Civil Rights, Alaska, & Hawaii
In the late 1950s civil rights bills were being introduced in Congress. To overcome the Southern Democrats’ suppression of the pro-Republican African-American vote,then-Republican Hawaii’s prospects for statehood were tied to Alaska’s, which many thought would be more Democratic. Hawaii statehood was expected to result in the addition of two pro-civil-rights senators from a state which would be the first to have majority non-white population. This would endanger the Southern minority segregationist Democrat Senate by providing two more Republican votes to invoke cloture and halt a Senate filibuster. The Congressional vote totals show a proportionally larger support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act by the Republican Party. The House of Representatives’ vote by party was 136 to 35 (80% support) by Republicans, but only 153 to 91 (63% support) by Democrats.
Read more about this topic: Alaska Statehood
Famous quotes containing the words civil rights,, civil and/or hawaii:
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man’s yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
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—Hawaiian saying no. 190, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)