This article traces the legislative and political history of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, from its antecedents in Reconstruction-era law through its passage and immediate aftermath. For interpretive disputes about the Act's meaning, legacy, and application, see Civil Rights Act of 1964 - Debate. For scholarly and legal consensus on the Act's provisions, see Civil Rights Act of 1964 - Legal Consensus.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not emerge without precedent. Congress had passed civil rights legislation during and after the Civil War, including the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, the latter of which prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodations. In 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Act in the Civil Rights Cases, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment constrained only state action, not private conduct.¹⁾ That ruling left federal civil rights enforcement largely inoperative for public accommodations for the next eight decades.

The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) and Fifteenth Amendment (1870) had guaranteed equal protection and voting rights on paper, but their practical reach contracted sharply in the decades following Reconstruction. By the early twentieth century, legally enforced racial segregation - known as Jim Crow - governed public life across most Southern states, backed by state statute and local ordinance. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) provided the constitutional rationale, endorsing “separate but equal” facilities.²⁾

Federal civil rights legislation appeared episodically in the twentieth century before 1964. President Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces by executive order in 1948.³⁾ Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, both focused narrowly on voting rights; both were substantially weakened during Senate debate and produced limited enforcement.⁴⁾

The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) declared state-mandated school segregation unconstitutional, overturning Plessy.⁵⁾ The ruling did not produce immediate desegregation; Southern states mounted organized resistance, and President Dwight Eisenhower deployed federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 only after Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to block court-ordered school integration.⁶⁾

Between 1955 and 1963, a series of organized campaigns - including the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956), sit-in campaigns at lunch counters beginning in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, and the Freedom Rides of 1961 - drew national attention to the legal and extralegal enforcement of segregation. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., organized many of these efforts.

President John F. Kennedy entered office in January 1961 without a major civil rights bill as an immediate legislative priority. His administration moved cautiously, wary of alienating Southern Democratic senators whose votes were needed for other legislation. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy pressed for negotiated settlements and voter registration drives rather than broad statutory change.⁷⁾

In the spring of 1963, the SCLC launched a campaign against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor ordered the use of fire hoses and police dogs against demonstrators, including children. Photographs and television footage of these events reached a national audience and intensified pressure on the Kennedy administration.⁸⁾

On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy addressed the nation in a televised speech and announced he would send a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress. Kennedy framed the issue as a moral question and called on Congress to act.⁹⁾ The bill he submitted on June 19, 1963 proposed to ban discrimination in public accommodations, authorize the federal government to file school desegregation suits, extend the Civil Rights Commission, and strengthen voting rights protections.

On August 28, 1963, approximately 250,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C. for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” address at the Lincoln Memorial. The march was organized by a coalition including the SCLC, SNCC, the National Urban League, and the NAACP, as well as labor organizations led by A. Philip Randolph.¹⁰⁾

Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as president the same day.

Lyndon Johnson, in his first address to Congress on November 27, 1963, called for passage of the Kennedy civil rights bill as a memorial to the slain president.¹¹⁾ Johnson was a former Senate Majority Leader with an intimate knowledge of congressional procedure and a record of brokering the weakened 1957 and 1960 acts. He resolved to pass a stronger bill.

The bill passed the House of Representatives on February 10, 1964 by a vote of 290 to 130.¹²⁾ In the Senate, the bill faced a filibuster led by Southern Democrats, including Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, who organized his colleagues into rotating shifts to sustain extended debate. The filibuster lasted 60 days - at the time the longest in Senate history.¹³⁾

Senate Majority Whip Hubert Humphrey managed the bill on the floor. Securing cloture - then requiring a two-thirds vote - depended on winning Republican support. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois negotiated amendments to the bill, particularly to Title VII's employment provisions, and ultimately supported cloture along with a substantial bloc of Republican senators.¹⁴⁾ Cloture was invoked on June 10, 1964 by a vote of 71 to 29 - the first time the Senate had ever voted cloture on a civil rights bill.

The Senate passed the Civil Rights Act on June 19, 1964. The House accepted the Senate version without a conference committee. President Johnson signed the Act into law on July 2, 1964.¹⁵⁾

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 contained eleven titles. The principal provisions were:

• Title I - Prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements.
• Title II - Prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin in places of public accommodation affecting interstate commerce, including hotels, restaurants, theaters, and gas stations.
• Title IV - Authorized the Attorney General to file suits to desegregate public schools.
• Title VI - Prohibited discrimination by programs receiving federal financial assistance.
• Title VII - Prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin by employers with 15 or more employees; created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce this title. The word “sex” was added by amendment during House debate.¹⁶⁾

The Act did not include provisions for federal protection of voting rights in state elections; that was addressed separately in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Shortly after Johnson signed the Act, Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee, campaigned in part on opposition to Title II and Title VII on constitutional libertarian grounds, arguing that federal regulation of private business exceeded Congress's commerce power. Goldwater carried five Deep South states in the November 1964 election - the first Republican to do so since Reconstruction.¹⁷⁾

The Act's constitutionality was immediately challenged. In Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964), the Supreme Court unanimously upheld Title II under the Commerce Clause.¹⁸⁾ In Katzenbach v. McClung (1964), decided the same day, the Court upheld the Act's application to Ollie's Barbecue, a Birmingham restaurant, on similar grounds.¹⁹⁾

Enforcement was uneven in its early years. The EEOC, created by Title VII, lacked litigation authority and initially functioned primarily as a conciliation body. Patterns of employment discrimination in many industries continued well into the following decade.

Whether the addition of “sex” to Title VII was intended to sabotage the bill or reflected genuine legislative support for sex-based employment protections is disputed among historians; some argue Representative Howard W. Smith of Virginia, who introduced the amendment, intended it as a wrecking measure, while others point to evidence that women's rights advocates supported and helped secure the provision.²⁰⁾

Whether the partisan realignment of the South following 1964 resulted primarily from white backlash against the Civil Rights Act or from longer-term economic and demographic shifts is contested among political scientists and historians.²¹⁾

Whether Congress, in enacting Title VII, intended to prohibit only intentional discrimination (disparate treatment) or also practices with racially unequal outcomes (disparate impact) was disputed from the Act's passage and remained unsettled until the Supreme Court addressed it in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971).²²⁾

1. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).
2. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
3. Executive Order 9981, July 26, 1948.
4. Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).
5. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).
6. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
7. William P. Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013).
8. John F. Kennedy, Address on Civil Rights, June 11, 1963, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, MA.
9. Lyndon B. Johnson, Address Before a Joint Session of Congress, November 27, 1963, LBJ Presidential Library, Austin, TX.
10. Congressional Record, 88th Congress, 2nd Session, February 10, 1964.
11. Robert Mann, The Walls of Jericho: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell, and the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996).
12. Todd Purdum, An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (New York: Henry Holt, 2014).
13. Public Law 88-352, 78 Stat. 241 (1964).
14. Francis J. Vaas, “Title VII: Legislative History,” Boston College Law Review 7 (1966): 431-458.
15. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).
16. Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U.S. 241 (1964).
17. Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U.S. 294 (1964).
18. Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971).