Tomorrow, June 10, 2024, is the 60th anniversary of the successful cloture vote in the U.S. Senate that enabled final enactment, on July 2, 1964, of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. This was the law that made illegal all forms of racial segregation in public businesses throughout the entire United States.

The big obstacle to a civil rights bill in the Senate at that time was the filibuster. Senate rules provide for unlimited debate, which means a group of senators could kill a bill by simply talking it to death.

Over the years, southern Democratic senators had clearly established the idea they would filibuster any strong civil rights bill. As a result, no meaningful civil rights reform had ever been enacted by the U.S. Congress.

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In May of 1963, Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference began a series of nonviolent demonstrations protesting the rigid segregation of public facilities in Birmingham, Alabama. King had been leading such demonstrations for many years prior and the cumulative effect was to slowly bring public opinion throughout the nation to support civil rights,

The city police chief, T. Eugene (Bull) Connor, was an avowed segregationist and brought out police dogs, fire hoses and electric cattle prods ordinarily used to drive reluctant cattle from the holding pen into the slaughterhouse.

Newspaper photographs and evening television reports of the violence in Birmingham further increased national support for civil rights, particularly in the north and west. The nation had seen firsthand the worst aspects of southern white oppression of blacks.

As a result of the civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, U.S. President John F. Kennedy sent to Congress in June of 1963 a strong civil rights bill giving black Americans equal access to all “public accommodations” throughout the United States, including the south.

The new law would make illegal the segregated restaurants, cocktail lounges, hotels and motels, which were the most visible forms of racial discrimination in the American south. It also provided for the cut-off of any U.S. government aid programs in the south administered in a racially discriminatory fashion.

The assassin’s bullet that killed President Kennedy in Dallas in the fall of 1963 changed many things, but nothing quite so much as the political situation concerning civil rights.

Kennedy’s successor, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, was a Democrat from Texas. Civil rights advocates initially believed this might doom the civil rights bill, but the reverse was the case.

Although a southerner, Johnson was well aware public opinion in the United States had shifted and was continuing to shift in favor of civil rights. Also, Johnson seized on the civil rights bill as a good instrument for establishing his credentials with northern and western liberals. He also knew this was the right thing to do — even as it would weaken his Democratic Party in the south.

Five days after Kennedy’s assassination, the new President Johnson told a joint session of the House and Senate: “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights… It is time now to write the next chapter — and to write it in the books of law.”

Senate rules at that time provided extended debate (a filibuster) could be ended by a two-thirds vote of those present and voting. Such a vote is called a cloture vote.

It was clear from the beginning a small group of Republican senators, mainly from midwestern and western states, would be needed to get a two-thirds vote for cloture. Among that group was Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, the Republican leader in the Senate.

On June 10, 1964, for the first time in its history, the U.S. Senate voted cloture on a civil rights bill. Soon afterward, the Senate adopted the final bill. The House of Representatives quickly agreed to the Senate amendments.

On July 2, 1964, before an audience of more than 100 senators, representatives, cabinet members and civil rights leaders, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. 

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 began to end most forms of public racial segregation in the nation, both north and south.

The threat of cutting off U.S. funds to government programs and business concerns that discriminate against minorities made “equal employment opportunity” and “affirmative action in hiring” fixed institutions in American life.

The act empowered the attorney general of the United States to sue for the desegregation of schools, a program that resulted in the use of school busing to achieve racial balance in the nation’s schools.

The civil rights act also was the first national law to guarantee significant equal rights for women in employment. It set the precedent for using cloture to stop a filibuster on any subsequent civil rights bill — a precedent that was used in 1965 to pass a national law guaranteeing equal voting rights to minorities.

There are times when a difficult domestic issue, such as racial segregation in public businesses, cannot be avoided. Tomorrow is the 60th anniversary of the day on which two-thirds of the U.S. Senate voted to cloture, and thus speed to final passage, the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Tom Cronin and Bob Loevy write about Colorado and national politics.