WASHINGTON — On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the most sweeping civil rights bill enacted since the Reconstruction Era. Now, a quarter of a century later, blacks have made tremendous strides in education and politics, but many remain mired in economic stagnation.
As he was about to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, Johnson proclaimed that it was necessary to ``eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country.``
While many vestiges of racial injustice continue, the landmark legislation has left its impact across a broad spectrum of life for the American minorities it was designed to rescue from bigotry.
``In employment, blacks have made billions of dollars more in jobs that they couldn`t have had at all before the Civil Rights Act,`` says Mary Frances Berry, a Howard University law professor and member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
``In housing, some blacks have become middle class and moved into neighborhoods where they couldn`t have lived before. The same is true with education. In all of those areas, blacks got a chance to do things they couldn`t do before.``
Ernie Green, who gained fame as a member of ``the Little Rock Nine,`` a group of black students who integrated Central High School in the Arkansas capital under federal protection in 1957, is now an investment banker and senior vice president at Shearson Lehman Hutton Inc.
``I am a beneficiary of the Civil Rights Act,`` Green said. ``The Civil Rights Act made the opportunities greater for me, which was why I went to school in the first place.``
Perhaps Green`s personal drive would have propelled him to success, but he and others were stunned by the number of new opportunities the law directly created. To fully appreciate the transformation, they said, it`s necessary to reflect on how blacks were treated before the measure was passed.
In most parts of the South and in some other areas, blacks could not eat in the same restaurants as whites, attend the same tax-supported schools, rent rooms in the same hotels, sit in the front seats of buses or trains, drink from the same fountains, or share the same restrooms.
``The 1964 Civil Rights Act put an end to American apartheid-legally sanctioned racial segregation in this country,`` said Phyllis McClure, an attorney in the Washington office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Still, at the 25-year mark normally reserved for celebrations, many civil rights activists are worried about an assault on civil rights from another front-one that they say began in the Reagan administration with Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese and William Bradford Reynolds, chief of the Justice Department`s civil rights division.
``They failed abysmally with respect to their efforts to change substantive civil rights laws, and the Supreme Court, up until this year, joined Congress in reaffirming civil rights and repudiating the extremism of the Meese-Reynolds civil rights agenda,`` says Ralph Neas, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
``What is tragic about the last two or three weeks is that as a result of new Supreme Court rulings making it harder to prove racial discrimination, the court is going to make us fight this battle for the third time-the original enactment, then the Meese-Reynolds challenge, and now we`re being forced to go back to Congress to make these laws meaningful once again.``
One reason civil rights activists are not eager to go before Congress again is that they remember the difficulty they had getting the 1964 measure passed.
A youthful John F. Kennedy, after narrowly winning the presidency in 1960, came under pressure from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and other civil rights leaders who wanted the federal government to take a more active role in protecting the rights of blacks.
King underscored the need for such legislation by organizing massive street demonstrations throughout the South.
Kennedy, who had been worried that pushing Southerners too hard on the race question would endanger his re-election prospects, set aside some of his ambivalence and proposed a new civil rights bill that would protect the rights of all citizens.
But he was assassinated before the bill could become law. His vice president, elevated to the top job, said he could think of no more fitting memorial to the slain president than the ``earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill.``
That was on Nov. 27, 1963, five days after Kennedy died in Dallas. It wasn`t until Feb. 10, 1964, that the House passed a civil rights bill-a stronger one than Kennedy had proposed-and the Senate did not pass a similar measure until after overcoming a 13-week filibuster.
The logjam was finally broken when Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the nation`s highest-ranking Republican and a master of the legislative process, decided to get behind the bill.