The Filibuster of 1964

Yesterday when I was looking into the events of 1963 in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life, I found out more about the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act than I remember knowing before. I knew that it wasn't easy, and that it had been filibustered by Dixiecrats. But I don't think I ever learned the details.

All of this is pretty shallow still, since it comes from the Wikipedia, but none of it is disputed.

As I said yesterday, President Kennedy introduced a bill in summer 1963. It didn't include provisions to end discrimination in private employment, protection from police brutality, or the ability of the Department of Justice to sue over discrimination, but those were added to the House bill soon after. After the March on Washington in August and then Kennedy's assassination in November, the bill finally passed the House of Representatives in February 1964.

Then it was up against the Senate with its filibuster rule and Dixiecrat bloc. President Johnson and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield avoided one hurdle by keeping the bill out of the Judiciary Committee, which was chaired by Mississippi's John Eastland. That got it to the floor on March 30.

That's when the 18 Dixiecrats (17 Democrats and one Republican) began their filibuster, which lasted for 60 working days (75 calendar days).

A key figure in that obstruction was Richard Russell of Georgia, chair of the Armed Services Committee. He had been Johnson's mentor in Congress, but they broke over the issue of Civil Rights at this point. A few hair-raising Russell quotes: 

• "We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would tend to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our [Southern] states." 
• America is "a white man’s country, yes, and we are going to keep it that way." 
• He opposed "political and social equality with the Negro."
• He called President Truman's support of civil rights for black people an "uncalled-for attack on our Southern civilization." 

To this day, the oldest of the three U.S. Senate office buildings is named for this white supremacist, and a full-body statue of him stands in its rotunda. I've been in that building a number of times, and I'm pretty sure I didn't know this.

The other senators who filibustered included: Strom Thurmond (of course!), Olin Johnston, William Fulbright, John McClellan, Sam Ervin, B. Everett Jordan, John Eastland, John Stennis, Russell Long, Allen Ellender, Herman Talmadge, Al Gore Sr., Herbert Walters, A. Willis Robertson, Harry Byrd, John Tower (the only Republican…from Texas), and Robert Byrd. Some of the names on that list are completely unfamiliar to me, while others are associated with other things: Later party leadership, famous scholarships*, the Watergate Hearings, sons who were vice presidents and work on climate change.

After the filibuster's 54th day, proponents of the bill substituted a somewhat weaker bill they hoped would persuade a few opponents to break the filibuster, without losing supporters of the bill.

On the 60th day, Robert Byrd of West Virginia did just that and the filibuster began to end. The compromise version of the bill passed on June 19, went through final reconciliation with the House version, and was signed by President Johnson on July 2.

Two other notable Senators I had never heard of before, who were not part of the filibuster:

• Clair Engle of California was dying of brain cancer, but returned to vote for the bill. He was unable to speak, but after being wheeled into the chamber, he pointed at his eye to indicate he was voting "Aye." He died about two months later. (Ironically, or perhaps sadly would be a better descriptor, Engle was originally from Bakersfield, the same place as the spineless Kevin McCarthy, now Speaker of the House of Representatives.)
• Ralph Yarborough was the only Senator from a state within Confederate boundaries who was not part of the filibuster. (Robert Byrd was the only senator outside the Confederacy who was part of the filibuster, and the first to leave it.) The progressive Yarborough's story, in general, tells you just how much politics in Texas have changed over the past 50 years, as well as how much Democrats stab each other in the back. And at one point it reveals how lucky he was to be in the wrong car on November 22, 1963.

It's notable that both senators from Texas voted in ways contrary to the past party traditions of the states of the Confederacy, but those votes turned out to be aligned with the future trend in the country: a Democrat supporting Civil Rights and a Republican opposing them.

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* I see no reason the Fulbright Scholarships couldn't be renamed. I find the idea of naming grants of public money after elected officials distasteful in general. The scholarships are public funds: why are they named after the person who wrote the bill? This opinion applies to Pell Grants as well.