A single vote cast on the floor of the Senate on June 19, 1964, still resonates in the nation's body politic - most recently in the remarks by Republican Sen. Trent Lott that led to his resignation as majority leader.

It was less than a year after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had stood at the other end of The Mall in Washington and delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. The civil rights demonstrators he had led and inspired were being pummeled with blasts from fire hoses in Alabama, killed in Mississippi as they challenged racial segregation - an American apartheid that institutionalized white supremacy in the South.

The bill being considered was the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It contained the public accommodations section, which would mean that segregation was outlawed not only in schools and other government-run institutions, but in private businesses as well. This section was widely decried throughout the South as an unwarranted, unconstitutional intrusion by the federal government, a fundamental violation of the rights of law-abiding citizens to associate and do business with whom they pleased.

The measure was pushed by a Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who came from Texas, one of the states where Jim Crow segregation was the norm - and Democrats ruled unchallenged. Johnson was able to persuade the Republican leader of the Senate, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, to support the bill. That brought along moderate Republicans who joined with Northern Democrats to pass it over the votes of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans.

The critical vote was a "nay" cast by one of those conservative Republicans - Barry Goldwater. A few weeks later, he was nominated for president at the Republican convention in San Francisco. Before the summer was out, Goldwater appeared with South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond when Thurmond announced that he was switching parties, leaving his beloved Democrats for the party of Lincoln, the Republicans.

Goldwater aligned himself with other segregationist Southerners. Politically it made sense, as he had little chance against Johnson. Southern whites provided one of his few hopes. That fall, Goldwater won only six states, his home state of Arizona and a swath across the deep South, from South Carolina to Louisiana. But in defeat, he set in motion the long march of white Southerners from their century-old political home in the Democratic Party to the Republicans, and hastened a reverse migration of African-Americans from the party that freed their ancestors from slavery to the Democrats.

One of the white Democrats who made that switch was Lott, of Mississippi.

"President Johnson decided to place his administration and the full faith and credit of the Democratic Party on the side of civil rights," says William Galston, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. "As is well-known, Johnson did that in full knowledge that if the Republican Party chose to take advantage of that politically, there would be a huge shift in affiliation of white Southerners. And so it did."

The pro-civil rights stance of Harry S. Truman in 1948 increased black support for the Democratic Party - and motivated Thurmond's Dixiecrat run. But, Fredrick C. Harris, director of the Center for the Study of African-American Politics at the University of Rochester, says that, "As late as 1960, the black vote was still up for grabs."

He notes that 1960 Republican nominee Richard M. Nixon got between 25 percent and 30 percent of black votes, in part because Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce a school integration order in 1957.

Goldwater's effect

But 1964 changed all that. Black support for the Republican nominee plummeted to 6 percent. Though Goldwater later said that he regretted voting against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the political alignment that vote helped establish remains in place. Its longevity illustrates once again how entrenched race is in the politics of America. And - as the storm unleashed by Lott's remarks praising the presidential bid by Thurmond's racist Dixiecrat Party in 1948 shows - how rarely it is brought to the surface and talked about.

Linda Williams, a political scientist at UM, says it is not surprising that the United States is still wrangling with issues that were supposed to be resolved by such bills as the 1964 legislation.

"I think the civil rights era represented a moment of optimism that was very different from the entire rest of American history," she says. "It was almost a moment of madness, when all was possible. Momentarily, people believed that now we could overcome the centrality of race in American politics.

"But arguably, if you look at the long history of America, you would have to be much more pessimistic. Race is the most endemic issue in American politics since the birth of the nation," she says.

At that birth, slaveholder Thomas Jefferson of Virginia wrote paragraphs denouncing slavery into the Declaration of Independence. They were removed by the Continental Congress. A decade later, the framers of the Constitution almost failed in their mission as they grappled with slavery, finally coming up with a number of compromises - including counting each slave as three-fifths of a person when determining how many representatives a state would get.

"The Democratic Party of Jefferson and [Andrew] Jackson was a party of Northern men of Southern principles," says Ira Berlin, a history professor at UM. "That was the winning combination, Northern men who could somehow address Southern concerns about slavery. It allowed the Democratic Party to control American politics between the election of Jefferson and the election of Lincoln."

Race - not class, not taxes, not ethnicity - led to the only war that pitted Americans against one another. It was that Civil War, and the Republican-dominated Reconstruction that followed, that made the Democratic Party the home of the white Southerner for a century.

"After Lincoln, the Democratic Party remains very much a party built on race," Berlin says. "When they finally do get back into power [in 1913] with Woodrow Wilson, the first thing he does is institutionalize segregation throughout the federal government. Race has always played a major role in American politics. What Lott had the misfortune of doing was revealing it in a stark, inescapable way that ultimately scares people."

Freeman A. Hrabowski III, who grew up in Birmingham, Ala., during the civil rights struggles there, says that even then he was not optimistic that these problems were being solved.

"I could not then, and still cannot now, imagine a time when race is not an issue in this country," says Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "Certainly black kids have more chances now, but they are always going to be disadvantaged. Even in my most hopeful of times, I never felt race was going to go away as an issue because in so many ways so much of what happens to us is because of what race we are."

Berlin agrees: "The country has always been polarized about race."

Many see the Lott affair as an opportunity to talk about this issue in a way Americans rarely do.

"I was so disturbed that the semester was over when this happened because it's a terrific teaching moment," says Berlin. "What it really has revealed is the kind of secret history of politics of the last 50 years ... a history that in some sense everybody knows, but is not talked about."

Author Taylor Branch agrees. "What makes it so difficult is that so much of it is unspoken. A whole new generation is not aware of the transformation, the really wholesale realignment of partisan politics that happened 40 years ago. It turned on a dime. ... But now it is unspoken. It is all done by sign language because it is not respectable to talk about segregation."

Branch, now completing the third volume of his biography of Martin Luther King, says the dependence of Democrats on the African-American vote - and their fear of losing white voters as a result - hamstrings that party as well. "The fact of the matter is neither party is comfortable talking about race very much," Branch says. "It is hard to be honest and straightforward about race in a way that allows you to build coalitions and win in politics."

"Where can people learn to talk about race?" asks Hrabowski. "I honestly think that if there is any place people should be able to talk about race, it should be college campuses. But even there there are major challenges, figuring out how to talk about these issues in a such a way that people do not become so emotional and stop listening to each other."

'Sacrificial lamb'

Despite the hopes of many, James Klumpp, chairman of UM, College Park's communication department, is not optimistic that the Lott affair will lead to a substantive discussion of the issue, that instead it will be buried along with Lott's leadership position. Klumpp says he was sure all along that Lott would resign because he sees an ancient ritual at work - the scapegoating of Lott so that the rest of the body politic can cleanse itself.

"Episodes like this almost inevitably lead to the sacrifice of the individual involved," says Klumpp, who studied the political reaction after reports of U.S. Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz's telling of a racial joke in 1976.

"There is delicate timing involved. You cannot sacrifice him too quickly because then you have not perfected him as the sacrificial lamb. Then there might be a reservoir of suspicion that there was racism in the party or the culture and it is still there," Klumpp says. "So, you go through the process with someone like Lott or Earl Butz until all are comfortable that is it the individual that has the problem, not the party.

Klumpp says to expect statements praising Lott but saying his comments were not appropriate for a leader of the country or the party, indicating the problem lies with the individual, not the larger institution.

"He takes the blame upon himself and the party is protected," Klumpp says. "But the culture is left still not facing the vestiges of racism and the memory of slavery that we have."