Civil Rights: Your Future Depends on It

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The ceremony was unique—and fitting for the historic occasion. Last week President Johnson signed into law a bill that will almost immediately add more than 1,000,000 American Negroes to the nation's voting rolls.

For the signing, the President drove to the Capitol, appeared in the Rotunda before an audience of 800 Congressmen, Cabinet officers, civil rights leaders and others. To his right was a statue of Abraham Lincoln, to his left a bust of the Emancipator. On national television and radio, the President recalled that the first Negro slaves in the U.S. were landed at Jamestown in 1619. "They came in darkness and chains," he said. "Today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds."

To the President, this was "a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory won on any battlefield. Today the Negro story and the American story fuse and blend."

Next, Johnson went to the President's Room of the Capitol, a small but ornate room with a large gilt chandelier near the Senate chamber. It was in that room, 104 years before to the very day, that President Lincoln had signed a bill freeing slaves forced into the service of the Confederacy (the famed Emancipation Proclamation came 17 months later). To sign the voting rights bill, President Johnson used 50 pens, squiggling a tiny portion of his signature with each. He handed the first pen to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the second to Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen, the third to New York's Senator Robert Kennedy.

The effect of the law was felt immediately, and Johnson made eminently clear his determination to move with "dispatch in enforcing this act." At his orders:

>The Census Bureau certified Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Virginia, South Carolina, Alaska and parts of North Carolina as areas that have voter-qualification tests that impede registration and where 50% or more of the voting-age population failed to register or vote in 1964. Federal examiners were to be sent to parts of some of these states with authority to register disenfranchised persons. At week's end 45 examiners, having gone through a three-day training course at Civil Service Commission headquarters, already were on their way.

>Justice officials worked throughout the week end preparing a list of all counties that fail to meet the franchise requirements set up by the bill. This week federal registrars were to be sent into 10 to 15 of those counties; this, it was hoped, would stimulate voluntary compliance in other counties. Not even illiteracy will be considered a bar to voting registration.-—

>The Justice Department filed suit challenging Mississippi's poll tax as being in violation of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. This week the department planned to file similar suits against Alabama, Virginia, and Texas.