Case Study 01 — The Civil Rights Act of 1964

The bill

The bill that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 began as a Kennedy administration response to the events of the spring. Birmingham, in May, had produced the photographs of children attacked by police dogs and fire hoses; Medgar Evers had been assassinated in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, on the night of June 11. President Kennedy's televised address that same evening framed civil rights as "a moral issue ... as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution," and announced that he would send Congress legislation guaranteeing access to public accommodations, authorizing federal lawsuits to desegregate schools, and protecting the right to vote.

The bill was sent to Congress on June 19, 1963. By the time of Kennedy's assassination on November 22, the House Judiciary Committee had reported a strengthened version, but the bill had stalled in the Rules Committee under the chairmanship of Howard W. "Judge" Smith of Virginia, a segregationist who had successfully bottled up earlier civil-rights legislation.

President Lyndon Johnson made the bill the centerpiece of his agenda. In his first address to a joint session of Congress on November 27, 1963, Johnson said: "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. ... We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law."

The House

By December 1963, the bill had been reported by the Judiciary Committee but Smith refused to schedule it for Rules Committee action. The procedural workaround was a discharge petition — a rarely successful device requiring 218 House signatures (then a majority of the House) to pull a bill out of a committee that refused to release it. By January 1964, the petition had 178 signatures. Smith, sensing he would be defeated either by petition or by a Rules Committee revolt, scheduled hearings.

The House began debate on January 31, 1964. Over the course of nine days, the House considered approximately 100 amendments. Smith, perhaps in an attempt to make the bill so broad that it would lose support, offered an amendment on February 8 to add "sex" to the list of prohibited employment-discrimination grounds in Title VII (which already covered race, color, religion, and national origin).

The Smith amendment is the most-debated parliamentary maneuver in the bill's history. Smith was a foe of civil rights but also had a longstanding relationship with the National Woman's Party (which had been pushing an Equal Rights Amendment since the 1920s). He may have meant the amendment as a poison pill; he may have meant it sincerely; the historical evidence is consistent with both. Whatever his motive, Representative Martha Griffiths of Michigan, a Democrat, defended the amendment on the floor with a speech that historian Pat Mainardi has called the founding text of second-wave American feminism: "If you do not add sex to this bill, ... white women will be last at the hiring gate." The amendment passed 168-133. The full House passed the bill 290-130 on February 10, 1964.

The Senate

The Senate was the harder chamber. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 and 1960 had been weakened in the Senate by southern filibusters. The 1964 Act would face the same threat, and as of early 1964, the Senate had never invoked cloture on a civil-rights bill in American history.

Mike Mansfield, the Democratic majority leader, did something procedurally unusual: he placed the House-passed bill directly on the Senate calendar without sending it to the Judiciary Committee, which was chaired by James Eastland of Mississippi, a segregationist who had already stated he would never report a civil-rights bill. Mansfield's maneuver bypassed Eastland but enraged southern senators, who saw it as a violation of regular order.

The southern bloc — eighteen Democratic senators led by Richard Russell of Georgia — began their filibuster on March 30, 1964. They held the floor for sixty days. (The longest individual speech, by Robert Byrd of West Virginia, lasted 14 hours and 13 minutes.) Their argument combined constitutional objections (Title II's regulation of private property, they argued, exceeded the Commerce Clause power), states-rights arguments (segregation, however regrettable, was a matter for state regulation), and predictions of social disorder.

Cloture, in 1964, required two-thirds of senators present and voting — sixty-seven if all 100 were present. The math was difficult. The Democrats had 67 senators, but at least 21 of them were southerners committed against the bill. Cloture would require nearly every non-southern Democrat plus a substantial bloc of Republicans.

Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois became the central figure. Dirksen was a conservative Midwestern Republican of the old school, in the Senate since 1951, with a baroque speaking style and a reputation for cutting deals. He was, importantly, not a civil-rights crusader; he had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1957's enforcement provisions. But he was committed to the bill in 1964, partly out of personal conviction (he had said the time had come), partly out of party tradition (the Republican Party of 1964 was still proud of Lincoln), and partly out of strategic calculation (the bill was popular nationwide).

Dirksen negotiated technical amendments — many concerning the procedural protections for accused employers and businesses — that secured the votes of seven additional Republicans without losing the bill's substance. On June 10, 1964, the Senate invoked cloture by a vote of 71-29. Twenty-seven of 33 Republican senators voted yes; six voted no. Forty-four of 67 Democrats voted yes; the 23 Democratic "no" votes came overwhelmingly from the South.

The bill itself passed the Senate 73-27 on June 19. The House accepted the Senate version on July 2. President Johnson signed the bill that same day, in a televised ceremony attended by Martin Luther King Jr. and dozens of civil-rights leaders. The pen Johnson used to sign Title VI was given to King.

The substantive provisions

The 1964 Act has eleven titles. The most consequential:

  • Title I — voting rights (largely superseded by the 1965 Voting Rights Act).
  • Title II — public accommodations (hotels, restaurants, theaters, gas stations) "engaged in interstate commerce" must serve customers without discrimination on grounds of race, color, religion, or national origin. Upheld by Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (December 1964) and Katzenbach v. McClung (December 1964) under the Commerce Clause.
  • Title III — desegregation of public facilities.
  • Title IV — desegregation of public schools, with authority for the Attorney General to bring suit.
  • Title VI — no discrimination in any program receiving federal funds. The lever that drove medical-facility desegregation under Medicare/Medicaid (1965), university compliance, and (with later interpretations) school district funding decisions.
  • Title VII — employment discrimination on grounds of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, by employers of 15 or more. Created the EEOC.

The empirical effects

The effects were measurable and large.

Public accommodations. Compliance was rapid and overwhelming. Within months of Heart of Atlanta and Katzenbach, the iconic landmarks of segregation — separate water fountains, "whites only" signs at hotels and restaurants — disappeared from the southern landscape. Some pockets of resistance lasted into the 1970s, but the broad system fell within two years.

Employment. Title VII produced a surge of employment-discrimination claims; the EEOC processed approximately 9,000 charges in its first year and over 90,000 by 2024. The integration of southern textile mills, auto plants, and clerical workforces — not just by race but, after the Smith amendment, by sex — proceeded over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. The economic literature (Heckman and Payner 1989; Donohue and Heckman 1991) attributes a substantial portion of the closing Black-white wage gap in the 1965-1975 period to Title VI and Title VII enforcement.

Schools. Title IV's authorization for federal lawsuits combined with Title VI's federal-funds leverage finally broke the back of "all deliberate speed." Southern school desegregation went from approximately 2 percent of Black students in formerly Jim Crow states attending integrated schools in 1964 to approximately 36 percent by 1968 and 90 percent by 1973. The South became, briefly, the most desegregated region of the country in education.

Women's employment. The Smith amendment, intended or not as a poison pill, became the foundation of women's employment law. Title VII supported the early sex-discrimination lawsuits (Phillips v. Martin Marietta, 1971; Griggs, 1971, applied to sex; Newport News Shipbuilding v. EEOC, 1983, on pregnancy). Women's labor force participation climbed from 38 percent in 1964 to 60 percent by 2000, driven by many factors but legally undergirded by Title VII.

The political earthquake

The political consequences fundamentally reshaped American party coalitions.

The white South had been solidly Democratic since Reconstruction. Strom Thurmond had run for President as a Dixiecrat in 1948 and returned to the Democratic Party afterward. By 1964, the bill's Senate cloture vote had been opposed by every southern Democrat except one (Ralph Yarborough of Texas). Three months after the Act was signed, Strom Thurmond switched parties. In November 1964, Lyndon Johnson won 61 percent of the national popular vote — but lost five Deep South states to Barry Goldwater (Arizona, the only non-Southern Republican who had voted against the Act, on Title II constitutional grounds). The white South began its long realignment to the Republican Party. By 1980, the Republican presidential ticket carried every former Confederate state. By 2000, the South had become the most reliably Republican region of the country.

Black voters, who had split between the parties in the 1950s — Eisenhower won 32 percent of the Black vote in 1956 — began their consolidation into the Democratic coalition. By 1964, Johnson won 94 percent of the Black vote; the percentage has remained above 80 percent in every presidential election since.

The party realignment is one of the most consequential political shifts of the twentieth century. It is the reason that within a generation the Republican Party — once the party of Lincoln and Dirksen — and the Democratic Party — once the party of Eastland and Russell — had effectively swapped their positions on civil rights. The bill, in other words, didn't just integrate American institutions; it remade American politics.

What the case shows

Three lessons, each of which we will return to in later chapters:

  1. Coalitions across parties can produce great legislation. The 1964 Act would not have passed without Republican votes — and not just any Republican votes, but the votes of Senate Republicans led by a conservative leader (Dirksen) who understood that the bill was a moment of national moral consequence. Cross-partisan governance is not impossible. It is rare, and it requires leaders willing to take political costs.

  2. Procedural rules shape substantive outcomes. Mansfield's bypass of Eastland's committee, Dirksen's cloture negotiations, Smith's strategic amendment — the bill survived because legislators understood the rules and used them creatively. The civil-rights framework would look very different had any of these procedural moves failed.

  3. Major legislation produces unintended consequences. The Smith amendment is the most striking example. Whatever Smith intended, the addition of "sex" to Title VII produced a body of women's employment law that has reshaped the American workforce. Legislators write text; courts and administrators implement it; the long-run effects often exceed and sometimes contradict the original intentions.

Sources

  • Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 4: The Passage of Power (2012). The definitive account of Johnson's role.
  • Todd S. Purdum, An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (2014).
  • Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (2014).
  • Pauli Murray, Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Autobiography of an American Pilgrim (1987) — for Murray's role in the strategy that produced the "sex" amendment.
  • Donohue and Heckman, "Continuous Versus Episodic Change: The Impact of Civil Rights Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks," Journal of Economic Literature (1991).
  • Karen S. Markowitz, The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Comprehensive History (2024).