CIVIL RIGHTS. THE LAW THAT CHANGED AMERICA.

The 

LAW 

That changed America

By Jeannye Thornton-Hencke

For sheer courage and drama, for moments of undreamed horror and sublime hope, for a single era and a single law that transformed American society, the American civil rights movement in the 1960s and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are unmatched in United States history.

Even today the images from that time illustrate stunning contrasts in American society and in human behavior. Black and white, naked violence and courageous nonviolence, rage and forbearance, dignity and dehumanization. Such forces met and culminated in what has been characterized as the "Law That Changed a Nation."

PART I

The history of the subjugation of blacks in America began in the 17th century, when the first black slaves were brought from Africa to work in the colonies of North America. Slaves were held throughout the colonies and later the American states, especially in the South. The South, with its agricultural economy, relied heavily on slave labor. In the North, where there was a growing industrial commercial base, slavery was a less important factor in the economy.

A northern-based anti-slavery movement had emerged by the early 1800s. Although the importation of slaves was banned by the U.S. Congress in 1808, slavery itself was not. Nineteen states (in the U.S. North and the West) prohibited slavery by 1861 and 15 (primarily in the South) allowed it.

Eleven southern states had seceded from the Union by mid-1861 over the issue of slavery. They feared that President Abraham Lincoln, who had been recently elected, would ban or restrict slavery in the entire nation. (Many Southerners also believed that the powers of the U.S. Government did not supersede the rights of the states.) Thus, viewing the elimination of slavery as a threat to their economic survival, they formed the Confederate States of America – and became a separate nation. When the Confederacy attacked a military post in South Carolina's harbor, President Lincoln sent troops to recapture the fort. The South saw this as a declaration of war. The "War Between the States" had begun.

Blacks saw the beginning of a brief period of hope for their enfranchisement in 1863, the middle of the Civil War, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation – a presidential order freeing slaves in the Confederate states.

In April 1865 the Civil War ended in a victory for the North, and slavery was abolished throughout the United States with the ratification of the 13th amendment to the United States Constitution. Two additional amendments soon followed: the 14th amendment, ratified in 1868, which made it clear that blacks were citizens of the United States and attempted to defend the rights of all citizens; and the 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, which prohibited voting discrimination on the basis of race or color.

But the last two amendments were speedily eclipsed by lack of enforcement, and passage of a series of segregation laws, especially in the South, that came to be called "Jim Crow" laws – so named after a derogatory term for blacks. Constant and consistent efforts by individuals and courts to deny rights to blacks followed.  

 “Essentially, blacks in those states (in the South) lived under a regime where they had very few rights that white people were bound to respect,” recalls William Taylor, a white lawyer in Washington who worked in the civil rights movement. A black person was regularly and routinely denied basic services: blacks couldn't try on clothing in many stores; blacks and whites didn't sit next to each other in a movie theater, especially not in the South; blacks could not use public accommodations that whites used, they couldn't eat in restaurants or stay in motels. Black entertainers were often refused rooms in the very hotels in which they were performing. Southern drinking fountains were separate and marked: "White Only" and "Colored Only." So were restrooms, although whites generally had separate restroom facilities for women and men, while "Colored" men and women sometimes were forced to use the same one. Blacks couldn't swim in public pools – except in "Colored Only" ones, if they existed. In some places, even public libraries prohibited blacks from entering and using their facilities, barring them from checking out books and doing research. Some black graduate students and researchers on occasion might be allowed to use the books – if they sat in the library basement.

        In 1896 Homer Adolph Plessy, who was half black, challenged a Louisiana segregation law when he sought a place in a railroad car reserved for whites. Plessy lost, with the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing "separate but equal" treatment for blacks. Fifty-eight years later, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the case in a landmark civil rights suit, Brown v. Board of Education [of Topeka, Kansas]. The court held that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and that discrimination in education was unconstitutional. While the Brown case signaled the beginning of some change, the court's order that schools be desegregated "with all deliberate speed" was largely ignored. Clearly, civil rights experts point out, something more was needed. "Separate but equal" remained the guiding theory for treatment of blacks throughout the South and well beyond the classrooms. Separation was certainly the case, equality was not. Black children in the South were educated in substandard schools, housing was often dilapidated, access to many places (including jobs) was through the back door, and voting by blacks was discouraged through poll taxes, phony tests, and outright intimidation. In other parts of the country segregation laws may not have been on the books, but in many ways the racism was more insidious. Whites presumed their racial superiority and blacks' inferiority in day-to-day transactions. 

PART II

Turning points in history are often difficult to pinpoint, but if there was one single event in the civil rights movement that served as a catalyst it might be the quiet act of defiance by a tired black seamstress, Rosa Parks, when she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. For this act, in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, she was arrested and charged with violation of city ordinance. Her simple act, though not the first of its kind, united the 45,000 blacks of Montgomery (pop. 120,000) in a successful massive resistance that eventually caught attention of the whole country. With the help of ministers and other prominent black citizens, the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) organized a boycott of the city buses that would last for more than a year. It ended only on November 13, 1956, when the United States Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling that segregation on the buses was unconstitutional. Leadership of the boycott was soon conferred on Martin Luther King Jr., a new 26-year-old minister in town whose preaching of nonviolence in the face of white threats, bombings, and jailings brought his people again and again to a pitch of determination and jubilation so great that one reporter observed: “They were on fire for freedom.”

Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, for example, walked alone through a mob chanting "Lynch her! Lynch her!" her first day at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, when she and eight other black students sought admission to the all-white school. It took an executive order from President Dwight Eisenhower and his dispatch of U.S. troops to guarantee the safety of the students and assure that integration came about.

Two black students who sought admission to segregated state universities also faced hostile crowds: James Meredith, who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1962, and Vivian Malone, who sued in 1963 to attend the University of Alabama. At the same time, dignified and nonviolent confrontations were repeated throughout the South, not only in schools, but also in many types of institutions that practiced segregation.

Sometimes whites responded to these nonviolent actions with violence. In 1961 "Freedom Riders" – members and supporters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who rode buses to challenge segregation practices on interstate highway routes in the South –   were physically assaulted by angry mobs.

In the early 1960s boycotts, lawsuits, protest marches, and sit-in demonstrations were all being used by civil rights activists to fight injustice and inequality. The road to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a long and difficult one. It was paved by large and small acts of individual and group sacrifice. And it saw ordinary American citizens, both black and white, display remarkable courage in the face of immense turmoil and personal danger. 

The Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group, escalated its tactics of murdering or brutally beating blacks, some of whom were attempting to challenge the status quo in various demonstrations, while others just happened to be in the Klan's sights. Individual whites also terrorized blacks and committed atrocities against them. One of the most outrageous attacks occurred on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963. The 16th Street Baptist Church located in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed – and four young black girls, ages 11 to 14, were killed while attending Sunday School.

Throughout the South, thousands of civil rights supporters were jailed because of their protests, among them ordinary citizens and committed black leaders, including James Farmer of CORE and John Lewis of SNCC. In May 1963 in Birmingham 900 demonstrating black schoolchildren were arrested and transported to jail in school buses. Martin Luther King was one of several leaders jailed in Birmingham early in 1963, in the aftermath of a confrontation with Public Safety Commissioner “Bull” Connor and municipal officials. Criticized by a group of white clergymen who blamed him for violence in the city, King used toilet tissue, the margins of newspapers, any scrap of paper he could get, to write a passionate letter to his colleague that was smuggled out of the jail.

Former CORE director Farmer, now a professor at Mary Washington College in Virginia, recalls: "After the demonstrations in Birmingham, millions of Americans saw the horrors of bigotry. They saw the dogs of the Birmingham police chief released on school children, tearing clothing and flesh; they saw high pressure fire-hoses turned on crowds of demonstrators, women with skirts flying rolling down the streets from the pressure of the water. They saw policemen with billy clubs beating people. Americans sat in their living rooms watching this carnage on the television news. Public opinion polls showed the tide was turning in our favor."

President Kennedy urged the U.S. Congress, in June to pass civil rights legislation. Politically, civil rights was a loaded issue, even for the president.  If Kennedy were to win reelection in 1964 he would need the support of the white South. He would not get it, many of his advisers feared, by alienating the white southern Democratic leadership in Congress and the white public throughout the South. Black civil rights leaders, tired of the slow pace the country was taking toward equal justice, organized a massive march on Washington. In August 1963 some 250,000 blacks and whites gathered peacefully in the capital to demonstrate for jobs, equality, and passage of the civil rights bill pending in the U.S. Congress. The demonstration grabbed the attention of the members of Congress, the President, and the nation as a whole.

But three months after the march, the bill still had not been passed. Then, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. The nation mourned and wept. A new president, Lyndon Johnson, took over. He urged the Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a memorial to the slain president.

"Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were both key players in the passage of that bill, but in very different ways," recalls Robert D. Loevy, now professor of political science at Colorado College, but who worked on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as an American Political Science Association fellow assigned to Senator Thomas Kuchel of California, the then minority (Republican) floor leader for the bill in the Senate. Loevy, who has written a computer program designed to help college students learn more about the Civil Rights bill, notes: "Kennedy's great contribution was to write a bill that would get through both houses of Congress. He had just gotten that bill out of the rules committee when he was assassinated. When Johnson became president, that changed the situation because he was a Southerner who had to run for reelection and needed northern and minority support. In his state of the Union address in January 1964, President Johnson called for the end of all segregation in American society. No president had ever done that before in American history.

In that address, Johnson said: “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights … It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law. ”

Despite presidential commitment to the bill, it did not receive easy passage in Congress. For 81 days, the Senate battled over the bill. For 57 days a filibuster – a continuous session of interminable opposition speeches organized in order to hold up a bill in the Senate – was sustained by Senate Republicans and Southern Democrats who opposed it. Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia set a record for the longest speech of the 1964 filibuster beginning at 7.38 p.m. and continuing all night until 9.51 the next morning. But on June 10, for the first time in history, the Senate imposed “cloture” – voted to close the debate on the civil rights filibuster. Nine days later the Senate passed the Civil rights bill by a 73-to-27 roll call vote of each member. After approval by the House of Representatives, the bill was signed by President Johnson on July 2, and became law, with Johnson calling on all Americans “to join in this effort to bring justice and hope to all our people and peace to our land … let us close the springs of racial poison.”

PART III

The 1964 law, passed July 2, was not the first U.S. civil rights law. Such laws date back as far as 1866. And just a few years prior to the 1964 act, civil rights legislation was passed by the U.S. Congress in 1957 and 1960. However, those two laws were "very weak and ineffective," says Washington attorney Joseph Rauh, who played a major role in drafting the 1964 legislation. "Neither had any significance other than symbolic. Both laws had little enforcement capability and did virtually nothing to change the actual living and working conditions of black people in America."

What made the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so noteworthy, and so effective, was its comprehensiveness. In its 27 pages and 11 "Titles" or sections, it sought to eliminate "the last vestiges" of discrimination. It addressed voting, public accommodations, public facilities, and public schools; it gave tenure to a civil rights commission to police America's enforcement of civil rights laws, addressed the questions of U.S. Government aid, employment, statistics, courts, and conciliatory services, and assured the right of jury trial in criminal contempt cases growing out of any part of the act.

With the signing of the law, discrimination in public accommodations was outlawed. No more could blacks be barred from hotels and motor lodges when they traveled. Nor could they be denied entrance to, or relegated to separate accommodations in, theaters and other places of entertainment, in restaurants or in gasoline station restrooms.

No longer would black children and their parents be barred from city parks or public swimming pools. The law now guaranteed to them equal access to, and treatment in, all publicly owned and operated facilities. And, in one particularly important provision, the law authorized the U.S. Government to provide technical and financial aid to all school districts engaged in the process of desegregation.

Clearly, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was more than a law that simply created an office in the U.S. Department of Justice to help solve racial disputes or that empowered the U.S. Government to withhold federal funds from those guilty of discrimination. Boldly and solidly, it attempted – fundamentally and irreversibly – to redress the great contradiction of America: a country predicated on liberty, equality, opportunity, and justice for everyone but which had for some 300 years denied those rights on the basis of skin color.

While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 achieved a great deal for black Americans, it has also helped many others, including Hispanics and other racial and ethnic minorities, the handicapped, homosexuals, and women. Indeed, each group, protesting and demanding further civil liberties, has learned from the black civil rights movement and has used the Civil Rights Act as a starting point to press for additional legislation or guarantees of protection. "It is the model for antidiscrimination legislation for not just blacks, but women, the handicapped, and the aged. It set the standard for how other laws would be written," says Mary Frances Berry, a member of the U.S Civil Rights Commission, who is also an attorney and law professor.

Adds Rauh: "What the Civil Rights law did was inaugurate a legal revolution. That law and the two other laws it paved the way for – the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the Fair Housing Act in 1968 – together turned the legal system of this country upside down. Prior to these statutes you had a legal system that supported segregation. By outlawing segregation, these laws caused a legal revolution in America."

Althea Simmons, a lawyer and chief lobbyist for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), notes that in addition to being the basis for the voting rights and fair housing acts, the Civil Rights Act was the basis, in 1972, for legislation banning discrimination against the handicapped and the elderly and for additional protection against unfair practices in housing and education.

The most important feature of Title VII, the employment provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is the affirmative action requirement for minorities and women, notes Berry. The rights of women were specifically written into the section of the Civil Rights law which prohibits discrimination in employment. Comments Berry: "One study has shown that thousands of millions of dollars have been earned by women and minorities since that period in jobs they would not have had had those provisions not existed."

Today's successes by blacks and others almost make it hard to remember how different America was 50 years ago—how bad things were for blacks, how far they have come, how short has been the time span.

The day the law was passed in Jackson, Mississippi, William Robinson was a young law student working in voter registration for SNCC. “I recall wondering what this was all about, whether this was going to mean anything or not,” he says looking back. “Almost spontaneously integration parties started up. Everyone wanted to go integrate something. Black civil rights workers, local residents, white volunteers from the North went down to a segregated hotel to have lunch. And nothing happened and that was amazing. You would have been turned before. The only thing that really happened was that our waitress returned the tip with the comment that ‘we understand the law has changed and we have to honor it. But we don’t have to like it and we don’t have to accept your tip.’ That aversion to our money lasted about a week!” he says now, laughing.

Elsewhere in the country, the transition was not that sanguine. In Enfield, North Carolina, hooded Klansmen patrolled the highways. In Jackson, Mississippi, the circuit clerk responsible for registering votes refused to place two black women on the rolls. On August 4, a month after the bill was signed, the bodies of three young civil rights workers – two whites and one black – were discovered on a farm near Philadelphia, Mississippi. They had been missing since June 21. U.S. Government investigators say the three were murdered by segregationists on the night they disappeared. Among 19 suspects: the sheriff and a deputy of Neshoba County. No convictions on murder charges were obtained.

So much death. So much pain. So much sacrifice, say civil rights experts. But so much gained in so short a time.

“No white person today gives it a moment’s pause of concern when he sits next to a black family in a restaurant or a movie,” says Robinson. “It is simply wrong to think that you can’t change attitudes by changing laws.”

When Martin Luther King made his now-famous “I have a dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, he spoke of his hopes for a better America. “I have a dream,” he said, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Today, most American probably would say that King’s dream is closer to reality that it ever has been. Once relegated primarily to low-level, low-paying jobs, blacks are now visible throughout the public and private sectors in all kinds of professions. Once denied the rights of vote, they are now being elected to thousands of state and local offices. Once subjected to degrading treatment in retail establishments, they now own many types of businesses. Once banned from certain schools, they are now attending America’s most prestigious universities.

Still, pockets of discrimination do exist in America despite the legacy of the Civil Rights Act. “Today we are not free from discrimination, but we do have the tools to fight with,” says Althea Simons of the NAACP.

For Americans, black and white, who remember segregation and who recall the troubled turmoil of the times, the 1964 Civil Rights Act represents a clear turning point in history – a point at which America made a genuine attempt to resolve its contradictions and its constrictions. All Americans, both black and white, have benefited. 

    

guide

part 1

• Explain the following notions: subjugation, enfranchisement, segregation
• Match two parts of the collocations and give their Russian equivalents:

1. subjugation of	a) an amendment
2. elimination of	b) rights
3. to ratify	c) law
4. to deny	d) housing
5. segregation	e) theory
6. to challenge	f) slavery
7. guiding	g) a law
8. dilapidated	h) blacks

• Fill in the correct preposition:

• In 1861 eleven southern states seceded … the Union … the issue … slavery.
• In 1865 the Civil War ended … a victory for the South, and slavery was abolished … the United States.
• Jim Crow laws were named … a derogatory term for blacks.
• Blacks in the South lived under a regime where they had very few rights that white people were bound … respect.

Answer the following questions:

• When did subjugation of blacks begin?
• When did first anti-slavery movement emerge? 
• When the importation of slaves was banned? 
• The Civil War. Dwell on its causes and outcome.
• What kinds of problems did newly freed slaves face?
• What is a Jim Crow law? Provide your own examples.
• What were the first attempts to challenge segregation laws? Were they successful?

part ii

• Make sure you know how to pronounce the following geographical names: Montgomery, Alabama, Arkansas, Birmingham
• Match the words with their definitions and give their Russian equivalents:

1. turning point	a) open refusal to obey somebody/something
2. to pinpoint	b) (us. about a crowd) to capture sb they consider guilty of a crime, do not allow them to have a trial in court, and kill them illegally, usually by hanging
3. defiance	c) a cruel and violent act, especially in a war
4. mob	d) the time when an important change takes place, usually with the result that a situation improves
5. to lynch	e) a way of preventing a law from being passed by using the rules or making long speeches to delay voting on it
6. dispatch	f) a large crowd of people, especially one that may become violent or cause trouble
7. atrocity	g) to find and show the exact position of sb/sth or the exact time that something happened
8. bigotry	h) (formal) the act of sending somebody/something somewhere
9. filibuster	i) the state of feeling, or the act of expressing, strong, unreasonable beliefs or opinions

• Continue the following statements:

• One of the brightest turning points in civil rights movement history is …
• Civil rights activists were actively fighting segregation in education. The most well-known cases are …
• Freedom riders are … 
• The result of demonstrations in Birmingham, 1963, was … 
• March on Washington was organized in ………………….. by …………………. for the purpose of ….
• The Civil Rights Act did not receive easy passage in Congress ….

Part III

• Match the words with their synonyms:

1. comprehensive	a) to base sth on sth
2. to eliminate	b) optimistic
3. vestige	c) confusion, disturbance
4. to  outlaw	d) complete, full
5. to empower	e) to eradicate
6. to predicate sth on/upon sth	f) significant
7. turmoil	g) to authorize
8. sanguine	h) to ban
9. noteworthy	i) track, sign

• Say whether the following sentences are true or false:

• The 1964 law was the first US civil rights law.
• What made the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so noteworthy and effective, was its comprehensiveness.
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 achieved a great deal only for black Americans.
• The passage of the law triggered an immense activity of civil rights activists and ordinary people.
• The transition was absolutely sanguine in all parts of the country.
• Today we can say that King’s dream finally came true.