LBJ scholar says passage of legislation monumental, work incomplete

Feb. 3—JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — Daniel Perkins recalls growing up in a Greater Johnstown of the 1950s and 1960s that felt safe and friendly to him, but also divided, with areas he knew to avoid because of the color of his skin.

It wasn’t usually confrontational, violent or institutional racism, which existed elsewhere in the United States and led to the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 that is marking its 60th anniversary this year.

Rather, the intolerance felt “more segregated than it was overt” to Perkins, he said.

“I was born up in the Prospect area, raised in the Prospect area,” he said. “At that time, the Blacks were up in Prospect, in Kernville and Conemaugh for the most part, and the white community was spread out in the rest of the city. Everybody seemed to get along. I felt comfortable going just about anywhere in town, but there were certain areas we just didn’t go in because there weren’t people like me in those areas, so I didn’t have a lot of friends in those areas.

“The dialogue was that you just don’t go in those areas because those are white areas, specifically Richland.”

NAACP Johnstown Branch President Alan Cashaw remembers those times in a similar way.

“There was segregation in this town,” Cashaw said. “There were public pools that we weren’t invited to swim in. You could caddy at the golf courses, but not necessarily play. … You could cut people’s grass in Westmont, but you didn’t hang out in Westmont. … You could get jobs like a stock boy and that sort of thing downtown, but the police would still roust you if you hung around town.”

‘Dismantled Jim Crow’

Meanwhile, historic events regarding race relations — both positive and negative — were taking place throughout the country, particularly in the South and Washington, D.C.

In 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech from the Lincoln Memorial steps, and Ku Klux Klan members bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, murdering four Black girls.

Then, on July 2, 1964, Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

The legislation prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin in public places; barred unequal voting registration requirements; expanded the Civil Rights Commission; and strengthened desegregation in schools.

“I think the Civil Rights Act really dismantled Jim Crow (laws),” Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum Director Mark Lawrence said. “It, more than any other piece of legislation, overthrew decades and decades of segregationist practices in the American South, some of which were imposed by law and some of which were imposed more by everyday custom — tradition as supporters would see it.”

The act passed by votes of 290 — 130 in the U.S. House of Representatives and 73 — 27 in the U.S. Senate.

Almost all of the opposition, including a 72-day filibuster in the Senate, came from southern states where the harshest segregationist policies still existed a century after the Civil War.

Lawrence said matters were “more complicated” when dealing with “more subtle forms of segregation in the North,” regarding housing and employment.

“The moral issues weren’t quite as sort of stark as they were when people were turning firehoses on protesters or beating people up at lunch counters and so forth,” Lawrence said. “When I think of kind of how these issues play out in a place like Pennsylvania, I think my mind immediately goes to the story of civil rights that ensues after (the act was) adopted, and some of the resistance and some of the complexities that started to really fuel resistance to the civil rights agenda in many quarters in the 1970s, even more so, I would say, in the 1980s and beyond.”

The Civil Rights Act changed the nation, with King describing it as “a bright interlude in the long and sometimes turbulent struggle for civil rights: the beginning of a second Emancipation Proclamation providing a comprehensive legal basis for equality of opportunity.”

It provided a foundation for the ensuing Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, along with the expansion of women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.

Racism still obviously exists locally and nationally.

But Cashaw and Perkins believe significant strides have been made over the past 60 years.

Juneteenth, the federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, is now a weeklong celebration with music, arts, food and educational programming in Johnstown. There are two Black members on Johnstown City Council — the Rev. Sylvia King and Ricky Britt. And students of different races from different parts of town often interact, including while refreshing the painted “End Racism Now” message on Main Street downtown.

“I would say that the young people of today are a lot more comfortable than they were back then,” said Perkins, the founder of The Challenge Program, which has the mission of motivating students to develop the habits necessary to become successful in life. “Is racism in the back of their minds? For some Black people and white people. By and large, we’ve really come leaps and bounds in terms of race relationships.”

Major issues still plague parts of the country, including concerns in the Black community about voting rights.

There is also often tension between Black people and police forces in light of incidents such as the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer that sparked peaceful protests and violent riots in many cities in 2020.

Divides also often remain in terms of access to health care, jobs and education.

“This early history is suddenly very, very relevant again, not to say it ever went away completely, but I think it’s back,” Lawrence said.

“This history is important to think about these days as we wrestle with something that LBJ, I think, understood — the incompleteness of what was accomplished during the 1960s.”