The need for strong civil rights legislation had become increasingly apparent in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.[23-18] With that decision, the judicial branch finally lined up definitively with the executive in opposition to segregation. But the effect of this united opposition was blunted by the lack of a strong civil rights law, something that President Kennedy had not been able to wrestle from a reluctant legislative branch. The demands of the civil rights movement only underscored the inability of court judgments and executive orders alone to guarantee the civil rights of all Americans. Such a profound social change in American society required the concerted action of all three branches of government, and by 1963 the drive for strong civil rights legislation had made such legislation the paramount domestic political issue. Lyndon Johnson fully understood its importance. "We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights," he told his old colleagues in Congress, "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."[23-19]
He was peculiarly fitted for the task. A southerner in quest of national support, Johnson was determined for very practical reasons to carry out the civil rights program of his slain predecessor and to end the long rule of Jim Crow in many areas of the country. He let it be known that he would accept no watered-down law.
I made my position [on the civil rights bill] unmistakably clear: We were not prepared to compromise in any way. "So far as this administration is concerned," I told a press conference, "its position is firm." I wanted absolutely no room for bargaining.... I knew that the slightest wavering on my part would give hope to the opposition's strategy of amending the bill to death.[23-20]
Certainly this pronouncement was no empty rhetoric, coming as it did from a consummate master of the legislative process who enjoyed old and close ties with congressional leaders.
Johnson was also philosophically committed to change. "Civil rights was really something that was, by this time, burning pretty strongly in Johnson," Harris L. Wofford later noted.[23-21] The new President exhorted his countrymen: "To the extent that Negroes were imprisoned, so was I ... to the extent that Negroes were free, really free, so was I. And so was my country."[23-22] Skillfully employing the wave of sympathy for equal rights that swept the country after John Kennedy's death, President Johnson procured a powerful civil rights act, which he signed on 2 July 1964.[23-23]
The object of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was no less than the overthrow of segregation in America. Its major provisions outlawed discrimination in places of amusement and public accommodation, in public education, labor unions, employment, and housing. It called for federal intervention in voting rights cases and established a Community Relations Service in the Department of Commerce to arbitrate racial disputes. The act also strengthened the Civil Rights Commission and broadened its powers. It authorized the United States Attorney General and private citizens to bring suit in discrimination cases, outlining the procedures for such cases. Most significant were the sweeping provisions of the law's Title VI that forbade discrimination in any activity or program that received federal financial assistance. This added the threat of economic sanctions against any of those thousands of institutions, whether public or private, which, while enjoying federal benefactions, discriminated against citizens because of race. Accurately characterized as the "most effective instrument yet found for the elimination of racial discrimination,"[23-24] Title VI gave the federal government leave to cut segregation and discrimination out of the body politic. In Professor Woodward's words, "a national consensus was in the making and a peaceful solution was in sight."[23-25]
The 1964 presidential election was at hand to test this consensus. Given the Republican candidate's vehement opposition to the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson's overwhelming victory was among other things widely interpreted as a national plebiscite for the new law. The President, however, preferred a broader interpretation. Believing that "great social change tends to come rapidly in periods of intense activity before the impulse slows,"[23-26] he considered his victory a mandate for further social reform. On the advice of the Justice Department and the Civil Rights Commission, he called on Congress to eliminate the "barriers to the right to vote."[23-27]
In common with its predecessors, the 1964 Civil Rights Act had only touched lightly on the serious obstacles in the way of black voters. Although some 450,000 Negroes were added to the voting rolls in the southern states in the year following passage of the 1964 law, the civil rights advocates were calling for stronger legislation. With bipartisan support, the President introduced a measure aimed directly at states that discriminated against black voters, providing for the abolition of literacy tests, appointment of federal examiners to register voters for all elections, and assignment of federal supervisors for those elections. The Twenty-fourth Amendment, adopted in February 1964, had eliminated the poll tax in federal elections, and the President's new measure carried a strong condemnation of the use of the poll tax in state elections as well.
In all of his efforts the President had the unwitting support of the segregationists, who treated the nation to another sordid racial spectacular. In February 1965 Alabama police jailed Martin Luther King, Jr., and some 2,000 members of his voting rights drive, and a generally outraged nation watched King's later clash with the police over a voting rights march. This time he and his followers were stopped at a bridge in Selma, Alabama, by state troopers using tear gas and clubs. The incident climaxed months of violence that saw the murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi; the harassment of the Mississippi Summer Project, a voting registration campaign sponsored by several leading civil rights organizations; and ended in the assassination of a white Unitarian minister, James Reeb, of Washington, D.C., one of the hundreds of clergymen, students, and other Americans who had joined in the King demonstrations. Addressing a joint session of Congress on the voting rights bill, the President alluded to the Selma incident, declaring: "Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome."[23-28]