The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is widely considered one of President Lyndon Johnson’s signature accomplishments. But it likely wouldn’t have gone anywhere without the help of Pekin’s own U.S. Sen. Everett M. Dirksen. 

As the 60th anniversary of the law’s signing arrives in early July, it’s an opportunity to celebrate the role it played in improving equality and opening more civic and economic opportunities across America. But it’s also an opportunity to celebrate the values and morality Dirksen embodied, parts of his personality forged through his upbringing in Pekin.

Dirksen might best be remembered today for his deep, melodious speaking voice and his love of the marigold. But in his day as Senate Minority Leader, he was just as well known as the architect of countless pieces of bipartisan legislation. It’s actually quite natural for the Civil Rights Act to have been among them.

When it was first introduced, President John F. Kennedy described it in a moral light, a question of fundamental human decency to one’s fellow citizens. Dirksen was raised in Pekin’s Second Reformed Church with a similar moral compass, and later called “moral force … the motive power of human progress.” It was the voice of morality from church pulpits across the country –especially in the Midwest – that urged support for civil rights.

Though we recall him as a successful politician, Dirksen spent much of his childhood among the “have-nots” in the community. The child of immigrants, he was raised in a segment of the city for newcomers nicknamed “Beantown” because its residents had to keep extensive vegetable gardens to supplement their diet. That garden became even more important when Dirksen’s father suffered a paralyzing stroke and then died, leaving just his mother’s income to support three growing boys. In short, he understood the challenges of inequality.

The senator wrote in later years that his support for civil rights legislation was based in part on the feeling that his parents were given a fair shake as immigrants, leading to a belief that all Americans ought to have the same fair shot without facing discrimination. 

He also revered the legacy of another Illinoisan whose work a century earlier challenged inequality between black and white America: Abraham Lincoln. Alongside his time in Congress serving on the District of Columbia Committee – where he witnessed firsthand the segregation that still persisted in the capital city – he had encouragement to continue the work for equality. 

He’d built his record upon it for years. Beginning in the 1930s and continuing into the 1960s he sponsored anti-lynching and anti-poll-tax bills and supported federal orders to integrate schools. Thwarted at every turn by southern lawmakers, Dirksen chafed when the few civil rights bills in the 1950s and early ’60s were watered down to the point of being only symbolic.

But he’d become more seasoned in his tactics, more patient in his negotiating skills. He brought with him a small-town, Midwest practicality – and dogged determination – over four months of painstaking negotiations in 1964. 

He understood his goal in crafting the legislation was to create something practical: “First to get a bill; second to get an acceptable bill; third, to get a workable bill; and, finally, to get an equitable bill.”

His work was unifying, drawing support from conservative and moderate Republican senators and northern Democrats in enough numbers to stop a filibuster led by southern senators fighting to preserve racial segregation.

“When your country’s in trouble, what difference does it make whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican? You do what you can to meet the problem,” he told one interviewer days before senators passed the bill on June 19, 1964. 

It was signed into law on July 2 and set the stage for the decades of civil rights measures that followed, continuing to plow what Dirksen called the “long, hard furrow” toward equality.

NOTE: Artifacts related to Sen. Dirksen’s role in the Civil Rights Act and his upbringing in Pekin will be on display during the Pekin Marigold Festival in September.

Chris Kaergard is historian and communications director at The Dirksen Congressional Center in Pekin, which holds the papers of Sen. Everett M. Dirksen.