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The Civil Rights Act of 1866 (14 Stat. 27–30, enacted April 9, 1866, but not ratified until 1870) was the first United States federal law to define citizenship and affirm that all citizens are equally protected by the law. It was mainly intended, in the wake of the American Civil War, to protect the civil rights of persons of African descent born in or brought to the United States.
The Act was passed by Congress in 1865 and vetoed by United States President Andrew Johnson. In April 1866 Congress again passed the bill to support the Thirteenth Amendment, and Johnson again vetoed it, but a two-thirds majority in each chamber overrode the veto to allow it to become law without presidential signature.
John Bingham and other congressmen argued that Congress did not yet have sufficient constitutional power to enact this law. Following passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, Congress ratified the 1866 Act in 1870.
President Lyndon Johnson made the passage of slain President Kennedy’s civil rights bill his top priority during the first year of his administration. He enlisted the help of the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and key members of Congress such as Senators Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and Everett Dirksen (R-IL), and Representatives Emanuel Cellar (D-NY), and William McCulloch (R-OH), to secure the bill’s passage. He also asked for support from friend and mentor Senator Richard B. Russell, Jr., (D-GA), the leader of the Southern Democrats in the Senate, who opposed the bill to the very end. Throughout the winter and spring of 1964, Johnson applied his formidable legislative acumen and skills to push the bill through Congress. Republican Senator Dirksen, the Senate minority leader, played a pivotal role in the passage of the act.
On May 26, Senator Dirksen introduced the bi-partisan Dirksen-Mansfield-Kuchel-Humphrey compromise bill as a substitute for the original version. Previously an opponent of civil rights legislation, Senator Dirksen urged Republicans to support the bill as “an idea whose time has come.” On June 10, after a prolonged filibuster, the Senate invoked cloture, thereby cutting off debate. On June 19, exactly one year after President Kennedy’s proposal, the compromise bill passed the Senate by a vote of 73 to 27. House approval followed, and on July 2 President Johnson signed the bill into law. The law’s eleven sections prohibited discrimination in the workplace, public accommodations, public facilities, and agencies receiving federal funds, and strengthened prohibitions on school segregation and discrimination in voter registration.
