This month is the 60th anniversary of one of the most famous and important civil rights legistlation in our nation’s history. On July 2, 1964 the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law by President Johnson. It prohibited racial discrimination in a variety of areas including public accomodations, education, and voting. It also provided greater enforcement powers than the previous Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. The video posted below provides a summary of this landmark legislation. Looing back 60 years later, we tend to see this as an affirmation of basic human rights that hardly seems controversial. Yet at the time, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the subject of the longest filibuster in Senate history organized by Southern Senators who were vehemently opposed to the legislation. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia summed up the spirit of the opposition, “We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would tend to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our [Southern] states.” The filibuster paralyzed the Senate for 60 working days as teams of Southern Senators took turns monopolizing the Senate floor around the clock. Before it ended, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia gave the final speech that lasted 14 hours and 13 minutes. In that speech he emphasized some disturbing interpretations of Scripture in an attempt to affirm divine authority for racial segregation. Here are some of his words as recorded by Taylor Branch in his book Pillar of Fire:
To support his point, Byrd expounded on the biblical “curse of Noah” and quoted the law of Leviticus against letting “thy cattle gender with a diverse kind.” Citing the parable of vineyard laborers, he said Jesus not only condoned employment discrimination but endorsed a property holder’s right “to do what I will with mine own.” He found authority in the book of First Peter for a hierarchy of kinds, “even in heaven,” and went on to dismiss Jefferson’s doctrine of equal creation…Byrd recited the parable of the ten virgins from the book of Matthew to justify a society stratified by attainments and inherited features. “If all men are created equal,” he asked the Senate, “how could five of the virgins have been wise and five foolish?” …After conceding a superficial relevance of civil rights in the Good Samaritan parable and Jesus’ command to love neighbors as oneself, Byrd thundered his response: “But the Scriptural admonition does not say that we may not choose our neighbor! …It does not admonish that we shall not build a wall betwixt us and our neighbor.”
While Senator Byrd’s words are an obvious distortion of Scripture, such interpretations were widely accepted by those trying to preserve the Jim Crow racial segregation “way of life.” This part of the struggle for civil rights and racial equality is an essential part of the story. Whenever advances in racial justice have been made in our history, they are accompanied by significant backlash trying to prevent meaningful change. In our time, we see this in a variety of forms including white Christian nationalism that promotes a distorted view of the gospel in which certain Christians dominate our government and society while also affirming “American exceptionalism” that claims our nation is favored by God more than all other people of the earth. For those of us who identify as followers of Jesus, it is just as important to resist this distorted brand of Christianity in our time as it was to resist the distorted Christianity articulated by Senator Byrd in his attempt to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964.