Today, in black history, in herstory, in human history, let us remember the US House of Reps passed The Civil Rights Act. It went on to the Senate to pass on June 19th, by a vote of 73-27. Ultimately, both Houses of Congress and passed the Senate version of the bill and President Johnson signed it into law on July 2, 1964. It didn’t look like it was going to pass the House initially, until President Johnson stepped in:
“We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for a hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter and write it in the books of law. “
I think Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield is also someone who should be remembered for what he contributed to get this bill passed. It wasn’t even our constrictive two party system that made it flounder for 70 days.
To pass a civil rights bill in 1964, the Senate proponents of that bill developed a three-part strategy. First, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield maneuvered the bill away from the Judiciary Committee and made it the Senate’s pending business. Second, a bipartisan legislative team of senators and staff, led by Majority Whip Hubert Humphrey and Minority Whip Thomas Kuchel, developed a plan to defeat a well-organized filibuster. Finally, they enlisted the aid of Minority Leader Everett Dirksen. Only Dirksen could provide the Republican votes needed to invoke cloture and bring about passage of the bill. “The bill can’t pass unless you get Ev Dirksen,” President Lyndon Johnson told Hubert Humphrey. “You get in there to see Dirksen. You drink with Dirksen! You talk with Dirksen. You listen to Dirksen.”
In an era when there were many factional divisions within both political parties, the biggest headaches for Democratic leader Mike Mansfield often came not from Republicans but from the conservative bloc of his own party caucus. The filibuster that threatened to derail the civil rights bill in 1964 was not led by the opposition party, but by an opposing faction within the majority party. To invoke cloture on the civil rights bill, Democratic proponents of the bill needed strong Republican support. If the bipartisan team could gain the support of Dirksen, a small-government conservative from Illinois, they might win over other conservatives..
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing.
Thank you for reading today's post. Have an InterStellar Day! ~PrP
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1KCLpii5IN/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Did You Know
Today, we pronounce Dr. Seuss like his surname rhymes with “goose”, but he pronounced it like it rhymed with “voice”.
Another case of the FBI working for the white nationalists to keep blacks from gaining equality.
Jean Seberg was a pretty young girl from Iowa who managed to land the title role in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan. Her selection as a total newcomer got great press, but the critics panned both her and the film. A second attempt in Bonjour Tristesse, directed by Preminger did not do much better at the box office. In 1959, she starred in The Mouse that Roared, and her career began on a steady upward arc through the 1960s as she appeared in Paint your Wagon, Airport, and moved between American and European cinema.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, Jean donated to groups that supported the civil rights movement, including the NAACP and various Native American rights groups, which put her on the radar of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. They initiated a COINTELPRO operation against her.
The operation uncovered donations she made to the Black Panther Party, and seizing on that, the FBI created a false story that she was made pregnant by Raymond Hewitt, a prominent Black Panther leader. The story was reported by the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. She was pregnant at the time by her husband, Romain Gary, and she became so upset at the stories that she went into premature labor, and the baby died after two days. Seberg and her husband sued Newsweek for defamation and won. Newsweek paid $10,000 in damages and was ordered to print a retraction in their magazine and several newspapers.
But the harassment didn’t stop.
The FBI kept her under aggressive surveillance in that their agents made little to no effort to disguise their presence, her phones were tapped for years, and they enlisted Army Intelligence and the CIA to keep her under watch when she was abroad. Records released under FOIA requests revealed Hoover kept the Nixon White House apprised of the status of her case through reports to White House Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, John Ehrlichman.
At the peak of her career and the height of the FBI harassment, her roles in Hollywood suddenly dried up. She was being offered parts that, in her words, bordered on pornography or were minor characters. Researchers who have reviewed the records of the operation believe she was effectively blacklisted because no movie company wanted to deal with the FBI harassing their productions. She moved to France, where she spent the rest of her life.
On August 30, 1979, her body was found wrapped in a blanket in the back seat of her car in Paris, not far from where she lived. There was a note to her son found with the remains, along with a bottle of pills, and an empty mineral water bottle.
The following year, charges were filed against “persons unknown” for failing to provide assistance to an endangered person. An autopsy revealed a blood alcohol level that would have prevented her from getting into the car by herself, but there were no alcohol containers found, so the French police surmised someone must have put Jean in the car and left. Her first husband, Romain Gary, said that the FBI harassment was the primary cause of the mental health issues she experienced in her last years.
The FBI not only ruined an innocent person’s career with their lies, they effectively took her life.
As one of us you realize that our Time doesn’t move in a straight line it is a continuous circle in which very few can break the cycle. The only one of us immune from Time is the immortal, hence we must fine our own truth.