Monday 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 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 that 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 passed by Congress. In May 1963, the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began a series of nonviolent demonstrations protesting the segregation of public facilities in Birmingham, Ala. King had been leading such demonstrations for years, and the cumulative effect was to slowly bring public opinion throughout the nation to support civil rights, Birmingham Police Chief T.
Eugene (Bull) Connor, was an avowed segregationist and brought out police dogs, fire hoses, and electric cattle prods to use on demonstrators. 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.
