The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pub. L. 88–352, 78 Stat. 241, enacted July 2, 1964) is a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations, and employment discrimination. The act is considered one of the most significant legislative achievements in American history.
Initially, powers given to enforce the act were weak, but these were supplemented during later years. Congress asserted its authority to legislate under several different parts of the United States Constitution, principally its enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce under the Commerce Clause of Article I, Section 8, its duty to guarantee all citizens equal protection of the laws under the 14th Amendment, and its duty to protect voting rights under the 15th Amendment.
The legislation was proposed by President John F. Kennedy in June 1963, but it was opposed by filibuster in the Senate. After Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed the bill forward. The United States House of Representatives passed the bill on February 10, 1964, and after a 72-day filibuster, it passed the United States Senate on June 19, 1964. The final vote was 290–130 in the House of Representatives and 73–27 in the Senate. After the House agreed to a subsequent Senate amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law by President Johnson at the White House on July 2, 1964.
Background
Reconstruction and New Deal era
In the 1883 landmark Civil Rights Cases, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that Congress did not have the power to prohibit discrimination in the private sector, thus stripping the Civil Rights Act of 1875 of much of its ability to protect civil rights.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, the legal justification for voiding the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was part of a larger trend by the United States Supreme Court majorities to invalidate most government regulations of the private sector, except when dealing with laws designed to protect traditional public morality.
In the 1930s, during the New Deal, the majority of the Supreme Court justices gradually shifted their legal theory to allow for greater government regulation of the private sector under the Commerce Clause, thus paving the way for the federal government to enact civil rights laws prohibiting both public and private sector discrimination on the basis of the commerce clause.
Influenced in part by the "Black Cabinet" advisors and the March on Washington Movement, just before the U.S. entered World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, the first federal anti-discrimination order, and established the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Roosevelt's successor, President Harry Truman, appointed the President's Committee on Civil Rights, proposed the 20th century's first comprehensive Civil Rights Act, and issued Executive Order 9980 and Executive Order 9981, providing for fair employment and desegregation throughout the federal government and the armed forces.
Civil Rights Act of 1957
The Civil Rights Act of 1957, signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on September 9, 1957, was the first federal civil rights legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to become law. After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, Southern Democrats began a campaign of "massive resistance" against desegregation, and even the few moderate white leaders shifted to openly racist positions. Partly in an effort to defuse calls for more far-reaching reforms, Eisenhower proposed a civil rights bill to increase the protection of voting rights for African Americans.
Despite having a limited impact on African-American voter participation, at a time when black voter registration ranged from 0% (in 11 counties) to less than 5% (in 97 counties) despite being majority-Black counties, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 did establish the United States Commission on Civil Rights and the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. By 1960, black voting had increased by only 3%, and Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which eliminated certain loopholes left by the 1957 Act.
Activism
Global media additionally played a major influential role across both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, in allowing for the eventual passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As the negative global attention that televised instances of Civil rights resistance received such as the 1957 Little Rock Crisis, challenging the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education ruling by the United States Supreme Court which outlawed public school segregation, and the attack on the 1963 Birmingham campaign protestors, put major pressure on the executive branch of government to enact sweeping legislative reform.
1963 Kennedy civil rights bill
In winning the 1960 United States presidential election, Kennedy took 70% of the African American vote. But due to his narrow victory and Democrats' narrow majorities in Congress, he was wary to push hard for civil rights legislation for fear of losing southern support. Moreover, according to the Miller Center, he wanted to wait until his second term to send Congress a civil rights bill. But with elevated racial tensions and a wave of African-American protests in the spring of 1963, such as the Birmingham campaign, Kennedy realized he had to act on civil rights.
Kennedy first proposed the 1964 bill in his Report to the American People on Civil Rights on June 11, 1963. He sought legislation "giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public – hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments" – as well as "greater protection for the right to vote". In late July, Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, warned that if Congress failed to pass Kennedy's civil rights bill, the country would face another civil war.
Emulating the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had been struck down by the Supreme Court in 1883, Kennedy's civil rights bill included provisions to ban discrimination in public accommodations and enable the U.S. attorney general to join lawsuits against state governments that operated segregated school systems, among other provisions. But it did not include a number of provisions civil rights leaders deemed essential, including protection against police brutality, ending discrimination in private employment, and granting the Justice Department power to initiate desegregation or job discrimination lawsuits.
Legislative history
House of Representatives
On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy met with Republican leaders to discuss the legislation before his television address to the nation that evening. Two days later, Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen and Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield both voiced support for the president's bill, except for provisions guaranteeing equal access to places of public accommodations. This led to several Republican representatives drafting a compromise bill to be considered. On June 19, the president sent his bill to Congress as it was originally written, saying legislative action was "imperative". The president's bill went first to the House of Representatives, where it was referred to the Judiciary Committee, chaired by New York Democrat Emanuel Celler. After a series of hearings on the bill, Celler's committee strengthened the act, adding provisions to ban racial discrimination in employment, providing greater protection to black voters, eliminating segregation in all publicly owned facilities (not just schools), and strengthening the anti-segregation clauses regarding public facilities such as lunch counters. They also added authorization for the attorney general to file lawsuits to protect individuals against the deprivation of any rights secured by the Constitution or U.S. law. In essence, this was the controversial "Title III" that had been removed from the 1957 act and 1960 act. Civil rights organizations pressed hard for this provision because it could be used to protect peaceful protesters and black voters from police brutality and suppression of free speech rights.
Lobbying efforts
Lobbying support for the Civil Rights Act was coordinated by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of 70 liberal and labor organizations. The principal lobbyists for the Leadership Conference were civil rights lawyer Joseph L. Rauh Jr. and Clarence Mitchell Jr. of the NAACP.
After the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, on August 28, 1963, the organizers visited Kennedy to discuss the civil rights bill. Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, and Walter Reuther attempted to persuade him to support a provision establishing a Fair Employment Practices Commission that would ban discriminatory practices by all federal agencies, unions, and private companies.
Kennedy called the congressional leaders to the White House in late October 1963 to line up the necessary votes in the House for passage. The bill was reported out of the Judiciary Committee in November 1963 and referred to the Rules Committee, whose chairman, Howard W. Smith, a Democrat and staunch segregationist from Virginia, indicated his intention to keep the bill bottled up indefinitely.
Johnson's appeal to Congress
The assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, changed the political situation. Kennedy's successor as president, Lyndon B. Johnson, made use of his experience in legislative politics, along with the bully pulpit he wielded as president, in support of the bill. In his first address to a joint session of Congress on November 27, 1963, Johnson told the legislators, "No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long."
Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler filed a petition to discharge the bill from the Rules Committee; it required the support of a majority of House members to move the bill to the floor. Initially, Celler had a difficult time acquiring the signatures necessary, with many Representatives who supported the civil rights bill itself remaining cautious about violating normal House procedure with the rare use of a discharge petition. By the time of the 1963 winter recess, 50 signatures were still needed.
After the return of Congress from its winter recess, however, it was apparent that public opinion in the North favored the bill and that the petition would acquire the necessary signatures. To avert the humiliation of a successful discharge petition, Chairman Smith relented and allowed the bill to pass through the Rules Committee.
Passage in the Senate
Johnson, who wanted the bill passed as soon as possible, ensured that it would be quickly considered by the Senate.
Normally, the bill would have been referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was chaired by James O. Eastland, a Democrat from Mississippi, whose firm opposition made it seem impossible that the bill would reach the Senate floor. Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield took a novel approach to prevent the Judiciary Committee from keeping the bill in limbo: initially waiving a second reading immediately after the first reading, which would have sent it to the Judiciary Committee, he took the unprecedented step of giving the bill a second reading on February 26, 1964, thereby bypassing the Judiciary Committee, and sending it to the Senate floor for immediate debate.
When the bill came before the full Senate for debate on March 30, 1964, the "Southern Bloc" of 18 southern Democratic senators and lone Republican John Tower of Texas, led by Richard Russell (D-GA), launched a filibuster to prevent its passage. Russell proclaimed, "We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would tend to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our [Southern] states."
Strong opposition to the bill also came from Senator Strom Thurmond, who was still a Democrat at the time: "This so-called Civil Rights Proposals [sic], which the President has sent to Capitol Hill for enactment into law, are unconstitutional, unnecessary, unwise and extend beyond the realm of reason. This is the worst civil-rights package ever presented to the Congress and is reminiscent of the Reconstruction proposals and actions of the radical Republican Congress."
After the filibuster had gone on for 54 days, senators Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey, Everett Dirksen, and Thomas Kuchel introduced a substitute bill that they hoped would overcome it by combining a sufficient number of Republicans as well as core liberal Democrats. The compromise bill was weaker than the House version as to the government's power in regulating the conduct of private business, but not weak enough to make the House reconsider it.