50th Anniversary: Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Deborah Bayliss | As of Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Lyndon B. Johnson shake hands with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Lyndon B. Johnson shake hands with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

President Barack Obama along with former presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and others, gathered last week for a three-day Civil Rights Summit held at the LBJ (Lyndon B. Johnson) Presidential Library, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Bill’s passage and to honor Johnson’s legislative legacy.

As he introduced President Barack Obama during the event, U. S. Rep. John Lewis said of Johnson, “His legacy was to make society a better place and move us closer to the “Beloved Community,” referring to a term popularized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who envisioned a society based on justice, equal opportunity, and love of one's fellow human beings.

“Like many of us, he was not a perfect man,” said President Obama, after a few minutes of extolling Johnson’s legislative virtues. “His experiences in rural Texas may have stretched his moral imagination, but he was ambitious, very ambitious, a young man in a hurry to plot his own escape from poverty and chart his own political career.  In the Jim Crow South, that meant not challenging convention.  During his first 20 years in Congress, he opposed every civil rights bill that came up for a vote, once calling the push for federal legislation ‘a farce and a sham.’  He was chosen as a vice presidential nominee in part because of his affinity with, and ability to deliver, that Southern white vote.  And at the beginning of the Kennedy administration, he shared with President Kennedy, a caution towards racial controversy.” 

“Marchers kept marching and four little girls were killed in a church,” Obama continued to remark. “Bloody Sunday happened.  The winds of change blew.  And when the time came, when LBJ stood in the Oval Office -- I picture him standing there, taking up the entire doorframe, looking out over the South Lawn in a quiet moment -- and asked himself what the true purpose of his office was for, what was the endpoint of his ambitions, he would reach back in his own memory and he’d remember his own experience with want (as someone who grew up in poverty). 

According to historical accounts, Johnson, born Aug. 27, 1908, in central Texas, is said to have pushed more legislation for minorities in his first two years of office, than any other president--signing bills and acts that included the War on Poverty, the Civil Rights legislation, the Voting Rights Act, Medicaid and Medicare, all towards his goal for “A Great Society.”

Though Johnson as president, came to the aid of minorities with civil rights legislation, as a congressman, he is said to have voted with his fellow Southern Democrats, against civil rights measures such as banning lynching, eliminating poll taxes and denying federal funding to segregated schools.

Whatever the motivation, Johnson at some point changed his legislative course in favor of civil rights.

According to information from Black History.com, attempts were made to sabotage the Civil Rights Bill but it eventually passed in the House with a bipartisan 290-130 vote.

The bill then moved to the Senate, where southern and border state Democrats 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 over 14 consecutive hours. The bill eventually obtained the two-thirds votes necessary to end debate with one of the votes coming from California Senator Clair Engle, who, though too sick to speak, signaled “aye” by pointing to his own eye. After breaking the filibuster, the Senate voted 73-27 in favor of the bill, and Johnson signed it into law on July 2, 1964, using 72 ceremonial pens, flanked by Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and other civil rights figures, while seated at a desk in the East Room of the White House.

Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Johnson, as Kennedy’s vice president, was sworn in as President and pushed through legislative initiatives that Kennedy was advocating for at the time of his death—such as the a new civil rights bill, and urged the nation to embrace the ideals of “a great society, where the meaning of man's life matches the marvels of a man's labor."

In 1964, Johnson was re-elected President with 61 percent of the vote.

The “Great Society” program became Johnson's agenda for Congress in January 1965 and promoted the creation of ground-breaking educational, urban renewal, beautification programs, Medicare, the war against poverty and removal of obstacles to the right to vote and other societal initiatives.

Two major additions to the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 included the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited literacy tests and other discriminatory voting practices, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which banned discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of property.

“LBJ was nothing if not a realist,” Obama said. “He was well aware that the law alone isn’t enough to change hearts and minds.  A full century after Lincoln’s time, he said, “Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skin, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”

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