Republican Senator Everett Dirksen – The Key To Modern-era Civil Rights Legislation Little known is the fact that it was Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois, not Democrat President Lyndon Johnson, who pushed through the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. In fact, Dirksen was instrumental in the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965 and 1968. Dirksen wrote the language for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. hailed Senator Dirksen’s “able and courageous Leadership”, and The Chicago Defender”, the largest black-owned daily at that time, praised Senator Dirksen “for the grand manner of his generalship behind the passage of the best civil rights measures that have ever been enacted into law since Reconstruction”. The chief opponents of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were Democrat Senators Sam Ervin, Albert Gore, Sr. and Robert Byrd, a former official in the Ku Klux Klan. None of these racist Democrats became Republicans
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 16:28:35 +0000
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