End the filibuster

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The phrase “long hot summer” wouldn’t be coined until 1967, but it would have fit the summer of 1963 perfectly.  Civil rights protests were taking place all over the deep south.  So was southern resistance and violence against them. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham on Friday, April 12, 1963  Held without bail and initially denied access to a lawyer, his wife Coretta Scott King placed a call to President John F. Kennedy at the White House.  He called her back on Monday and promised he would help her husband.  A few days later, Jacqueline Kennedy called Mrs. King and expressed support.  After writing his famous, “Letter from Birmingham jail,” King was released on April 20.

Protests and boycotts broke out all around Birmingham. School children from high school age down to first and second grades marched into downtown and chanted civil rights slogans and attempted to enter segregated businesses.  Birmingham police chief “Bull” Connor ordered the arrests of hundreds – 300 in a single day, more than 1200 children in all.  When the jails were full, he released police dogs on the children and used firehoses to disperse the crowds.  Images of firehoses knocking children from their feet and tearing clothes from their bodies made the national news.    

On May 28, students from Tougaloo College staged a sit-in at the lunch counter in a Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi.  As local police and FBI agents stood by watching, a violent mob of whites attacked the small group of protestors using brass knuckles, fists, and items from the lunch counter such as broken sugar containers.  One student was thrown from his stool at the counter and kicked in the head as he lay on the floor.  The sit-in lasted three hours and made headlines around the country.

On June 11, Kennedy addressed the nation on national television and called for the passage of a comprehensive civil rights act addressing voting rights, access to public accommodations such as restaurants, motels and theaters, and prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in jobs and strengthening enforcement of the integration of schools.  Four hours after Kennedy’s speech, civil rights organizer Medgar Evers was assassinated in the driveway of his home.

At the time Kennedy was assassinated five months later, the civil rights bill was still held up in the House Rules Committee by Virginia congressman Howard Smith, a staunch segregationist. Shocked by Kennedy’s death and the violence in the south against the civil rights movement, Lyndon Johnson made Kennedy’s cause his. It took until early February for the bill to reach the Senate where it was quickly bottled up again by southern committee chairmen.  The bill finally reached the floor of the senate for debate on March 30, 1964, where it faced a filibuster by southern democrats led by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and Georgia Senator Richard Russell, who infamously declared on the floor of the senate, “We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of races in our Southern states.”

It took 60 days of wrangling by Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey and Johnson, a pass master at Senate procedure, but they rounded up the 67 votes necessary to end the filibuster.  The bill finally passed the senate 71 to 27 and was signed into law by Johnson on July 2.  It was the first time in history that the senate had cut off a filibuster of a civil rights bill, and the only time the body had voted for cloture on any bill since 1927.

Johnson used his momentum from the passage of the civil rights bill and the violence of “Bloody Sunday” at the Edmund Pettus bridge in Alabama to secure 66 senators to sponsor his voting rights bill in March of 1965.  Moving quickly, and with the aid or Humphrey and Illinois senator Everett Dirksen, the senate passed the bill by 77 to 19.  The bill passed the House 333 to 85 and was signed into law by Johnson on August 6.

Opposition to civil rights and voting rights was just getting started.  Republicans have been chipping away at the laws passed during those grim summers ever since.  They’ve filed lawsuits that led to decisions defenestrating the Voting Rights Act like Shelby County v. Holder.  They’ve fought against equal pay, equal hiring on the basis of sex as it applies to gay and transgender Americans, and they’ve fought to change voting rules across the nation to make it harder for black people and brown people and Asian people to vote.

They use the same old arguments about “states rights” to control their populations and voting.  It’s the same old crap that white rights trump all other rights.  The inheritors of the mantles of Strom Thurmond and Richard Russell and Jesse Helms and brand new Republican assholes from Republican controlled states in the north are behind opposition to HR 1, the “For the People” act, which would pre-empt most of the laws intended to limit the right to vote in states around the country.

Look at what had to happen back in the 60’s to haul Black people from the back of the bus into full citizenship.  Look at how hard we’ve had to fight in court and in state houses to preserve civil rights and the right to vote.  Look at what we’ve had to do to insure rights for gay and transgender Americans, and to keep them.  We’ve even had to fight all over again for the violence against women act. We’ve had to fight once, then twice, then three and four and five times, and we’ve had to keep on fighting.  

And now they’re threatening to use the filibuster again.    

We should be ashamed of ourselves that the battles of 1963 and 1964 and 1965 must be revisited again and again and again. But we didn’t let them win then, and we’re not going to let them win now.  We’re not going to turn back the clock and let Mitch McConnell use the filibuster the way Bull Connor used his firehoses and dogs.

We shouldn’t have to pass a new voting rights act, but we do, so let’s get it done.  We’ve got a new Lyndon Johnson in office:  Joe Biden.  He  should shame these asshole Republicans.  Threaten them.  Do whatever you have to, but get it done.  

Fuck the filibuster. Pass the voting rights act of 2021.