Civil Rights Act of 1960
By the late 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement had been pressuring Congress to enact legislation to protect the constitutional civil rights of African Americans. The first major piece of civil rights legislation passed by Congress was the Civil Rights Act of 1957. While enforcing the voting rights of African Americans set out in the Fifteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the act had several loopholes. Southern states continued to discriminate against African Americans in application of voter registration and electoral laws, in segregation of school and public facilities, and in employment.
Report to the American People on Civil Rights
In the end, the most vocal support for the civil rights bill came from the participants of the August 28 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The demonstration made Kennedy anxious, but its organizers ensured that it would be used to support his legislation. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing (in which four black choir girls were killed) in September increased public support for the bill, but legislative progress stagnated in Congress by the efforts of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans. In an interview that month, the President acknowledged the political cost of his new stance on civil rights: "It has caused a good deal of feeling against the Administration in the South—also, I suppose, in other parts of the country. ... I lost some southern states in 1960 so I suppose I will lose some, maybe more, in 1964. I am not sure that I am the most popular figure in the country today in the South, but that is all right." Still, he remained optimistic about his legislation, commenting in his last-ever press conference on November 14, "However dark the land looks now, I think that 'westward look, the land is bright,' and I think that next summer it may be." On November 22, 1963 Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Lyndon B. Johnson was immediately sworn in as President and addressed a joint session of Congress, saying, "No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long." After an intense legislative effort, the bill passed Congress and was signed into law by Johnson as the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964.