Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act; King watches as a year's promise becomes law
By the summer of 1964, the promise Kennedy had made a year earlier still sat unfulfilled in Congress, and the South had just spent 72 days trying to bury it in the Senate. On July 2, 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law at the White House, with Martin Luther King Jr. among those watching. The act outlawed discrimination by race, color, religion, sex, and national origin in schools, workplaces, and public accommodations. The House had passed it 290 to 130, the Senate 73 to 27.
The Act's passage triggered one of the most consequential political realignments in American history, driving Southern white voters from the Democratic Party toward the Republicans over the following decades. Its enforcement architecture — extended through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 — became the template for federal civil rights law for the rest of the century.
QWhy did Howard Smith, a segregationist, add the provision banning sex discrimination?
Howard W. Smith, the Virginia chairman of the House Rules Committee who had originally tried to block the entire bill, introduced the amendment adding sex to the list of protected categories in Title VII. His colleague Carl Elliott of Alabama later said flatly that Smith "didn't give a damn about women's rights" and was instead trying to peel off votes, since a bloc of congressmen reliably opposed anything resembling equal rights for women. Smith may also have calculated that Republicans, who had backed equal rights for women in their party platform since 1944, would vote for it and complicate the bill's passage. The amendment passed anyway, and Title VII became one of the most consequential pieces of the law.
QHow did a dying senator manage to vote during the cloture vote?
Clair Engle of California was suffering from terminal brain cancer by June 1964 and had lost the ability to speak. Wheeled into the Senate chamber for the historic cloture vote that broke the 72-day filibuster, Engle could not answer the roll call verbally. Instead he raised his hand and pointed to his own left eye, a prearranged signal understood to mean "aye." He died less than two months later, in July 1964, having cast one of the decisive votes of the civil rights era from a wheelchair he could barely control.
QHow long did the Senate filibuster against the bill actually last?
Southern senators led by Richard Russell of Georgia held the floor for 72 consecutive days, the longest filibuster in Senate history up to that point, trying to talk the Civil Rights Act to death before it could reach a vote. Russell was explicit about the goal, declaring senators would "resist to the bitter end" anything tending toward "social equality and intermingling... of the races." The filibuster finally broke on June 19, 1964, when cloture passed and the bill moved to a 73–27 final vote, just two weeks before Johnson signed it into law.
