The Lester Maddox Whitewash By Liberals, and more...

Moreover, it was the Republican Party that championed and pushed the Civil Rights Act into passage, so it hardly makes for much of a "protest" against that law to switch from Democrat to Republican.

Excuse me?

BACKGROUNDER ON THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT
The assassination of John Kennedy in November 1963 left most civil rights leaders grief-stricken. Kennedy had been the first president since Harry Truman to champion equal rights for black Americans, and they knew little about his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Although Johnson had helped engineer the Civil Rights Act of 1957, that had been a mild measure, and no one knew if the Texan would continue Kennedy's call for civil rights or move to placate his fellow southerners.
But on November 27, 1963, addressing the Congress and the nation for the first time as president, Johnson called for passage of the civil rights bill as a monument to the fallen Kennedy.

Please note that Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson were all Democrats.

If you'll recall, the Dixiecrats were Southern Democrats who"rejected President Harry S. TRUMAN's civil-rights program and revolted against the civil-rights plank adopted at the Democratic National Convention."

You are trying to re-write history.

Not me. Look in the mirror.

In the first week of February 1965, President Lyndon Johnson invited Dirksen to the White House, and there they discussed the possible need for a new civil rights bill. Continuing social unrest led Johnson and congressional leaders to conclude that a new law would have to be enacted. This surprised Dirksen and other sponsors of the omnibus Civil Rights Act of 1964. "We felt, "Dirksen opined, "we had made some real honest-to-God progress last year. We felt everything would fall into its slot. We thought we were out of the civil rights woods, but we weren't." [Quoted in MacNeil, Dirksen, p. 252]

On February 11, Dirksen met with Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Johnson's new Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach. They agreed on enacting a stringent new law to guarantee the right to vote, one that would inflict severe penalties on anyone obstructing any citizen's right to vote.

Working out the details took time, however. Dirksen, Mansfield, and Katzenbach labored for weeks, as demonstrations continued in Alabama. Dirksen and his staff produced a bill that gave the federal courts responsibility for enforcing the right to register and vote. This did not satisfy Mansfield or the White House, both of whom were suspicious of federal judges in the South. Dirksen relented and endorsed the use of federal registrars, called "examiners."

Once Dirksen was on board, President Johnson went before a joint session of Congress on March 15 and asked that the legislation be passed. On March 18 Dirksen and Mansfield jointly introduced the President's bill, S 1564, which had been drafted in Dirksen's office. The bill went to the Judiciary Committee for consideration - with an April 9 deadline for reporting.

Dirksen explained the context for the voting rights bill in a television and radio broadcast to his constituents in Illinois during that same week. He dealt with the Constitution's treatment of slavery, the post-Civil War amendments, and the series of civil rights bills passed beginning in 1957. He issued a strong call for action by Congress: ". . . the right to vote is stall an issue in this free country. There has to be a real remedy. There has to be something durable and worthwhile. This cannot go on forever, this denial of the right to vote by ruses and devices and tests and whatever the mind can contrive to either make it very difficult or to make it impossible to vote." A week later, Dirksen's staff created a form letter to respond to growing volume of mail on the subject.

Proponents of action battled among themselves over particular provisions, however, some preferring stronger action than others. For example, Dirksen differed sharply with Democratic liberals in the Senate led by Ted Kennedy over the latter's anti-poll tax amendment. The Judiciary Committee reported the bill shortly before midnight on April 9. It now contained stronger provisions than the original, reflecting intense lobbying by liberals.

Senate floor debate on the voting bill began April 22. Minority Leader Dirksen prepared his remarks carefully, writing a draft in one of the scores of personal notebooks he kept. As was often his practice, the Senator from the Land of Lincoln provided historical background for the current debate. He emphasized the constitutional principle of "consent of the governed" before posing this rhetorical question: "How then shall there be government by the people if some of the people cannot speak?" One hundred years to the month after the Civil War ended, in Dirksen's words, "we seek a solution which overrides emotion and sentimentality, prejudice and politics and which will provide a fair and equitable solution."

Southern opponents of S 1564 argued that the measure was unconstitutional in circumventing a state's right to impose its own voting criteria. But an expected filibuster never materialized. Instead, the Southerners attempted to alter the bill's main provisions by proposing many amendments.

For weeks the bickering continued. The White House needed Dirksen and his Republicans to support cloture to end debate, but Dirksen found it more difficult than expected to bring Republicans to support cloture. The battle over voting rights legislation become a test of Dirksen's ability to lead the Republicans, some of whom supported a rival, Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa. Despite being hospitalized three times in the Spring of 1965, Dirksen worked relentlessly. "This involves more than you," Dirksen told one of his colleagues. "It's the party. Don't' drop me in the mud." [Quoted in MacNeil, Dirksen, p. 259]

Dirksen had to disarm and satisfy Republican conservatives who opposed the expansion of federal authority into realms typically reserved to the states and localities. In his effort to forge a majority, he tailored the legislative language to limit the ban on poll taxes to those states actually using them to prevent voter registration. Senate liberals, including Illinois's other Senator, Paul Douglas, blasted Dirksen for watering down the bill, but President Johnson understood the political realities and instructed Majority Leader Mike Mansfield to go along with Dirksen to get a cloture vote.

By late May, Dirksen found the votes. He told Mansfield to proceed, and on May 21 a petition for a cloture motion was filed. The motion for cloture was adopted by a 70-30 roll-call vote on May 25. The very next day, Dirksen again exhorted his colleagues to pass the voting rights bill, and by this time approval was well-assured. It passed on 77-19 roll-call vote.

The House approved its version of voting rights legislation (HR 6400) on July 9 by a vote of 333-85. A conference committee was named, and Dirksen served on it (for an example of a letter from a House member asking for Dirksen's support during those deliberations, click here). The committee settled the differences in relatively short order and issued its report on July 29. The House approved the conference report on August 3, the Senate a day later.

Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law (S 1564 - PL 89-110) on August 6, 1965. At the signing ceremony, broadcast nationwide from the U.S. Capitol rotunda, President Johnson said that the Act would "strike away the last major shackle" of black Americans' "ancient bonds."

Some senators filibustered against the bills in order to prevent their passage. That made it necessary for Dirksen to deliver four-fifths of the Republican vote in order to silence the opposition. To cloture the fillibuster, Dirksen had to persuade six Republicans from the west and a handful of liberal Republicans from the northeast. He changed the bills in many ways to get the support of his fellow senators. He received help from many of the other senators who wanted them passed, but his office was the main headquarters for the revision of the bills. On June 12, 1963, after a sixty-seven-day delay, the Senate voted for cloture, 71 to 29. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was skillfully helped along by Dirksen, who obtained a final vote of 73 to 21 in favor of the bills.

Again in 1968 additional civil rights bills were proposed and the southern Democrats began to filibuster. Dirksen was in and out of the hospital frequently that year, but he still did his best to advance the civil rights package with his western colleagues. Dirksen got to the Senate early and was the last to leave as he worked to end the filibuster. On the third attempt, Dirksen and his fellow Senators finally won the cloture, 65 to 32. Passage of the Civil Rights Act followed shortly after the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968. The enormous demonstrations that King had led focused attention on the need for civil rights legislation under consideration in the Congress. Partly as a result of those demonstrations, the Civil Rights Bill was passed. On April 11, 1968, President Johnson signed the bill to make it a law.

Everett Dirksen played a huge role in passing both the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Despite Dirksen's numerous ailments, he still fought for what he believed. He rose to the occasion and gave everything he had in order to pass those two important bills. That legislation is often remembered as his most important congressional work.—[From Allan Carpenter, Illinois; Neil Mac-Neil, Dirksen; Edward L. Schapsmeier and Frederick H. Schapsmeier, Dirksen of Illinois.]

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