Voting Rights Act of 1965
Congress responded to rampant discrimination against racial minorities in public accommodations and government services by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Act included some voting rights protections; it required registrars to equally administer literacy tests in writing to each voter and to accept applications that contained minor errors, and it created a rebuttable presumption that persons with a sixth-grade education were sufficiently literate to vote. However, despite lobbying from civil rights leaders, the Act did not prohibit most forms of voting discrimination. President Lyndon B. Johnson recognized this, and shortly after the 1964 elections in which Democrats gained overwhelming majorities in both chambers of Congress, he privately instructed Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to draft "the goddamndest, toughest voting rights act that you can". However, Johnson did not publicly push for the legislation at the time; his advisers warned him of political costs for vigorously pursuing a voting rights bill so soon after Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Johnson was concerned that championing voting rights would endanger his Great Society reforms by angering Southern Democrats in Congress.
Ned Breathitt
Passage of the national Civil Rights Act of 1964 had paved the way for an even stronger civil rights bill in the 1966 legislative session. The Assembly easily passed the Kentucky Civil Rights Act opening all public accommodations to people of every race and prohibiting racial discrimination in employment by firms that employed eight or more people. The act applied to many kinds of businesses not covered by the federal statute, and approximately ninety percent of the businesses in Kentucky were affected, compared to only sixty percent that were covered by the federal statute. The act was the first of its kind passed in a southern state. In 1966, Breathitt was presented with the Lincoln Key Award for his leadership in the bill's passage. In 1966 and 1967, he was chair of the Southern Governors' Conference's Committee on Regional and Interstate Cooperation. He was also the only state governor named to the President's Council on Human Rights.