Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [45]
When civil rights legislation came before the House, a long, heated debate ensued. My records show a total of 111 amendments were brought forward—some designed to strengthen the legislation, others to gut it, and still others designed to make it more moderate so it could garner enough votes to pass.13 The 1964 Civil Rights Act ultimately was approved by the House on February 10, 1964, by a vote of 290–130. Ninety-six Democrats and thirty-four Republicans opposed the bill. I was a proud member of the majority.
After the bill passed the House, Democrats staged a filibuster in the Senate. Though a majority of senators tended to support civil rights legislation, they had failed over the years to obtain the two-thirds supermajority needed to cut off a filibuster. In 1964, Johnson was ready to try again.*
Over those tense, dramatic days, Senate Republicans and moderate Democrats together worked to garner the votes needed to end the filibuster. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Republican leader, skillfully led the effort in support of the legislation. The situation seemed to change by the hour as senators worked to pry loose that elusive sixty-seventh vote. Many prominent senators joined the bill’s opposition, including Tennessee’s Al Gore, Sr., and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, who filibustered against the legislation for fourteen hours and thirteen minutes.
Typically, President Johnson was in the thick of things. He used all of the skills he had honed as Senate majority leader to help ensure the bill’s passage, first making sure that it got to the floor and later arm twisting to get every possible vote. As the historic debate unfolded, some of us from the House went over to the Senate to watch. When the Senate roll call reached the necessary sixty-seventh vote, cheers broke out in the Senate chamber. After years of frustration, this historic legislation had passed the United States Congress. Dirksen summed up the battle by paraphrasing Victor Hugo. “Stronger than all the armies,” he said, “is an idea whose time has come.”
I was grateful and proud that the Republican Party had proved indispensable in passing the civil rights legislation. Indeed, one of the generally overlooked facts in the history of the civil rights movement was that in the 1960s a higher percentage of Republicans in both the House and the Senate supported the legislation than did the Democrats, and that without the leadership of Senator Dirksen, it would likely not have passed.* I had hoped that the robust and critical level of support by the GOP for civil rights would lead to a revival of the party’s historically close relationship with minority voters. For many decades after the Civil War, black voters had voted with the party of Lincoln, but that changed during the New Deal days of the Franklin Roosevelt administration.
A few years later, when I was still in the House, I urged civil rights activist James Farmer to seek a seat in Congress as a Republican. If he had been elected in his heavily Democratic Brooklyn district—admittedly a long shot—he would have been the first black Republican in the House of Representatives since the 1930s. Farmer was a masterful orator and a charismatic presence—one of the heroes of the movement, who organized the Freedom Rides that led to the desegregation of busing. Farmer had been linked to a socialist group in his youth. Some of my Republican friends took issue with my support for Farmer’s candidacy—some unfairly calling him “a renowned black militant.”14 Farmer had pledged to vote for the GOP leadership and was the only hope