LBJ Signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Ceremony, Speech, Legacy

On the evening of July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law in the East Room of the White House, capping a year-long legislative fight and enacting the most sweeping civil rights legislation the United States had seen in nearly a century. LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on live television, just hours after the House cleared the final version, outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public accommodations, employment, education, and federally funded programs.

Inside the East Room That Evening

The signing took place at 6:45 p.m., about five hours after the House voted 289 to 126 to accept the Senate-passed version and send it to the president.¹² The room was packed with legislators and civil rights leaders. Among those present were Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Attorney General Robert Kennedy, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Hubert Humphrey, and labor leader A. Philip Randolph.³⁴

Johnson used an estimated 75 to 100 pens to affix his signature, touching each one to the paper before moving to the next, and distributed them as souvenirs. King received one, which he called a gift he would cherish. Humphrey and Hoover each received pens. Robert Kennedy was entrusted with half a dozen, with additional pens reserved for the Kennedy family.³⁵

Cecil Stoughton, the first official White House photographer, documented the ceremony. His images from that evening capture Johnson at the signing table flanked by members of Congress and civil rights leaders, and in one of the most reproduced frames, handing a signing pen to King.⁶⁷ Another well-known photograph shows Johnson handing a pen to Robert Kennedy, with Congressman Emanuel Celler, Senator Wayne Morse, Randolph, and Dr. Rosa Gragg visible nearby.⁴

What Johnson Said on Live Television

In his televised address, Johnson framed the law in plain terms: those who “are equal before God shall now also be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.” He emphasized that the law “relies first on voluntary compliance” and that “its purpose is not to punish. Its purpose is not to divide, but to end divisions.” He credited John F. Kennedy with proposing the bill and noted its bipartisan support from more than two-thirds of both chambers.⁸

Johnson then outlined five immediate steps for implementation: nominating former Florida Governor LeRoy Collins as the first Director of the Community Relations Service, appointing an advisory committee, requesting supplemental appropriations from Congress, directing federal agencies to begin discharging their new responsibilities, and initiating meetings between officials and community groups to promote compliance.²

“We May Have Lost the South”

Later that evening, according to White House aide Bill Moyers, Johnson made a remark that became one of the most quoted statements about race and American politics. As the two flew to the LBJ Ranch, Johnson said: “Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime — and mine.”⁹ Moyers has described the comment as a “throwaway sidebar” that was “lightly said,” not the dramatic pronouncement it later became. Over the years the quote mutated into versions like “for a generation” or “once and for all,” and others, including Lady Bird Johnson and aide Harry McPherson, placed a similar remark after the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 rather than the Civil Rights Act.¹⁰ Whichever evening it was spoken, the words proved prophetic. Johnson won five Southern states against Barry Goldwater in 1964, but the region’s long-term shift toward the Republican Party accelerated in the years that followed.

The Fight That Made the Ceremony Possible

Kennedy had announced the legislation in a June 11, 1963, address to the nation and submitted the bill on June 19, 1963.¹¹⁵ After Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, Johnson urged Congress to pass the bill as a tribute. “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights,” he told a joint session five days after taking office. “It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”¹²

In the House, Rules Committee Chairman Howard W. Smith of Virginia held the bill in what colleagues called “Judge Smith’s graveyard” until a discharge petition and White House pressure forced hearings.¹³¹⁴ On February 8, 1964, Smith introduced an amendment adding “sex” to the categories protected under Title VII, a move widely understood as an attempt to sink the bill by broadening it. The strategy backfired. The House passed the amended bill on February 10, 1964, by 290 to 126, with 138 Republicans in favor.¹⁵¹⁶

The Senate was harder. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield bypassed the Judiciary Committee, chaired by James Eastland of Mississippi, and placed the bill directly on the calendar.¹² Southern senators, led by Richard Russell of Georgia, launched a filibuster on March 9, 1964, that ran 60 working days.¹⁷

Breaking it required 67 votes for cloture, and that meant Republicans. Johnson told Humphrey to court Minority Leader Everett Dirksen: “You’ve got to play to Ev Dirksen. You’ve got to let him have a piece of the action… You drink with Dirksen! You talk to Dirksen! You listen to Dirksen!”¹⁴ On May 13, 1964, Humphrey and Dirksen agreed on a compromise limiting federal lawsuits to cases involving a “pattern or practice” of discrimination. Dirksen introduced the bipartisan bill on May 26 and urged his party to back it, calling it “an idea whose time has come.”¹⁸

The Senate voted cloture 71 to 29 on June 10, 1964, with 27 Republicans and 44 Democrats in favor. It was the first time the Senate had ever successfully voted to end a filibuster on a civil rights bill. Senator Clair Engle of California, dying of a brain tumor and unable to speak, raised his hand and pointed to his eye to signal “aye.” Senator John Williams of Delaware cast the decisive 67th vote.¹⁹ The Senate passed the bill 73 to 27 on June 19. To avoid a conference committee that could revive the delays, the House accepted the Senate version on July 2, clearing the way for the signing that evening.¹⁷

What the Law Actually Did

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Public Law 88-352) contains eleven titles. The provisions that reshaped daily life were these:

Title I set uniform voter registration standards, limited literacy tests, and created a presumption of literacy for anyone who had completed the sixth grade.²⁰
Title II prohibited discrimination in hotels, restaurants, theaters, and other public facilities whose operations affected interstate commerce. Private clubs were exempt.²⁰
Title III authorized the Attorney General to sue to desegregate publicly owned or managed facilities other than schools.
Title IV directed the Commissioner of Education to survey inequality in schools and authorized technical assistance and grants for desegregation, while explicitly prohibiting court-ordered busing for racial balance.²⁰
Title VI barred discrimination in federally assisted programs.
Title VII outlawed employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin for employers with 25 or more employees and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate and mediate complaints.²¹
Title X established the Community Relations Service to mediate local disputes arising from discriminatory practices.²¹

The Supreme Court Upholds the Act

Congress had relied primarily on the Commerce Clause to reach private conduct, a strategic choice because earlier Supreme Court rulings had limited the Fourteenth Amendment’s reach to state-sponsored discrimination.²² Challenges reached the Court within months. In Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, 379 U.S. 241, a downtown Atlanta motel serving interstate travelers challenged Title II. The Court unanimously sustained the Act, holding that Congress could regulate local business operations that burdened interstate commerce. In Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U.S. 294, a Birmingham restaurant argued it had no meaningful connection to interstate commerce. The Court noted that 46 percent of its food costs involved meat procured from out of state and held that Congress could reach activities that appear local when they exert a substantial effect on interstate commerce.²³

Legacy

The Act hastened the end of legal Jim Crow. The EEOC opened on July 2, 1965, one year to the day after the signing, with a $2.25 million budget and about 100 employees. Its early work focused on investigating complaints, negotiating conciliation agreements, and desegregating employer facilities, which often meant physically removing “white” and “colored” signs from restrooms, locker rooms, and cafeterias. A 1966 agreement with the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company delivered class relief for 5,000 Black workers, including equal pay, thousands of promotions, and equal access to apprenticeship programs.²⁴

Howard Smith’s “sex” amendment, intended to torpedo the bill, wound up transforming American workplaces. The EEOC ruled against sex-segregated “help wanted” advertising and struck down corporate policies requiring women to resign upon marriage.²⁴ The inclusion of sex discrimination in the Act energized the women’s movement and contributed to the founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966.²¹

The Act became the template for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and, as the Library of Congress has put it, a “blueprint and inspiration” for rights movements on behalf of older Americans, people with disabilities, and other groups.²¹ In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that firing an individual for being gay or transgender violates Title VII’s prohibition on discrimination “because of… sex.” Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for a 6-3 majority, held that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”²⁵

The Act’s enforcement framework continues to evolve. In December 2025, the Department of Justice rescinded portions of its Title VI regulations that had prohibited conduct resulting in unintentional “disparate impact” discrimination, limiting enforcement to cases of intentional discrimination. The rule cited the Supreme Court’s 2001 decision in Alexander v. Sandoval and implemented Executive Order 14281, which directed agencies to repeal regulations contemplating disparate-impact liability.²⁶ More than sixty years after Johnson put pen to paper in the East Room, the scope of the law he signed remains a live question in American courts and politics.

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