Civil Rights Laws of the 1960s

The '64 and '65 Acts were enacted during the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. They represented a culmination of a long struggle by the civil rights movement for recognition of the legal and political rights of African Americans. The effective mobilization by black leaders of opposition to Southern segregation and discrimination coupled with the intransigent and brutal tactics employed by Southern extremists helped generate public support for new civil rights legislation, which was effectively led, at first hesitantly, and then more decisively, by Presidents John Kennedy and Johnson. LBJ probably did more for the cause of black civil rights than any President since Abraham Lincoln, out of a combination of political calculation and personal conviction. The relationship between black civil rights leaders and these presidents was often uneasy during the 1960s, but became more cordial during 1963-1965. This was due to a convergence of mutual interests, but the relationship deteriorated thereafter amidst the pressures produced by a white backlash to urban rioting, the split between black leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King and Johnson over the Vietnam War, and divisions within the

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st in part, motivated by his desire to be seen as a national political figure. But he had supported one of the most crippling amendments to the '57 Act which had required that state officials accused of impeding black voters to be tried before all white juries. Although as Chairman of the CEEO, "federal jobs held by blacks increased 17 percent in fiscal 1962 and 22 percent in fiscal 1963," he was strongly criticized by Robert Kennedy for relying too much on voluntary compliance by federal contractors and for his appointment of black lawyer Hobart Taylor, Jr. as executive vice chairman of CEEO, whom Kennedy called an "Uncle Tom." In an interview King later said that "I really think we saw two Kennedys, a Kennedy the first two years and another Kennedy emerging in 1963 . . . who addressed race as a moral issue of national survival." According to Dallek, "from the moment he assumed the presidency, he [LBJ] saw a compelling need to drive Kennedy's [civil rights] bill through Congress with no major compromise that would weaken the law." LBJ lost no time in making his position clear to all that would listen. Two days after JFK's assassination, he told Young, "we've got to have a civil rights bill. It's [segregation] a cancer
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Approximate Pages = 22 (250 words per page)

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