Nothing called the Civil Rights Act of 1967 passed
Congress passed no measure called the Civil Rights Act of 1967. The sequence of major laws ran from 1957 through 1960, 1964 and 1965 to 1968, and the years 1966 and 1967 were the gap in which two attempts to move further failed. Understanding why means looking at the Senate, and especially at the filibuster.
Filibusters and the rule of cloture
In the Senate, debate could be ended only by a cloture vote. In the 1960s that required two-thirds of the senators present and voting, a high bar. A determined minority could therefore block almost any bill by talking at length, and Southern senators had used the tactic against civil rights measures for decades. They had weakened the 1957 and 1960 acts and fought the 1964 act through weeks of debate before cloture was finally voted in June 1964.
Congressional filibusters had a particular power on civil rights because the Southern bloc was cohesive and experienced. Successful cloture usually depended on securing the votes of a number of Republican senators, and on the backing of Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen. That support could not be assumed for each new bill.
The September 1966 filibuster
Johnson’s 1966 proposal combined several parts: federal jury reforms, protection for civil rights workers and a ban on housing discrimination in the sale and rental of homes. The House passed a version in August 1966, with the housing section weakened. In the Senate, supporters tried in September to end debate. Two cloture votes, held that month, received a majority of those voting but fell short of the two-thirds then needed. The bill was dead for that Congress.
The housing section was the main obstacle. Dirksen opposed it, and the marches in Chicago that summer, and the hostile reaction they drew, made some senators wary. The filibuster succeeded where the 1964 one had failed because the cohesion that carried cloture in 1964 was absent on housing.
The November 1966 elections then added Republican seats in both chambers, and the next Congress, which met in January 1967, was a harder place for civil rights supporters.
The 1967 proposals
President Johnson did not give up. In 1967 he again asked Congress for legislation on housing and for protection of those exercising their rights, and members introduced bills. Committees held hearings. But the proposals stalled without reaching the floor in a form that could pass, and the administration judged that a new fight so soon after the 1966 defeat was unlikely to succeed.
Several factors lay behind the stall:
- The Democratic majority was smaller after 1966.
- Vietnam was consuming attention and money, and Johnson’s relations with Congress were strained by the war and by tax and budget disputes.
- Congressional conservatives, Southern Democrats and Republicans alike, could block bills in committee and on the floor.
The Powell exclusion
In January 1967 a House Democratic caucus stripped Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of his Education and Labor chairmanship, and on 1 March 1967 the full House voted, 307 to 116, to exclude him from his seat. Powell had been accused of misusing funds and of other misconduct, and he had been a flamboyant figure. But many Black Americans saw the vote as selective and as an insult to his Harlem constituents, who returned him in a special election in April. The Supreme Court ruled in 1969, in Powell v. McCormack, that the House had acted unconstitutionally in excluding him. The Powell exclusion did not directly kill any bill, but it soured relations and showed that the chamber was not in a conciliatory mood on race.
The riots and the congressional mood
The summer of 1967 made things worse. After disturbances in Newark and Detroit and in many smaller cities, many members of Congress pressed for tougher measures against rioting. In July the House voted down a modest rat-control bill, a vote that critics saw as dismissive of the conditions in poor neighbourhoods; such is the commonly told account, although the bill’s fate was also tied to ordinary legislative disputes. Anti-riot proposals advanced instead, and the House passed an anti-riot measure in the summer.
Johnson responded to the riots by creating the Kerner Commission in late July 1967. It issued its report in February 1968, warning of a nation moving toward two societies, separate and unequal. It came too late to change the Congress that had already shaped its mood in 1967.
How the story ended
The filibuster that killed the 1966 bill did not end the argument. In early 1968 Mondale and Brooke pushed fair housing in the Senate, Dirksen agreed to a compromise, and cloture was finally achieved in March 1968. The assassination of Martin Luther King on 4 April moved the House to accept the Senate bill, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 became law on 11 April. The anti-riot title was in the same act.
So 1967 was a year of struggle in Congress, not progress in the form of a statute. The failures of 1966 and 1967 were the background to the passage of 1968, and the lesson most historians draw is that the filibuster, the electoral shift and the riots together decided what could pass.