Civil Rights Act Leaves Deep Mark On the American Political Landscape
By MICHAEL ORESKES
Published: July 2, 1989
While its aim was to tear down the barriers of race in housing, employment and trade, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law 25 years ago today, profoundly altered the nation's political life as well.
The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have proved to be among the most powerful agents of partisan realignment since the Civil War and have helped each party secure its hold on one branch of Government, politicians and political scientists say.
Recalling the dramatic and painful birth of the 1964 act, aides who were present at its creation say advocates and opponents alike saw its potential to obliterate the old political order and install a new one in its place. White Flight Worried Johnson
Some of President Lyndon B. Johnson's advisers recall how Democrats rejoiced at the thought that millions of grateful black voters would come flooding into the Democratic camp. But some also remember that Mr. Johnson was warned that whites would flee the party, and they say he worried about it late into the night of July 2, 1964, after signing the bill.
''It was exciting to think you could improve your chances by enfranchising a great chunk of people,'' said Matt Reese, a political consultant who has served in hundreds of campaigns since he advised John F. Kennedy and Mr. Johnson. ''From the standpoint of the politicians we were looking at it as a great boon. The period of the Kennedys and the new Presidency of Lyndon Johnson quite convinced Democratic politicians that the blacks were solidly for the Democrats. We had great hopes of retaining the white Southern Democrats and getting the blacks registered in great numbers.''
But there were warnings that this was far too much to hope for. It was just a few days after his wrenching ascension to the Presidency that Mr. Johnson asked his old friend and mentor, Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, to come to the White House to talk about the plan to seek strong civil rights legislation in 1964. 'Don't Stand in My Way'
The President sat in a wing chair. The Senator sat at one end of a small couch. Their knees almost touched. From the other end of the couch, the President's executive assitant, Jack Valenti, witnessed a moment that captured much of what was to come in the next quarter century of American politics.
The President looked his old friend in the eye, Mr. Valenti recalled. ''He said: 'Dick, you've got to get out of my way. I'm going to run over you. I don't intend to cavil or compromise. I don't want to hurt you. But don't stand in my way.' ''
Mr. Russell, the patriarch of the Senate, a legislator respected even by those who disdained his defense of the old Southern ways, looked back at the President and spoke sorrowfully.
''You may do that,'' he replied, ''but by God, it's going to cost you the South and cost you the election.''
''If that's the price I've got to pay,'' said the President, ''I'll pay it gladly.''
Seven months later, after a bruising fight to break the filibuster of Mr. Russell and his Southern allies, Mr. Johnson got his Civil Rights Act. Hours after he signed it, the President said to his press aide, Bill Moyers, ''I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.'' Transcendent, Definining Debates
Mr. Russell was wrong about the 1964 election. The Democrats lost five Deep South states but easily defeated Senator Barry Goldwater, who was then considered an extreme conservative. In the long term, however, as the civil rights effort took effect, Senator Russell's warning turned out to be ''unhappily, lamentably prophetic,'' in Mr. Valenti's words.
The effect of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on race relations, on the progress of blacks, on America's sense of itself and on its standing in the world are still the subject of intense discussion. But on one point there is little debate. The fights over the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were transcendent and defining moments that have shaped American politics from that day to this.
Both George Wallace in the Democratic primaries of 1964 and Senator Goldwater, who voted against the 1964 act, tried to take advantage of whites' resentment of the new law. But few whites outside the South saw the law as threatening, since its initial effects had to do mainly with things like desegregating lunch counters, motels and buses.
It was only later that aspects like affirmative action in employment and Federal action against discrimination in aid to education began to pinch white voters across the country. More than that, they served as a constant reminder to white voters of blacks' Democratic allegiance. Racial Polarization The single most powerful facts of American Government since 1964, the almost unbroken Democratic control of Congress and Republican control of the White House, can be traced in large measure to the racial polarization that the act helped produce, in the view of analysts as disparate as Eddie Mahe, a leading Republican consultant, and Linda Williams, an expert on race and politics at the Joint Center for Political Studies in Washington.
The Civil Rights Act did not create the political schism between blacks and whites. But even though many Republican lawmakers supported the act and many Democrats opposed it, the views of the national tickets served to define both parties in the eyes of many voters. The Democratic Party's commitment to civil rights legislation secured the almost monolithic support of newly enfranchised black Americans; no ethnic, racial or religious group votes is more solidly Democratic than blacks. But that very identification drove many white voters away from the party, at least as a national institution, and undermined it not only in the South but in the urban North as well.
This trade-off has served the Republicans at the Presidential level and the Democrats at the Congressional level, particularly in the House of Representatives. Mr. Johnson in 1964 was the last Democratic candidate for President to win a majority of white votes, not only in the South but nationwide. Not even Jimmy Carter of Georgia could do it, unseating Gerald R. Ford in 1976 only by the margin provided by black voters. Rewards of Apportionment
At the Congressional level, Democrats have benefited greatly through the apportionment of black voters. ''They can take a district and put 20 or 30 percent black in it and keep it from being a black district but make it totally safe for a white Democrat,'' said Mr. Mahe, who specializes in advising Republican Congressional candidates.
The South has 41 Congressional districts with electorates that are 20 percent to 50 percent black. Only one has a black Congressman; the South's three other black members of Congress all come from districts with a black majority.
Ms. Williams, of the Joint Center for Poliitcal Studies, said the great change in race relations over the last 25 years has been in the area of politics. Economic inequality has barely changed at all, she said. But where there were only a few hundred black officeholders in 1965, there are some 6,000 today.
Republicans, who have lately sought to reassert their 19th century origins as the party of civil rights, will push hard in the reapportionment after the 1990 census for the creation of districts with more black voters. They hope to see more black members of Congress but fewer Democratic ones - a potentially painful choice for black Democrats.
Politicians and students of politics say that of all the forces that affect political behavior - class, ideology, regionalism, religion - none has been as powerful as race.
''The Civil Rights Act we've handled pretty well,'' said Mr. Reese, the Democratic consultant. ''We've handled it with very little violence and reasonable good will. But it has been so important in so many places both to the black and white communities that it has overwhelmed all the other issues. Politically it's made us not colorblind but color-conscious. Our politics today is basically racial. I think we'll grow out of it. God, I hope so.'' The Democrats' Nightmare
Many other Democrats do, too. Simply put, a party without white voters is a party that loses. The white flight that has cost Democrats dearly at the Presidential level is begining to hurt them at lower levels. ''The trend is what gives me the concern,'' said Senator John B. Breaux, Democrat of Louisiania. Citing the declining numbers of white registered Democrats, he added: ''That hemorrhaging has to be stopped. As we try to address these more moderate and middle concerns, there is a danger that minorities will perceive that as a movement away from their concerns. That is the problem.''
The Democratic problem has been closely chronicled in polls. In 1964, 64 percent of white Southerners in a University of Michigan survey called themselves Democrats and only 15 percent said they were Republicans. This year, according to New York Times/ CBS News polls, 37 percent of white Southerners said they were Republicans and 34 percent said they were Democrats. The gap was even more pronounced among younger white Southerners.
To Mr. Breaux, the answer is to stress issues like economic development that appeal to whites as well as blacks, and to find ways to talk about others, like crime, that will allow Democrats to take a tough stand without appealing to racism.
''You don't have to be perceived as just the party of minorities,'' said Mr. Breaux, ''You can be strong on defense, for patriotism and the flag and address the interests of the middle class and still look out for minorities.'' Furloughs and Statehood
The problem for Democrats is not just what they do, of course, but what Republicans do, too. Last year George Bush's campaign made great headway with repeated references to Willie Horton, a black prisoner released on furlough under the administration of Mr. Bush's opponent, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts. Many Democrats saw that as an appeal to race, a charge Mr. Bush and his aides denied.
A similiar complaint is being made this year about a campaign tactic one Republican used against another in the Virginia gubernatorial primary. Representative Stan Parris broadcast advertisments attacking former Senator Paul S. Trible Jr. for voting in favor of statehood for the District of Columbia. ''What they are really talking about is the possibility of two black senators,'' said Representative John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia, who led civil rights marchers in the South 25 years ago.
Mr. Parris's advertisements were thought to have hurt Mr. Trible, enabling a third candidate, J. Marshall Coleman, to win the Republican nomination. He now faces Lieut. Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, who is seeking to be the first black ever elected governor of any state.
Both men have stressed that their campaigns should focus on issues rather than race. The campaign, nevertheless, will be an important measure of the Democratic Party's ability to hang on to white voters and of a black Democrat's ability to attract them.
Photo of President B. Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with Senators Everett McK. Dirksen and Hubert H. Humphrey and Representatives Charles A. Halleck and Emanuel Celler, Whitney M. Young, Representative Hale Boggs, George Meany, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (NYT/George Tames); chart of 1960, 1964 and 1988 presidental elections with breakdown of voting trends by all whites, southern whites and all blackd (Gallup Poll/NYT)