Editor's Note: Eugene Meyer is a veteran journalist who writes about history, lifestyles, and travel. He is the author of three books of history, including Five for Freedom. The African American Soldiers in John Brown's Army. He publishes a blog at eugenelmeyer.com, where a version of this essay appeared.
It was a time of relative comity, when Senate Republicans joined with the Democratic majority to overcome a filibuster and pass the most significant civil rights legislation in a century. Segregation had prevailed throughout the South and even in border states like Maryland ever since the end of Reconstruction with the corrupt bargain of 1877 that restored white supremacy to the defeated Confederate states in a contested presidential election.
This time the country was still reeling from the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but the reaction to that terrible tragedy propelled his successor, a Texan, to seek and achieve what the martyred Kennedy sought to do but could not. When LBJ signed the bill, I was there.