Michael Barone: The 40th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and No One Is Celebrating?

It seems that there will be far less commemoration of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, exactly 40 years ago today, than there was of the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education in May.

This is not as it should be. Brown was certainly a milestone in the nation's history, a declaration that separate could not be equal and that racial discrimination is wrong. But Brown was much less effective in ending segregation than the Civil Rights Act. This was partly because the Court -- in its follow-up decision to Brown a year later -- said that desegregation should proceed"with all deliberate speed," words that were taken as an invitation to delay and resistance.

But it was also because as a practical matter courts had a hard time controlling facts on the ground. Schools in the border states were rapidly desegregated. But in the Deep South"freedom of choice" plans produced little integration as blacks were intimidated from seeking places in mostly white schools. It was not until Green v. New Kent County in 1968 that the Supreme Court really made a difference by overturning a"freedom of choice" plan.

In the meantime, Congress had acted. Chief Justice Warren had hoped that the unanimous support on the Court for Brown would move white Southerners to change their ways, but that didn't happen. In contrast, the long deliberative process between President Kennedy's June 1963 endorsement of the Civil Rights Act and President Johnson's signing of the bill more than a year later seems to have changed minds.

The nation watched on television as senators slept on cots during the Southerners' filibuster in the Senate. Opponents of the bill were given every chance to obstruct, but they could not prevent an overwhelming majority of the House from voting for the bill and a two-thirds majority in the Senate breaking the filibuster. Support was broad and bipartisan; contrary to what is often assumed today, a higher proportion of Republicans than of Democrats supported the bill. Its leading advocates included not only Democrats like Sen. Hubert Humphrey and Congressman Emanuel Celler but also Republicans like Sen. Jacob Javits and Congressman William McCulloch.

It was widely expected that there would be massive resistance to the Act, as there had been to school desegregation. But that proved not to be the case. Within a few years, public accommodations were largely integrated in the South and workplace discrimination, widespread throughout the nation, was vastly diminished. I remember traveling in the South not long after the Civil Rights Act was passed and noticing that black diners were treated with courtesy by white waitresses: an astonishing contrast with the anger and violence that greeted the lunch-counter sit-ins and freedom rides only a few years before. The law was the law, and Southern manners took over. Integration was achieved about as rapidly as it had been in the 1950s in the military, where it was based on the president's command authority.

Few politicians called for repeal of the Civil Rights Act. One reason may have been the passage in 1965 of the Voting Rights Act, which quickly and effectively enfranchised Southern blacks who had been barred from the polls for many years. True, Lester Maddox, who closed his restaurant rather than serve blacks, was elected governor of Georgia in 1966, but Republican Howard Callaway had a plurality of votes and Maddox, under state law, was installed by the heavily Democratic legislature. Alabama Governor George Wallace's career had prospered since he stood in the schoolhouse door in 1963, but as he went about the nation in the Democratic primaries in 1964 and as a third-party candidate in 1968, he did not call for repeal of the Civil Rights Act but concentrated on other grievances. In the political marketplace, the demand for a return to legally enforced segregation quickly fell toward zero....