Civil Rights Act of 1964: Clair Engle's Silent Vote and Smith's Poison Pill

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In June 1964, Senator Clair Engle of California, partially paralyzed and unable to speak because of a terminal brain tumor, was wheeled into the Senate for the cloture vote and pointed to his eye to vote aye. He died seven weeks later. The episode traces how the Civil Rights Act got there. The Supreme Court had gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1875 in 1883, and the 1957 and 1960 acts lacked enforcement against the massive resistance that followed Brown v. Board of Education. Images from Little Rock and Birmingham, which the Soviet Union used as propaganda, pushed John F. Kennedy to propose a bill on June 11, 1963, but it lacked protections against private employment discrimination and left lawsuits to individual victims.

House Judiciary chairman Emanuel Celler added employment protections and a section letting the attorney general sue, while Rules Committee chairman Howard W. Smith of Virginia buried the bill and planned to add the word sex as a poison pill. After Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson framed passage as a memorial, a discharge petition pried the bill loose, and it passed the House 290 to 130 on February 10, 1964. Mike Mansfield bypassed James Eastland's Judiciary Committee, and Richard Russell's Southern bloc held the floor in a marathon filibuster until a substitute bill drafted with Hubert Humphrey and Everett Dirksen won cloture on June 10. Johnson signed the act on July 2, 1964.

• Senator Robert Byrd spoke for more than 14 hours straight, and senators slept on cots to maintain a quorum.
• The opposition split by region rather than party, with Senate Republicans voting 27 to 6 and Democrats 46 to 21 in favor.
• Five Southern states swung Republican in 1964 even as Johnson won in a landslide.
• Smith's added word became the basis for Phillips v. Martin Marietta in 1971, Burlington Northern v. White in 2006 and Bostock v. Clayton County in 2020.
• The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 copied the act's structure, with employment and public accommodations titles tracking Titles VII and II.