The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act by Clay Risen Read Free Book Online

Introduction
    At 8:00 a.m. on July 3, 1964, a thirteen-year-old boy in Kansas City, Missouri, named Eugene Young went into the barbershop at the historic Muehlebach Hotel to get a haircut. He hopped into the chair of Lloyd Soper, one of the barbers, and gave him two dollars. A few minutes later, Young left, another satisfied customer. Young’s satisfaction went beyond the mere follicular: he was black, and the day before he had been refused service at the same shop.
    In the intervening hours and a thousand miles away, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which among other things forbade places of public accommodation—including restaurants, hotels, theaters, and barbershops—from discriminating on the basis of race. Who knows how many countless black men had been denied service at the Muehlebach since it opened in 1915. And now, suddenly, the doors were opened, as if they had never been closed. “I didn’t mind cutting that little boy’s hair,” Soper said. 1
    Young’s story was repeated across the country that day, and in the weeks that followed. An entire social system built on oppressing and excluding blacks had been outlawed with the stroke of a pen, and blacks were amazed to find how easy it fell apart. A black civil rights leader in Atlanta walked into the restaurant at the Henry Grady, an exclusive downtown hotel formerly the segregated terrain of the city’s white elite, and was served like he had been coming there for years. In Birmingham an aging black chauffeur went for dinner at the Dinkle-Tutweiler Hotel, where he had driven white customers for more than three decades but never himself been allowed to eat. 2
    There were pockets of resistance: a few hours after Johnson signed the bill, an Atlanta motel filed a suit against the Department of Justice, claiming the new law was unconstitutional. In Greenwood, Mississippi, officials drained a formerly whites-only public pool rather than open it to black children. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a mob of whites chased the actor Jack Palance from a movie theater because they thought he had been sitting with a black man. And an Atlanta restaurant owner named Lester Maddox vaulted himself into the national spotlight by not only refusing to serve blacks, but chasing them away, in front of photographers, with a gun. Yet overall the fall of Jim Crow was rapid and peaceful. As a Department of Justice report concluded at the end of the month, “The general picture is one of large-scale compliance.” 3
    The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most important piece of legislation passed by Congress in the twentieth century. It reached deep into the social fabric of the nation to refashion structures of racial order and domination that had held for almost a century—and it worked. Along with banning segregation in public accommodations, it banned discrimination in the workplace—and not only on the basis of race, but sex, religion, and national origin as well. It permitted the attorney general to sue school districts that failed to integrate, finally giving teeth to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ruling. And it barred federal funds from going to state or local programs that practiced discrimination—effectively withholding billions of dollars from the Jim Crow South, until the South got rid of Jim Crow. The act put the political, economic, and moral power of the federal government firmly behind black America, in a single step demolishing white supremacy’s stranglehold on public policy.
    While racism and discrimination are still facts of American life, the profound effects of the Civil Rights Act are evident in every facet of contemporary society, from the expansion of the black middle class to the election of black officials to the highest offices in the land. Less well known is the full story behind the act’s passage.
    The basic outlines of the bill’s biography are of course familiar. President John F.