President
Johnson Signs Civil Rights Act
July 2, 1964
On this
day in 1964, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson
signs into law the historic Civil Rights Act in a
nationally televised ceremony at the White House.
In the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of
Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that
racial segregation in schools was
unconstitutional. The 10 years that followed saw
great strides for the African-American civil
rights movement, as non-violent demonstrations
won thousands of supporters to the cause.
Memorable landmarks in the struggle included the
Montgomery bus boycott in 1955--sparked by the
refusal of Alabama resident Rosa Parks to give up
her seat on a city bus to a white woman--and
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I have a
dream" speech at a rally of hundreds of
thousands in Washington, D.C., in 1963.
As the strength of the civil rights movement
grew, John F. Kennedy made passage of a new civil
rights bill one of the platforms of his
successful 1960 presidential campaign. As
Kennedy's vice president, Johnson served as
chairman of the President's Committee on Equal
Employment Opportunities. After Kennedy was
assassinated in November 1963, Johnson vowed to
carry out his proposals for civil rights reform.
The Civil Rights Act fought tough opposition in
the House and a lengthy, heated debate in the
Senate before being approved in July 1964. For
the signing of the historic legislation, Johnson
invited hundreds of guests to a televised
ceremony in the White House's East Room. After
using more than 75 pens to sign the bill, he gave
them away as mementoes of the historic occasion,
according to tradition. One of the first pens
went to King, leader of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC), who called it one
of his most cherished possessions. Johnson gave
two more to Senators Hubert Humphrey and Everett
McKinley Dirksen, the Democratic and Republican
managers of the bill in the Senate.
The most sweeping civil rights legislation passed
by Congress since the post-Civil War
Reconstruction era, the Civil Rights Act
prohibited racial discrimination in employment
and education and outlawed racial segregation in
public places such as schools, buses, parks and
swimming pools. In addition, the bill laid
important groundwork for a number of other pieces
of legislation--including the Voting Rights Act
of 1965, which set strict rules for protecting
the right of African Americans to vote--that have
since been used to enforce equal rights for women
as well as all minorities.
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