On the evening of July 2, 1964, the East Room of the White House was the setting for one of those historic events for which the chamber in which Abigail Adams once hung the presidential laundry has become famous. On that summer evening, President Lyndon B. Johnson, later self-described as "a man whose roots [went] deep into Southern soil," signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Many in the audience--and millions of black Americans (then called Negroes) watching by television--saw the signing as the fulfillment of hopes and dreams born of the long years in which blacks had suffered indignity and humiliation as they sought food, lodging, and the simplest and most basic of amenities. For every person who had been forced to the back door of a restaurant or turned away from a roadside restroom, the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1984 was the dawning of a new day.
On that summer evening, many thought they had received fulfillment of the promise of the Scriptures: "Weeping may endure for a reason, but joy cometh in the morning."
The moment of signing had been preceded by a struggle, often bitter and sometimes bloody, to move the conscience of a nation. As the decade began, young black college students--first in North Carolina and, later, throughout the country--had begun to "sit in" at dime-store lunch counters and other establishments, demanding service on the same basis as other patrons. In 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others had mounted the campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, that brought pictures of police dogs being "sicced" on children and water hoses being turned on young black people. Birmingham's police commissioner, Theophilus Eugene (Bull) Connor, had become the world-renowned symbol of Southern racism. Though in later years he would change his rhetoric, the then-sitting governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace, had taken office with a vow of "Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!"
Blood had bought the day of signing. There had been the blood shed by black and white civil rights advocates (and there would be more in that very summer of 1964). There was the blood of our little black girls blown to their deaths in an Alabama church. And there was the blood that poured from the body of the nation's young and popular president, John F. Kennedy.
For many, the evening ceremony represented a breaking dawn. For others, it was but a refreshing pause in a long day of struggle.
The end of the beginning
Almost a year later, Johnson, speaking of the voting rights legislation then making its way through Congress, borrowed language from Winston Churchill to say the bill was "not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." The words would have been apt had the president chosen to employ them on the night he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
For in the quarter of a century since Johnson's signature made the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the law of the land, those whom King once called "the devotees of civil rights" have discovered that the road ahead was long and the days ahead were filled with
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