The Civil Rights Act of 1964

On this day in 1964, July 2, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, and the country took a step it had been promising itself, and failing to take, for nearly a hundred years. The law was sweeping. It outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It ended legal segregation in public places. It barred discrimination in employment. It put the power of the federal government behind a promise that the Fourteenth Amendment had made in 1868 and that the country had spent a century declining to keep.

The signing took a few minutes. Getting there took the longest debate in the history of the United States Senate, and the story of that struggle is worth telling, because it shows something about how a great law is actually made, and about the long, frustrating distance between writing a right down and making it real.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, had guaranteed equal protection of the laws to all persons. On paper, the question of legal equality was settled then. In practice, it was not settled at all. An essay in this series has looked at the quiet revolution of the Fourteenth Amendment, and at the long gap between what it said and what the country allowed to happen. By the middle of the twentieth century that gap was a chasm. Across much of the country, law and custom kept Black Americans out of restaurants, hotels, theaters, schools, and jobs, and the federal government, for decades, did very little about it.

The pressure to close that gap did not come, in the first instance, from Washington. It came from the streets and the lunch counters and the buses, from the long discipline of the civil rights movement, which other essays this year have traced. By the early nineteen-sixties that movement had made the contradiction impossible to ignore: a country that called itself the land of liberty was enforcing, by law, a system of caste. The Civil Rights Act was the federal government's belated answer.

President Kennedy proposed a strong civil rights bill in 1963. After his assassination that November, Johnson took up the cause and made it his own, telling Congress that no eulogy could honor Kennedy's memory more than the earliest possible passage of the bill. The House passed it in February 1964. Then it went to the Senate, and in the Senate it met the wall.

The wall was the filibuster, the subject of an earlier essay, the Senate's tradition of unlimited debate turned into a tool for stopping a bill entirely. A group of senators opposed to the act set out to talk it to death, and they very nearly succeeded. The debate ran for fifty-seven working days. It was, and remains, the longest filibuster in Senate history. For two months the bill could not come to a vote, because a determined minority would not let the chamber decide.

To break it required cloture, the procedure for cutting off debate, which at the time needed a two-thirds vote, a very high bar deliberately designed to be hard to clear. Assembling that supermajority took weeks of patient, unglamorous work by senators of both parties, bargaining, persuading, counting and recounting. On June 10, 1964, the Senate voted for cloture for the first time ever on a civil rights measure. The wall came down. The bill passed, and on July 2 it was signed.

It is worth being concrete about what changed, because the act was not a statement of principle. It was a set of specific, enforceable rules. Its most famous section, Title II, guaranteed equal access to public accommodations: hotels, restaurants, theaters, and the like could no longer refuse service on the basis of race. The everyday humiliation of being turned away at a counter or a door, the daily machinery of segregation, was made illegal.

Title VII barred discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and it created a commission to enforce that bar. Other sections strengthened the federal government's hand against segregated schools and gave it the power to withhold funds from programs that discriminated. The law reached into the ordinary places where the denial of equality was actually carried out, and it gave the government tools to act there.

This is the difference between an amendment and a statute, and it is a difference worth understanding. The Fourteenth Amendment stated the principle: equal protection. The Civil Rights Act supplied the machinery: here are the specific things you may not do, here is who will enforce the rule, here is what happens if you break it. A principle without machinery is a hope. The act was the machinery, ninety-six years late.

The deepest lesson of the Civil Rights Act is the one its whole history teaches: the distance between a right on paper and a right in practice. The right to equal protection had been written into the Constitution in 1868. It took until 1964 to build even part of the machinery to deliver it, and it took the work of a mass movement, the death of a president, and the longest debate in Senate history to get that far.

That distance is not a flaw peculiar to civil rights. It is the ordinary condition of every right. Rights do not enforce themselves. A guarantee written into the Constitution is a promise that someone, eventually, will have to do the slow work of making real, through laws, through courts, through enforcement, through the patient assembling of majorities in chambers built to resist them. The Civil Rights Act is the clearest case in American history of how long that work can take, and of the fact that it does, with enough effort, get done.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is often remembered as a moment, a signing, a triumph. It was a triumph. But it is more useful remembered as a process, because the process is the part that instructs. A right was promised in 1868 and not delivered. A movement spent decades making the failure to deliver it intolerable. A Congress spent fifty-seven days arguing before it could act. And then, by the patient assembling of a supermajority across party lines, the machinery was finally built.

That is how a self-governing country closes the gap between what it says and what it does. Not quickly, not cleanly, and never by itself. The Fourth of July, two days from now, celebrates the writing-down of the country's founding promise. This essay, two days before it, is a reminder of the rest of the job: that a promise written down is only the beginning, and that making it real is the long, unfinished work the republic hands to every generation in turn.