Civil Rights Act Of 1964 Research Paper

Civil Rights Act of 1964

By the summer of 1963, after a series of violent demonstrations in the South, particularly in Birmingham, Alabama, President Kennedy pushed for a very strong civil rights bill through Congress. The first of its kind since the Civil War, this bill drastically called for the end of all segregation in all public places. In the eyes of the civil rights movement leaders, this bill was long over due. Kennedy began by sending the United States Congress a "Special Message on Civil Rights," stating, "Our Constitution is color blind, but the practices of the country do not always conform to the principles of the Constitution. Equality before the law has not always meant equal treatment and opportunity. The harmful,
However, Johnson surprised many when he pushed for the bill as before. In his first address to Congress after Kennedy's death, Johnson stated, "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". By that February the bill made its way through the House of Representatives with a vote of 290-130. Resembling Kennedy's October 1963 proposal the House of Representatives surprised many by adding an amendment guaranteeing women as well as minorities to the protection of employment opportunity section of the bill. Once in the Senate, however, the bill faced its biggest challenges, including the infamous filibuster, or talking the bill to death. Since the Senate allows for endless debate on bills, making the filibuster a clever tactic, a two-thirds vote is necessary to overrule and end any debate. From March to June the bill was debated in the Senate until finally a vote of 71-29 on June 10, 1964, overruled the filibustering Senators. For the first time in American history, a southern filibuster of a civil rights bill was stopped by a "cloture" (the process of closing a debate in the Senate by calling for a vote). The civil rights supporters were satisfied with the fact that the bill included ending segregation in nearly all public
1959: Sit-in campaigns by college students desegregate eating facilities in St. Louis, Chicago, and Bloomington, Indiana; the Tennessee Christian Leadership Conference holds brief sit-ins in Nashville department stores.

1960: Twenty-five hundred students and community members in Nashville, Tennessee, stage a march on city hall—the first major demonstration of the civil rights movement—following the bombing of the home of a black lawyer. John F. Kennedy is elected president by a narrow margin. Over forty blacks are lynched in the states by lynch mobs.

1961: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy hold a secret meeting at which King learns that the new president will not push hard for new civil rights legislation.

1962: Ku Klux Klan dynamite blasts destroy four black churches in Georgia towns. President Kennedy federalizes the National Guard and sends several hundred federal marshals to Mississippi to guarantee James Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi Law School over the opposition of Governor Ross Barnett and other whites; two people are killed in a campus