The first 20th-century breakthrough for civil
rights occurred in 1954 when, in Brown v. the
Board of Education of Topeka, the high court
unanimously ruled that segregation in public schools
was inherently unequal, thus unconstitutional.
Despite the Brown decision, integration of southern
schools was exasperatingly slow. So as the decade
unfolded, the pace of protests, boycotts, and
violent reactions quickened. The movement's
main driver was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., an
advocate of nonviolent protest and a brilliant
strategist. In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower
ordered federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to
oversee the desegregation of Central High School,
setting a precedent for executive branch
intervention to enforce court orders.
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In 1960,
presidential candidate Kennedy supported civil
rights legislation, but once ensconced in the Oval
Office, he did little more than give the issue lip
service. JFK had won a squeaker election with
support from working-class southerners, and so he
feared antagonizing the white South. But events in
Birmingham, Ala., in May 1963 prodded Kennedy to
act. Thousands of peaceful protesters--led by
King--converged on the city, seeking the integration
of restaurants and jobs for local blacks. Police
Chief Eugene "Bull" Connor, an archetype
of helmeted white authority, ordered his men to
attack the demonstrators with police dogs,
high-pressure water hoses, and cattle prods. And it
was all captured on film by national news
photographers and television cameramen. The images
that were transmitted from Birmingham, JFK said,
made him feel sick.
"Kennedy changed
completely after Birmingham," Loevy says, and
he threw the full weight of his office behind
passage of the act. The drama moved from the streets
to Congress. There the bill faced a huge hurdle: the
filibuster, the legislative stonewalling device that
the Senate's 22 southern members could use to
kill legislation that a congressional majority
supported. At the time of his assassination on Nov.
22, 1963, Kennedy--who still worried about
re-election--was negotiating to water down the bill.
Proponents, led by new President Lyndon B.
Johnson--a former Senate majority leader and a
master of legislative procedure--eventually passed a
stronger measure by evoking the memory of the slain
leader. The assassination gave LBJ "an
incredible amount of legislative and psychological
leverage, and Johnson knew how to use it,"
recalls Robert Mann, who at the time was an aide to
Louisiana Sen. Russell Long.
Land of
Lincoln. As expected, the southern senators
filibustered to derail the act. It lasted 83 days,
the longest in Senate history. A successful cloture
vote was needed to end the talkfest, but that
required 67 of the body's 100 votes. To do an
end run around the filibuster, Johnson's forces
negotiated with Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen of
Illinois, who controlled about eight Republican
votes. Deeply conservative, Dirksen was also a man
of conscience with a sense of history. He felt that
by supporting the bill, he was walking in Abraham
Lincoln's footsteps. When cloture was invoked
on June 10, 1964, Dirksen paraphrased French author
Victor Hugo, saying that "stronger than all the
armies is an idea whose time has come," and
that civil rights for all Americans was such an
idea. On July 2, 1964, LBJ signed the bill into law.
Johnson, whose earlier record on civil rights was
spotty at best, was heartfelt in his support of the
measure. But he correctly forecast that its passage
would help deliver a southern majority to the
Republicans. Although the measure couldn't have
passed without key GOP support, "the
Republicans got a free ride in the South," Mann
says.
