Fifty years ago today President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The law changed the face of America. It outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. It outlawed racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and at all places that served the public like libraries, parks, swimming pools and more. It ended race-based and unequal requirements to block blacks from registering to vote.
You will see and hear more about the law today.
But I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about two Alabama ties to the law.
We all know that in a real sense 99 years of American history led up to the law's passage. Much pain and death accompanied that history.
But it was Martin Luther King who said that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
Beginning after World War II it did. The U.S. Military was desegregated. The nation's highest court ruled that separate but equal schools were anything but equal and ordered that the old practice end. And a new generation of blacks led by King, Parks, Shuttlesworth, Lewis and many more stood up when it counted most.
Of course much of the white south pushed back. Little Rock, Oxford, Montgomery and especially Birmingham resisted, often with violence.
And that brings me to the direct Alabama tie to the Civil Rights Act. President John F. Kennedy first proposed the law in June, 1963. The direct force for JFK's decision to push for the law was events in Birmingham in the spring of 1963 when blacks rose up to oppose the city's Jim Crow legal system in demonstrations that began in May of that year.
You know that history well. The nation watched national news coverage of those demonstrations as Birmingham Police Chief Bull Connor let loose attack dogs, high powered water hoses and Billy club wielding police on blacks, many of them young students.
It was too much.
President Kennedy watched from the White House and finally decided to act. He took to the nation's airwaves on June 11, 1963 and announced he would put the force of his administration behind the passage of a civil rights act.
The other tie to Alabama also came from that speech – its date, June 11, 1963.
That was the same day that two young black students – Vivian Malone and James Hood – became the first blacks to successfully integrate the University of Alabama. They did so under the protection of Alabama National Guard units federalized by Kennedy.
JFK would be killed five months later and his successor, a southerner, would take up the work of pushing the Congress to approve the law that turns 50 today, a law that like so much during the Civil Rights era was propelled by acts of cruelty and courage in Alabama.