Senate Democrats by David Barton

Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower with Frederic Morrow the first African American to serve on the executive staff of the white house. After his re election, Eisenhower continued his civil rights efforts, but both the House and Senate were in Democratic control. In 1957, he proposed a bold civil rights bill to increase black voting rights and protections proposals promptly blocked by Democratic Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In fact, Eastland is credited with killing every civil rights bill that came before his committee in the 1950s, and his committee was literally known as the burial ground for civil rights legislation in the U. S. Senate. When Senate Republicans sought to keep Eisenhower’s civil rights bill from going to Eastland’s burial ground, only 10 Senate Democrats joined in that effort. Nevertheless, those few Democrats combined with the strong Republican numbers were sufficient; they were able to prevent Eisenhower’s bill from going to Eastland’s committee.

With Eastland unable to kill the bill in his committee, other Senate Democrats responded with a filibuster against the civil rights bill. In fact, South Carolina’s Senator Strom Thurmond, still a Democrat at that time, set the record in the U. S. Senate for the longest individual filibuster speech ever given in Senate history over twenty four hours of continual speaking in his attempts to block Eisenhower’s 1957 Civil Rights Bill. The stiff Democratic opposition in the Senate resulted in a very watered down version of Eisenhower’s original bill.

Yet, despite the fact that the bill was much weaker than introduced, Eisenhower did succeed in creating a Civil Rights Division within the U. S. Justice Department, as had earlier been proposed by his predecessor, President Truman. This division subsequently played a prominent role in helping secure civil rights in the South during the 1960s and 1970s. That law also started a Civil Rights Commission that became instrumental in publicizing the effects of southern segregation and racial oppression.