A Gain for Rights

Remarkably, there was no tension, no electric charge of uncertainty. The House debate on the civil rights bill had ended, the Southern holdouts had accepted the inevitable, the civil rights advocates were quietly confident. On the floor, nobody bothered to keep score. Republican Minority Leader Charles Halleck sat quietly relaxed; Ohio's William McCulloch, the G.O.P. floor manager for the bill, dawdled with his yellow pencil; the South's floor manager, Louisiana's Edwin Willis, scribbled on a note pad; New York's Emanuel Celler, the Democrats' floor manager, even left the chamber during the count. At length, Speaker Sam Rayburn spoke the finish: "On this vote, the yeas are 311, the nays 109."

The Celler-McCulloch civil rights bill was substantially the one that had been recommended by the Administration. In five key sections it provides that: On petition of disenfranchised citizens, U.S. district courts shall appoint voting referees (TIME, March 14), who will see to it that Negroes qualified under state laws get to cast a vote in federal, state and local elections.

P: Local authorities shall preserve federal voting records for two years. P: Obstruction of U.S. court orders in school desegregation cases shall be a federal crime.

P:Suspects fleeing across state lines to avoid prosecution for bombings or threats to bomb shall be guilty of a federal crime. P:Federal assistance may be provided for the education of servicemen's children where local schooling is disrupted by integration disputes.

Ten minutes after Speaker Rayburn announced the yeas and nays, the bill was in the hands of the Senate, where Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson was prepared for any maneuvering by the Southerners. When he called for a second reading of the title of the bill, Georgia's Richard Russell objected and called for a by-the-rules delay of one day between readings. At that, Johnson merely requested and got a three-minute adjournment, which turned the legislative calendar over one day, then got his second reading. Then, declining to strain precedent by bringing the bill directly to the floor but loath to see it bottled up in the Judiciary Committee chaired by Mississippi's James Eastland, Johnson won a vote (86-5) requiring that Eastland report the bill back within five days.

Most guesstimates gave the Senate two weeks for meandering dialogue, during which time Dick Russell and his Southerners would make their final pleas and then sit down. With a solid bill to work on, Lyndon Johnson figures that he can count on enough votes to close off debate should the South begin a new, last-ditch filibuster. If he is right--and he usually is--the fight is over; remarkably, in an election year, the U.S. Congress will have turned out a really meaningful civil rights bill.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.