The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was vigorously and vociferously opposed by the Southern states. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law nonetheless.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act. Its enactment, following the longest continuous debate in the history of the U.S. Senate, enshrined into law the basic principle upon which our country was founded - that all people are created equal.
I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary.
In 1962, the smallest things were upsetting to authority. It wasn't the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn't the Anti-war Movement. It was something else, but it was a harbinger of what was to come.
Many civil rights came about, not when they were passed into law, but because the federal government did what it should and saw them enforced.
I grew up in the 1960s in Memphis, and my father was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. I was born three years before Martin Luther King was killed, and I think that history of civil action was something that I had in my blood.
When Johnson decided to fight for passage of the law John F. Kennedy had put before Congress in June 1963 banning segregation in places of public accommodation, he believed he was taking considerable political risks.
At the end of the day, the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott had to be converted into the 1964 Civil Rights Act. We don't want politicians who've gotta be coaxed, cajoled and protested. We want them on our side from the beginning.
The Democrats co-opted the credit for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But if you go back and look at the history, a larger percentage of Republicans voted for that than did Democrats. But a Democrat president signed it, so they co-opted credit for having passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 laid the foundation for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but it also addressed nearly every other aspect of daily life in a would-be free democratic society.
When Kennedy could not get the civil rights bill passed - and he was the big liberal - Lyndon Johnson came in and it got passed, and he was the conservative and the southerner. So sometimes in politics, to get something done, it takes a special kind of knowledge and a special kind of person, but it doesn't always follow the party lines.
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