Question

Many advances in civil rights have been accomplished through federal legislation. Describe the different parts of these laws. What did they accomplish?

Answer 1

• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most comprehensive civil rights legislation ever enacted by Congress. It contained extensive measures to dismantle Jim Crow segregation and combat racial discrimination.

• The Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed barriers to black enfranchisement in the South, banning poll taxes, literacy tests, and other measures that effectively prevented African Americans from voting.

• Segregationists attempted to prevent the implementation of federal civil rights legislation at the local level.

After years of activist lobbying in favor of comprehensive civil rights legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted in June 1964. Though President John F. Kennedy had sent the civil rights bill to Congress in 1963, before the March on Washington, the bill had stalled in the Judiciary Committee due to the dilatory tactics of Southern segregationist senators such as James Eastland, a Democrat from Mississippi After the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, gave top priority to the passage of the bill.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 contained provisions barring discrimination and segregation in education, public facilities, jobs, and housing. It created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to ensure fair hiring practices, and established a federal Community Relations Service to assist local communities with civil rights issues. The bill also authorized the US Office of Education to distribute financial aid to communities struggling to desegregate public schools

The period following the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 witnessed resistance to the implementation of its measures. George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, made a strong showing in the 1964 presidential primaries in Indiana, Maryland, and Wisconsin. His campaign relied heavily on anti-integration rhetoric and bemoaned the loss of “traditional” American values, prefiguring the rise of the new social conservatism.

Though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 included provisions to strengthen the voting rights of African Americans in the South, these measures were relatively weak and did not prevent states and election officials from practices that effectively continued to deny southern blacks the vote. Moreover, in their attempts to expand black voter registration, civil rights activists met with the fierce opposition and hostility of Southern white segregationists, many of whom were entrenched in positions of authority.

The vicious beatings and murders of civil rights workers after the passage of the Civil Rights Act radicalized some black activists, who became skeptical of nonviolent, integrationist tactics and began to adopt a more radical approach. On March 7, 1965, six hundred activists set out on a march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery to peacefully protest the continued violations of African Americans’ civil rights. When they reached the Edmund Pettus Bridgeover the Alabama River, hundreds of deputies and state troopers attacked them with tear gas, nightsticks, and electric cattle prods. The event, which the press dubbed “Bloody Sunday,” was broadcast over television and splashed across the front pages of newspapers and magazines, stunning and horrifying the American public. Bloody Sunday galvanized civil rights activists, who converged on Selma to demand federal intervention and express solidarity with the marchers. President Johnson quickly became convinced that additional civil rights legislation was necessary.

The bill outlawed poll taxes, literacy tests, and other practices that had effectively prevented southern blacks from voting. It authorized the US attorney general to send federal officials to the South to register black voters in the event that local registrars did not comply with the law, and it also authorized the federal government to supervise elections in districts that had disfranchised African Americans. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 transformed patterns of political power in the South. By the middle of 1966, over half a million Southern blacks had registered to vote, and by 1968, almost four hundred black people had been elected to office.

As African Americans joined the Democratic Party, many white southerners began to defect to the Republicans. (Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” designed to shift white Southerners to the Republican Party, accelerated this trend.) With African Americans voting en masse, some Southern Democrats, like George Wallace, began to shed their segregationist rhetoric and attempt to appeal to black voters. At the federal level, President Johnson appointed the first black cabinet member, Robert C. Weaver, as head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and in 1967 appointed Thurgood Marshall as the first African American justice of the Supreme Court.