http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/10/politics/civil-rights-act-interesting-facts/
1. More Republicans voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act than Democrats
In the 1960s, Congress was divided on civil rights issues -- but not necessarily along party lines.
20 photos: The civil rights movement in photos
"Most people don't realize that today at all -- in proportional terms, a far higher percentage of Republicans voted for this bill than did Democrats, because of the way the Southerners were divided," said Purdum.
The division was geographic. The Guardian's Harry J. Enten
broke down the vote, showing that more than 80% of Republicans in both houses voted in favor of the bill, compared with more than 60% of Democrats. When you account for geography, according to Enten's article, 90% of lawmakers from states that were in the Union during the Civil War supported the bill compared with less than 10% of lawmakers from states that were in the Confederacy.
Enten points out that Democrats still played a key role in getting the law passed.
"It was also Democrats who helped usher the bill through the House, Senate, and ultimately a Democratic president who signed it into law," Enten writes.
2. A fiscal conservative became an unsung hero in helping the Act pass
Ohio's Republican Rep. William McCulloch had a conservative track record -- he opposed foreign and federal education aid and supported gun rights and school prayer. His district (the same one now represented by House Speaker John Boehner) had a small African-American population. So he had little to gain politically by supporting the Civil Rights Act.
Yet he became a critical leader in getting the bill passed.
His ancestors opposed slavery even before the Civil War, and he'd made a deal with Kennedy tosee thebill through to passage.
"The Constitution doesn't say that whites alone shall have our most basic rights, but that we all shall have them,"
McCulloch would say to fellow legislators.
Later, he would play a key role in the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act and become part of the Kerner Commission, appointed by the Johnson administration to investigate the 1967 race riots.
Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, wrote him an "emotional" letter when he retired from Congress in 1972.
"You made a personal commitment to President Kennedy in October 1963, against all interests of your district," she wrote. "There were so many opportunities to sabotage the bill, without appearing to do so, but you never took them. On the contrary, you brought everyone else along with you."
5. A segregationist congressman's attempt to kill the bill backfired
Virginia's Democratic Rep. Howard W. Smith was a staunch segregationist and strongly opposed the Civil Rights Act.
Smith, who was chairman of the House Rules Committee, came up with many tactics to discourage the passage of the bill's Title VII, which would outlaw employment discrimination because of race, color, religion or national origin.
When Smith added the word "sex,"
the House reportedly laughed out loud. The ploy was Smith's attempt to quash support among the chamber's male chauvinists on the grounds that the bill would protect women's rights in the workplace, according to Clay Risen in his book
"The Bill of the Century."
Despite resistance, and complex motives, the act eventually passed, laying the groundwork for legal battles to ensure equal employment opportunities for women.
And whether he intended to or not, Smith ended up helping to set
the stage for modern feminism.
You mean the one that was voted and supported by more Republicans than Democrats? And the same legislation where a Democrat senator Howard Smith set a campaign to oppose the bill?
