousy services.

Neil Young may be Canadian, and ineligible to vote in America, but he was right: "Southern man, better use your head." And Lynyrd Skynyrd were wrong: A Southern man does need him around, anyhow.