Forty years ago, a new day dawned in the United States

It may be difficult for younger Americans to imagine the United States before Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 40 years ago yesterday.
Before the Civil Rights Act, help wanted ads were segregated by sex and, in some areas by race as well. Almost any baby boomer who lived in or visited the South prior to the mid-60s can recall "white only" signs at restaurants, hotels, public restrooms and water fountains. Even many northern cities had separate pools for white swimmers and black swimmers until they were outlawed.
It did not take much to change that. The law can be adequately summarized in two paragraphs:
U All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal
enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.
U It shall be an unlawful employment practice
for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Suddenly, a restaurant owner couldn't legally refuse service to a person because of his color, an employer couldn't tell a woman she couldn't apply for a job because it was man's work and Irish need not apply signs were outlawed (OK, those hadn't been seen for decades, but in 1964 they became officially illegal).
A new look
The law forced the nation to re-examine who people were and what they could do. It forced Americans to look beyond race, national origin and gender. It is difficult to image what life would be like in the United States if President Johnson, a native Texan who once owned a house with a deed restriction that prohibited its sale to a black person, had not pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress.
And it took a lot of pushing. Southern senators mounted a filibuster that was broken only after Johnson brokered a deal between primarily Northern Democrats and Republicans to break the stalemate. His Senate floor manager was Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, later to become his vice president and still later his replacement at the head of the 1968 Democratic ticket.
The law has not been a panacea. Discrimination still exists and blacks and Hispanics in the United States have not reached educational or income parity with white Americans.
Just last year a university study showed that applications submitted by persons using white-sounding names got more favorable responses from potential employers than identical applications submitted with black-sounding names.
And school integration also has proved elusive. In a January 2004 study, Harvard University's Civil Rights Project found that school integration reached its peak in 1988, with the share of blacks in majority-white schools up to 43.5 percent in the South. That number declined to 30.2 percent in 2001.
Political fallout
And there was a consequence of the law that was surely unintended by Johnson and Humphrey. It changed the political landscape of the nation. Johnson commented after passage that the Democrats had lost the South for a generation.
But just four years later, the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, mounted a Southern strategy designed to pull traditionally Democratic voters to the Republican Party. The strategy not only won Nixon a narrow victory over Humphrey, it set the stage for Republican domination of the South that hadn't been seen since the Reconstruction and that is stronger today than ever -- long after the lost generation that Johnson anticipated.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which legally removed the barriers between white and black, helped paint the nation in blocks of red and blue that can been seen whenever network anchormen gather near maps to report national election results.