Black History Month (Part 5):  Democrats were NOT the leading force for civil rights laws

One of the most common and enduring widely held misconceptions is that the Democratic Party was a leading force for the civil rights legislation that passed in the mid-1900s.  Democratic leaders make that claim repeatedly. The media has perpetuated that false narrative for more than half a century.  The historic fact is that it has been the Republican Party that was largely responsible for civil rights legislation throughout American history.  

Folks may be surprised to know that the man who beat the Democrats’ filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act … who delivered most of the votes – and who drafted and introduced the 1965 Voting Rights Act was Illinois Republican Senator Everett Dirksen (pictured above).

In my book, “Who Put Blacks in That PLACE? The Long Sad History of the Democratic Party’s Oppression of Black Americans … to this day”, I report of the relative roles of the two major parties in the passage of civil rights legislation.  Here are several excerpts.

“Civil Rights Act of 1957

Popular Democrat mythology places the emergence of the contemporary civil rights movement with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and erroneously credits the Democratic Party with being the prime mover. The first Civil Right Act since Reconstruction was in 1957, during the administration of Republican President Eisenhower.”

“At the time of the 1957 Civil Rights Bill, Lyndon Johnson had an unbroken record of opposition to all civil rights legislation. In 1950, when Republican senator William Langer led another attempt to pass a law banning lynching and eliminating the poll tax, Johnson voted with his fellow Democrats to table the bill—essentially killing it. As Senate majority leader, Johnson organized the opposition to Eisenhower’s 1957 civil rights legislation.”

“For the first time, Johnson and his southern segregationist colleagues faced the fact that Eisenhower and the congressional GOP had the votes to pass civil rights legislation. Johnson did the only thing he could do and that was to have it watered down by assigning it to a committee headed by Eastland, arguably one of the most strident racists in Congress. After gutting the bill, Johnson wanted it both ways.

In The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson author Vaughn Davis Bornet writes:

Johnson sought recognition from civil rights advocates for passing the bill, while also receiving recognition from the mostly southern anti-civil rights Democrats for reducing it so much as to kill it.

The final bill was a great disappointment to Martin Luther King and most other civil rights leaders, although Dr. King reluctantly urged Eisenhower to sign it.”

* * *

“Civil Rights Act of 1960

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 was intended to restore some of the provisions stripped out of the 1957 bill by the Democrats under the leadership of majority leader Lyndon Johnson and Judiciary chairman James Eastland. Johnson’s pragmatic political view was obvious in his explanation to his southern Democrat colleagues.

These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us, since they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this—we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.

While Senator Strom Thurmond still holds the record for the longest individual filibuster for his effort to defeat the Republican Civil Rights Act of 1957, it is not the longest filibuster in Senate history. Johnson realized that to defeat civil rights legislation, he would have to engineer a filibuster longer than one individual could sustain. That occurred in 1960, when he changed the rules and introduced a relay Democrat filibuster against the Civil Rights Act in which eighteen southern segregationist senators took turns speaking in opposition. Johnson also allowed an unprecedented fifteen-minute break at one point. Together, the segregationists held the Senate floor for 125 hours and 31 minutes, not including the break.

With the Republican administration in full support of the 1960 Civil Rights Act, Johnson recognized that the filibuster in and of itself was no longer a reliable weapon against such legislation.

Rather than face the prospect of a cloture vote that would cut off the filibuster and set a precedent, he used it as a bargaining chip. Johnson used the filibuster to gain concessions to render the bill ineffective by removing the enforcement provisions and then passing the weakened bill.”

* * *

The significant difference between the 1957 and 1960 Republican civil rights bills was the remarkable conversion of Lyndon Johnson as President.  He became a full-throated supporter of civil rights legislation but did not have the support of his party.  To pass the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and to defeat a filibuster by his own party, Johnson had to rely on the Republican Party’s – and Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen’s — overwhelming support for civil rights legislation. 

“The Civil Rights Act of 1964

“On June 9, West Virginia’s Democrat senator Robert Byrd took the floor to launch the Dixiecrats’ filibuster. He spoke for more than fourteen hours before there was a call for a cloture vote to force an end to the filibuster.

Senator Dirksen rose to make the argument for cloture. The official United States Senate website described the Illinois senator’s comments:

Noting that the day marked the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s nomination to a second term, the Illinois Republican [Dirksen] proclaimed, in the words of Victor Hugo, “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.” He continued, “The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education, and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here!”

The cloture vote was essential to stopping the filibuster and win the passage of the Bill. When the final bill came up to a vote, Senate Republicans provided most of the votes in favor of ending the filibuster. Without the overwhelming support of the GOP, the cloture vote would have failed and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would have been blocked from passage for another generation. This represented the first time that a Democrat filibuster of a civil rights bill was successfully ended by a cloture vote and most of the credit belonged to Senator Dirksen.

The reputation of Kennedy and the Democratic Party as proponents of civil rights is an ironic and false narrative. In many ways, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did little more than restore powers and provisions that Kennedy, Johnson, and the Democrats in Congress had removed from the Republican’s 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts. The 1964 Act closed some of the loopholes that had enabled southern Democrats to avoid compliance— particularly those provisions that would have enabled the Justice Department to enforce the rights of Black citizens.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was officially enacted on July 2, 1964. Time magazine honored Senator Dirksen with its cover for his key role, saying “It is Dirksen’s bill, bearing his handiwork more than anyone else’s.”

* * *

“The Voting Rights Act of 1965

The need for the 1965 Act was the result of the Democratic Party’s opposition and outright disobedience to constitutional amendments, federal laws and Supreme Court decisions designed to guarantee the voting rights of Black Americans.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was described as “An Act to Enforce the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.” Republicans enacted the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 specifically to give Blacks their constitutional right to vote. It was reinforced by the Republican Enforcement Acts of the 1870s and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964. None of those actions were sufficient to force compliance by the Democratic Party.

Southern Democrats continued to defy the law through illegal and unconstitutional actions, including Jim Crow laws, administrative improprieties and government sponsored terrorism—and without virtually any condemnation or interference from the national Democratic Party. It would not be an exaggeration to say that from the Compromise of 1877, which turned the Confederate states over to the Democratic Party, to the early 1970s there was never a constitutionally valid election held in any of the segregated southern states. For more than one hundred years a defiant Democratic Party used authoritarian rule to block Black Americans from their fundamental constitutional right to vote.

Even in the history of world nations, rarely have such fraudulent elections been conducted on such a grand scale and for such a long duration as what took place in what was commonly known as America’s solid Democrat South. The rigging of elections so prevalent in Dixie can only be compared to the worst third-world authoritarian regimes.

Dirksen leads Voting Rights Fight

Republican Senate Minority Leader Dirksen played a central role in drafting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He was aided in the drafting by Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. The GOP leader’s role was so critical that SB 1564 was known informally as the Dirksenbach bill. With the backing of Johnson and the overwhelming support of Republican senators, the voting rights bill was introduced by Dirksen in the Senate on March 17, 1965.

While Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House, Johnson recognized that there was still a powerful anti-integration and anti-voting rights caucus within his own party. He and Dirksen feared the southern Democrat bloc would use technical rules and the filibuster to kill the legislation.

This was of concern because the bill would be assigned to the Judiciary Committee, still headed by one of the Senate’s most ardent segregationists, James Eastland of Mississippi. To prevent him from killing it in committee, the full senate, thanks to overwhelming GOP support, voted to force Eastland to bring the bill to the floor through a discharge petition.

After a few technical maneuvers by southern Democrats to either kill the bill or water it down, it came up for a vote. Republican Dirksen was the first to rise in support of the bill he drafted and introduced.  “This legislation,” he said, “is needed if the unequivocal mandate of the 15th Amendment is to be enforced and made effective, and if the Declaration of Independence is to be made truly meaningful.”

The bill was subsequently passed by the Senate. As with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Republicans provided greater support than the Democrats. Looking at it another way, 26 percent of the Democrat senators opposed the bill while only four percent of the GOP voted in opposition.

The House

The future of the Voting Rights Bill was less certain in the House of Representatives, where southern Democrats chaired powerful committees. Upon introduction, HR 6400 was referred to the Judiciary Committee chaired by New York congressman Emanuel “Manny” Celler. It was quickly voted out of committee. Like the 1963 Kennedy legislation, the bill was then referred to the Rules Committee chaired by Virginia segregationist Democrat Howard Smith. Smith strongly opposed the bill, but unlike 1963 he was forced to release the bill to the full House for debate and a vote because of the overwhelming support of Republican legislators.

Republican congressman William McCulloch of Ohio introduced a separate bill that would have banned literacy tests but weakened other portions of HR 6400. Southern Democrats seized on the McCulloch bill as a means of defeating the stronger Dirksenbach bill. Support for the McCulloch bill virtually evaporated after Virginia Democrat congressman William Tuck, in an unusual display of candor, endorsed the alternative measure because the Dirksenbach bill would actually guarantee Negros the right to vote.

The House defeated the McCulloch bill and proceeded that same day to pass HR 6400 by a wide margin. While the vote between parties was closer, Republicans still provided a greater margin in the final vote.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law by Johnson on August 6, 1965. In the era of civil rights legislation, the party of Lincoln was true to its heritage—and sadly so was a powerful faction of the Democratic Party.”

The Meaning of the Voting Rights Act

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was different than all the civil rights legislation of the past in that it was carefully crafted to address specific problems in specific states. It did not apply to the nation as a whole, but only to those states with histories of racial discrimination. Without overtly saying so, it was an extremely partisan bill. In defining the egregious “conditions” to be rectified in “certain jurisdictions,” the targets of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were the states and lesser jurisdictions with long histories of racial discrimination in voting. These “certain jurisdictions” were all controlled exclusively by the Democratic Party—and had been for almost ninety years. To put it bluntly, the 1965 Voting Rights Bill recognized the culpability of the Democratic Party in thwarting civil rights for Blacks in the past.”

* * *

“In many ways, the votes on the civil rights bills in the 1950s and 1960s reflected the weakening of southern segregationist power within the Congress—leaving the remnants of the Democratic Party’s historic institutional racism in the big cities of both the North and the South.

Unable now to prevent Blacks from voting in the South by de jure Jim Crow laws, Democrats were left with relying on the Party’s longstanding urban strategy of institutional de facto racism and generational welfare dependency as the means of controlling the Black vote. Johnson’s War on Poverty legislation played an important role in advancing that strategy.”

* * *

Contrary to the popular misconception, it was the historic consistency, Republican leadership and overwhelming support from GOP legislators that produced the mid-century civil rights gains.  Perhaps the most surprising fact was the civil rights hypocrisy of John F. Kennedy. That will be the subject of Black History Month (Part 6).

So, there ‘tis.

EDITOR NOTE: To get the full story, Larry’s book is available in paperback and as an eBook on Amazon.