The Passage of the Civil Rights Act

When the Civil Rights Act passed fifty years ago, it was immediately hailed as one of the most important pieces of legislation of the twentieth century. Not only did it ban discrimination in hotels, restaurants, public parks, schools, and the workforce; it also established, finally, the principle that the federal government would stand behind the rights of every citizen to be treated equally—and not just by the government, but by the whole of American society.

But if the legacy of the act is impressive, just as impressive is the fact that it passed in the first place.

There was nothing inevitable about the Civil Rights Act. By early 1963 President John F. Kennedy had made it clear that he was unwilling to risk his ties to the pro-segregation Southern Democrats by pushing for major legislation. And the Southern Democrats were an imposing challenge indeed: they controlled most of the important committees, and if a bill actually made it to the floor, they had enough allies to mount a filibuster, essentially talking the bill to death.

So what happened? How did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 come to pass when so many efforts before it had failed?

Kennedy had run on a strong civil rights platform in 1960. But once in office, he dawdled, relying on symbolic actions like White House appointments and executive orders to forestall real action. A series of increasingly violent confrontations in the South—the student sit-ins of 1960, the Freedom Rides, the integration riots at the University of Mississippi, and finally Martin Luther King, Jr.’s protest movement in Birmingham, Alabama—convinced Kennedy that a federal response was necessary. In a moving televised speech on June 11, 1963, he asked, "If an American, because his skin is dark . . . cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?" Less than two weeks later, he sent his civil rights bill to Congress.

The centerpiece of the bill was Title II, which outlawed discrimination in restaurants, hotels, theaters, and other privately owned, publicly accessible businesses. It also enforced school integration and banned the use of federal funds for discriminatory purposes.

The bill was almost assured passage in the House, where it was introduced, because pro-civil-rights members of both parties dominated the lower chamber. But there was a danger in having too many friends. Liberal members of the House Judiciary Committee, which debated the bill before sending it to the House floor, wanted to see it beefed up with additional measures, including a ban on job discrimination. But the administration and its allies were afraid of making the bill too strong—once in the Senate, it might scare off potential moderate supporters, and it needed every vote it could get to overcome a southern filibuster.

After several weeks of debate, the Judiciary Committee approved the bill on October 29, having strengthened it in a number of ways, most notably with the addition of a title to outlaw discrimination in the workplace through the creation of a new government agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Before the bill could move to the House floor, though, it had to go through the Rules Committee, a sort of gateway body that set the rules for the floor debate. Unlike the liberal-dominated Judiciary Committee, the Rules Committee was run by an ardent southern segregationist, Howard "Judge" Smith, who vowed to bottle up the bill. It was still there on November 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

Five days later, Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, gave an address to both houses of Congress in which he insisted that the country honor Kennedy’s legislative legacy—"above all, the dream of equal rights for all Americans, whatever their race or color." The moral force behind Kennedy’s vision, combined with Johnson’s reputation as a wheeler and dealer, proved a powerful fillip for the languishing bill.

It helped, too, that Congressional Republicans were growing tired of Southern Democratic intransigence. Many still stuck to their identity as the Party of Lincoln, and they desperately wanted to win the black vote in the 1964 elections. At the end of the year Republican leaders met with Southern Democrats and threatened to go around them to get the bill to the House floor. By mid-January Smith, realizing he was cornered, agreed to let the bill go.

But he wasn’t done pulling tricks. On February 8, on the House floor, Smith offered an amendment to add "sex" to the list of categories protected from employment discrimination. Smith never explained quite what he was up to, but he had a long history of supporting women’s rights issues (seemingly in contradiction to his racism, but a strongly held position nonetheless). He clearly wanted to complicate the bill—even many of its supporters were still dyed deep in the male chauvinist wool of the time—but also, if the bill was inevitable, to make sure it covered women as well. If he wanted to stop the bill, he failed; sex was added, and a few days later the House approved the Civil Rights Act. Now it confronted its real test: the Senate.

Even as the bill was wending its way through Congress, it was drawing support from a robust "coalition of conscience" outside Capitol Hill. Under the umbrella title of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, organizations as diverse as the United Automobile Workers, the National Council of Churches, and the NAACP had devised a two-prong strategy: lobby Congress and build a massive grassroots movement behind the bill. Members of the Leadership Council group came together in August 1963 for the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice; weeks later, hundreds of religious leaders, civil rights workers, and legislative experts fanned out across the Midwest, meeting with congregations and community groups to catalyze support for the bill in states where, until now, civil rights had never been an issue.

The Midwest, which was dominated by Republicans, was key to the bill’s survival in the Senate. To block the legislation, the Southern Democrats would launch a filibuster; to beat it, the bill would need sixty-seven votes for "cloture," or an end to the discussion. In the past, the southerners had sustained filibusters by making alliances with midwestern Republicans, who were not pro-segregation but, without a sizeable black population in their region, felt comfortable trading their votes for southern support on their own pet issues, like lower federal spending. Indeed, it looked like this same fate might await the Civil Rights Act: when it first reached the Senate, only forty-five senators were committed to cloture.

The bill’s supporters targeted Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Senate minority leader and, unofficially, the dean of the midwestern Republicans. If he could be persuaded to back the bill, he would likely bring most of his region’s delegation with him, all but sealing cloture. Dirksen was a strongly conservative Republican, and he had made it clear from the beginning that he would oppose the bill unless Title 2 and, after it was added, Title 7 were made voluntary. But he also had a solid record on civil rights, and he had played a critical role in the passage of the 1957 and the 1960 civil rights acts.

On May 1 Dirksen announced that he would enter negotiations with the bill’s supporters. He came with nearly 100 amendments—some large, some small—but over time that was eroded to a few dozen, which included just two major changes: a limit on when the Department of Justice could sue over a Title 2 violation, and a similar limit on Title 7. Finally, on May 19, Dirksen announced that he would support the bill, and over the next several weeks he lobbied his fellow Republicans to follow him.

It worked: On June 10, the seventy-five-day filibuster—totaling 534 hours, one minute, and fifty-one seconds of debate, by far the longest in history—was brought to a close by seventy-one senators from both parties. About a week later, the Senate voted to pass the bill itself. It went back to the House for final approval and was signed by President Johnson on July 2, 1964.

What brought about the shift in the Senate? One factor was Dirksen’s leadership, whether principled or opportunistic. Another was the filibuster itself. At the time, the Senate could not take up any other issue while the filibuster was underway, and Senate business had ground to a halt. After several weeks of that, all but the most diehard segregationists were beginning to hope for the end. A third factor was pressure from the civil rights movement, in particular from the synagogues and Protestant and Catholic churches that had spent so much time and effort across the Midwest to lobby their congressmen for the bill.

This massive grassroots effort, combined with the overwhelming support for the bill in Congress, is also an important reason why the bill, particularly Title 2, was peacefully, if grudgingly, accepted by the South. At the end of the month the Department of Justice, which took detailed records of these things, noted just a few dozen incidents of outright defiance across the region.

The Civil Rights Act was a rare thing indeed: a piece of legislation that was strong to begin with and in fact grew stronger as it traveled through Congress. And that could never have happened without the intense, often bitter but ultimately successful interplay between the powers that be in Washington and the ordinary citizens for whom they purport to govern.

Clay Risen is an editor at the New York Times and the author, most recently, of The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (Bloomsbury, 2014).