Events
1963John F. Kennedy is assassinated; Lyndon B. Johnson
becomes president
1964Civil Rights Act of 1964 is
passedTwenty-Fourth Amendment is ratifiedFreedom Summer
1965Selma campaignVoting Rights Act
Key People
Martin Luther King Jr. - Preacher and civil rights leader who received Nobel
Peace Prize in
1964;
went to Selma, Alabama, in
1965 to
draw national attention to problems with black voter registration
Lyndon B. Johnson -
36th
U.S. president; former opponent of civil rights who became one of
the movement’s greatest supporters as president; helped pass Civil
Rights Act of
1964 and
Voting Rights Act
Kennedy’s Assassination
On November 22, 1963, John
F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a presidential
motorcade through Dallas, Texas. After Kennedy’s death, many civil
rights leaders feared that their dream of racial equality would
die along with him. The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson,
had never supported the movement. A conservative Democrat from Texas,
he had opposed civil rights legislation while serving as the Senate
majority leader.
Support from Johnson
However, in 1963,
Johnson surprised black and white Americans alike by announcing
that he would honor Kennedy’s commitment to the civil rights cause
and that he recognized the need for stronger civil rights legislation.
Johnson supported civil rights not so much because he believed personally
in the movement but because he wanted to establish himself as the
new leader of the Democratic Party and take control of the issue
before it spun out of control. As a result, Johnson pushed for an
even stronger civil rights bill than Kennedy had ever intended to
pass.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
After months of wrangling, Johnson finally managed to
convince enough southern conservatives in the House and Senate to
support and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The act consisted of a bundle of landmark laws that outlawed segregation
and discrimination in public places, forbade racial discrimination
in the workplace, created the Equal Opportunity Commission to
enforce these new laws, and gave more power to the president to
prosecute violators. Civil rights leaders hailed the passage of
the act as the most important victory over racism since the civil
rights bills passed by Radical Republicans during Reconstruction.
One interesting aspect of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was
that it outlawed not only racial discrimination but also discrimination
on the basis of color, nationality, religion, and gender. Conservative southerners
had actually had gender equality written into the document in the
hope that it would kill the bill before it even got out of committee.
However, conservatives lost their gamble, and the act passed with
the gender provisions, boosting the growing feminist movement and
protecting millions of working women.
The Twenty-Fourth Amendment
Later in 1964,
Johnson and liberal Democrats were able to get the Twenty-Fourth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ratified. Designed to
help both poor whites and blacks in the South, the amendment outlawed
federal poll taxes as a requirement to vote in federal
elections.
Freedom Summer
Meanwhile, the SNCC and CORE, hoping to provoke southern extremists
even further, organized a voter registration campaign in Mississippi.
As in most southern states, less than 10 percent
of the black population was registered to vote, even though blacks
outnumbered whites in many districts. The SNCC recruited nearly 1,000 northern
white college students to register voters and teach civics classes
to black Mississippians in a campaign that it called Freedom
Summer.
