On This Day: Record 83-day Senate filibuster against U.S. Civil Rights Act ends

JUNE 19, 1964: America’s seminal Civil Rights Bill overcame a last-ditch bid to stop it after a record 83-day Senate filibuster to prevent a vote was finally ended on this day in 1964.

The legislation, which would go on to be signed into law 13 days later, sought to ban all forms of discrimination and end racial segregation following huge protests.

It would also pave the way to stop Southern states using ‘Jim Crow Laws’ to make it hard for black people to vote.

It faced the stiffest opposition from politicians in those states that had only abolished slavery in 1865 after their rebel Confederacy lost the U.S. Civil War.

The strongest resistance to the Bill came in the Senate, where the South’s members wielded more power than those it had elected to the House of Representatives.

The mostly Democrat senators’ defied their party’s leadership, including President Lyndon B Johnson, and used their tool of last resort, the filibuster, to block it.

This meant that no voting could take place as long as members of the upper house in America’s two-chamber Congress were still speaking and holding the floor.

The 19 members of the Southern Bloc, including ex-Vice President Al Gore’s father Albert Gore Sr, spoke for hours without being allowed to sit down or go to the toilet.

The longest single period of oratory was carried out by Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan organiser from West Virginia, who spoke for 14 hours and 13 minutes.

The strongest condemnation of the Bill came from South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, who said: ‘This so-called Civil Rights Proposals, which the President has sent to Capitol Hill for enactment into law, are unconstitutional, unnecessary, unwise and extend beyond the realm of reason.

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‘This is the worst civil-rights package ever presented to the Congress and is reminiscent of the Reconstruction proposals and actions of the radical Republican Congress.’

The Reconstruction he referred to was the post-Civil War era when anti-slavery Republicans enforced their own regimes in the South using the army.

White Democrats, who were more conservative than their Northern counterparts, later regained control of the region and – via fraud, violence and laws such as voter registration based on literacy levels - ensured that deliberately poorly-schooled and segregated blacks there had little say.

This continued until the 1950s, when civil rights campaigners led by Atlanta pastor Martin Luther King risked their lives in wide scale protests against this inequality.

And, in the months before his assassination in November 1963, President John F Kennedy had promised to bring in the most sweeping changes in a century.

Returning to the Senate vote in 1964, by June the bipartisan proponents of the Civil Rights Bill realised they had sufficient support to end the filibuster.

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Hubert Humphrey and Everett McKinley Dirksen, the Democratic and Republican managers of the bill, had garnered the votes needed force Cloture and end the debate.

But they only had the support of 67 of the 100 senators – the minimum requirement – and so they decided to water down the Bill with amendments to gain more backing.

It worked and a vote of cloture was passed against a civil rights legislation for the first time ever – with 71 members voting in favour.

On June 19, the Senate finally voted on the Bill by a tally of 73 to 27.

The measure was easily passed by the House days later and a British Pathé newsreel shows the Bill being signed into law by President Johnson on July 2.

King, who was among those watching, received one of the pens used and described it as one of his most cherished possessions.

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Johnson, a Texan, had feared the Civil Rights Act would wipe out Democrats in the once ‘Solid South’ but was nevertheless sure it was the right thing to do.

By the 1990s, Republicans dominated the region and ensured the national party has become increasingly socially conservative in its outlook.

As a result, northern states, especially those on the east and west coasts, have become more staunchly Democrat, which has become more liberal over the years.