When discussing the history of the Democratic and Republican Parties the era of civil rights often comes up, and I’ve found there are many under the impression the Civil Rights Act was passed exclusively by Republicans with the Democrats in opposition. I’ve heard some even claim that it had zero Democrat support and 100% Republican support. Besides the fact that’s impossible (Democrats had the majority in both houses of Congress at the time) and besides the fact it was originally championed by John F. Kennedy and passed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson (both Democrats) the notion is simply far from the truth.
A simple glance at sites like GovTrack.us shows the map is painted very differently. For the purposes of this analysis we’ll look at how the nation’s senators voted.
At the time of the vote there were a total of 67 Democrat and 33 Republican senators. Altogether 73 senators voted in favor while 27 voted against. As you can see already it would have been impossible for Republicans to pass it alone.
Of those 67 Democrats, 46 voted in favor (69%); and of the 33 Republicans, 27 voted in favor (82%). So despite people’s misconceptions, in raw numbers there were actually more Democrat senators in support of the Civil Rights Act than Republicans.
However, there were also more Democrats in opposition to it than Republicans, at 21 to 6. The fact that Democrats had more senators supporting it and more senators opposing it not only shows how much more overall power the Democratic Party had at the time, but also represents the revolution that was occurring within the Democratic Party. This conflict among Democrats is even clearer in the House of Representatives where the margin between those supporting the Civil Rights Act and those opposing it was even slimmer.
This brings us to the heart of the matter. The Democratic Party, well along their way of modernizing their social platform, was embracing civil rights and progressivism from the “North” that created a chasm with conservative Democrats from the “South”. The “Southern States”, as used here, were those that formed the Confederacy during the Civil War and had long been the stronghold and source of influential control over the Democratic Party. Of those 11 states and their 22 senators, only one was a Republican (in Texas) and coincidentally voted against the Civil Rights Act, while the state’s Democrat senator voted in favor of it. Every other Southern state had two Democrat senators and they all opposed the Civil Rights Act.
I’ve already shown the bipartisan nature of the Civil Rights Act, so you might be asking why I’m getting into this detail. The reason is that it provides important historical context at a pivotal time of reform in our political parties. Support of and opposition to the Civil Rights Act wasn’t drawn along party lines as many believe, but instead drawn along very familiar other lines: those we saw during the Civil War. And we see these lines in divisive issues even to this day. That region has long been a stronghold of American conservatism and where once those conservatives identified with and highly influenced the Democratic Party, today they identify with and highly influence the Republican Party.
But while we’ve gotten a glimpse of the Democratic Party’s then-in-progress evolution in this vote, the changes the Republican Party underwent in the latter half of the 20th century is another story. What we can sit back and appricate for now is that at this point in time, the mainstream elements of both parties were on the same page with social issues. They both fought for racial equality and the Civil Rights Act. And in our current era of extreme partisanship and brinkmanship, this can offer a good moment for reflection.