I have a dream. One day, this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its dream.

Because we intend to fire our people up so much, until if they can't have their equal share in the house, they'll burn it down.

This City Rights Act is a challenge to all of us, to go to work in our communities and our states, in our homes and in our hearts, to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice.

Welcome back to this History Extra podcast series, where we're charting some of the key moments in the transformative history of the US Civil Rights Movement, the fight for equality that dominated mid-20th century America, with a legacy that continues to shape the world around us today.

I'm Rianne Davis, section editor for BBC History magazine, and in this six-part series, I'm speaking to leading historians to explore some of the crucial moments that defined this struggle for racial equality.

In each episode, our experts will recount one significant story from the movement and consider its place in the wider fight for civil rights.

In our last episode, we were in the nation's capital in 1963, discussing the legendary March on Washington, which saw more than 250,000 people take to the streets in the name of Jobs and Freedom, and we also explored Martin Luther King Jr.'s seismic contribution to the Civil Rights Movement.

Today's episode sees us fast forward to the summer of 1964, and this time we have a ringside seat in the Oval Office.

On 2 July 1964, the nation's new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, affixed his signatures to one of the country's landmark pieces of legislation, the Civil Rights Act.

I spoke to Tamiko Brownigan, Dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a Professor of History at Harvard, to find out what the atmosphere was like on that auspicious day.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on 2 July 1964.

When he signed the Act into law, Martin Luther King Jr. and several other American civil rights leaders were behind him.

They were there because the passage of the law and its enactment had been the product of a work between the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the entire Civil Rights Movement, of which Martin Luther King Jr. and these other leaders were integral parts.

In essence, the Civil Rights Act was a do-over. After the Americans of a war, Congress had enacted constitutional amendments that had been designed to do the very things that, over 100 years later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did.

But because of non-compliance in the Southern States and the U.S. Supreme Court's undermining of that reconstruction era legislation, there had not in fact been an era of civil rights and a new start for the Friedman.

Instead, there had been violence and many efforts undertaken to keep black Americans in a state of virtual slavery.

And so this moment in 1964 was a great victory for the nation, for the principle of equality under law, and for these brave men and women of the Civil Rights Act who had put their bodies on the line in an effort to bring about this momentous occasion.

What the Civil Rights Act did was to sweep away in terms of its text discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, and religion in a wide variety of areas.

In public spaces, in schools, in employment, it was truly the crowning legislative achievement of the Civil Rights Movement.

The Civil Rights Act was a piece of legislation long in the making, following decades of sustained grassroots activism and mass protests such as the March on Washington.

The Act was originally proposed in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy, but Kennedy would never see it brought into fruition.

Just five months later, he was assassinated by a sniper.

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