South Coast Today - Massachusetts, Nation Reflect on Civil Rights Act

News Article

By Gerry Tuoti

Fifty years ago, the nation dismantled a systemic institution of racial oppression and took a major step toward legal equality.

"The Civil Rights Act and its passage was the culmination of many individuals and many organizations looking for a legal and legislative victory to eliminate Jim Crow and deal with a lack of access to opportunity for people of color, particularly African-Americans, at that time," said Michael Curry, president of the NAACP's Boston branch. "It was a landmark piece of legislation, and organizations like the NAACP wanted to present passage of the Civil Rights Act as a turning point in the battle for civil rights."

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law on July 2 of that year, made it illegal to discriminate based on "race, color, religion, sex or national origin" in employment and public accommodations. The following year, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which forced states to stop the unequal enforcement of voter requirements based on race.

"The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, taken together, are among the most significant laws Congress has ever passed," said Peter Ubertaccio, director of the Martin Institute at Stonehill College.
Beginning in the mid-1950s, the civil rights movement began to take hold as thousands of black Americans and anti-segregationists organized mass demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience to protest the systemic racism that was rampant in the Deep South. They scored a legal victory in 1954, when the Supreme Court's decision on Brown v. Board of Education paved the way for integration in public schools.

"In many respects, the civil rights era was the end of the Civil War," Ubertaccio said. "That's 100 years on after the Civil War ended, and the country was still trying to grapple with issues of where African-Americans belong."

Throughout the remainder of the 1950s and early 1960s, protests were often met with violence from police officers and members of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council. In the northern states, however, public sentiment swelled in support of civil rights.

"The violent attacks on freedom activists, the death of civil rights workers in Mississippi, was a wake-up call to America and its policymakers that justice delayed is justice denied," Curry said.

President John F. Kennedy submitted the Civil Rights Act to Congress in June 1963. Following Kennedy's assassination that November, Johnson worked to get the legislation passed.

"No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long," Johnson said in his first presidential address to a joint session of Congress.

U.S. Rep Joe Kennedy III, the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, said stories of his grandfather's and President Kennedy's commitment to civil rights have long been sources of family pride.

"The Civil Rights Act is one of the seminal pieces of legislation in our country's history," he said. "It continues our quest to try to live up to the values of the foundation of our country … It's a critical milestone in our quest, but certainly not the end."

He reflected on a photo in his Washington office that shows him and his wife with U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., during a recent trip to Selma, Ala., where Lewis -- one of the original Freedom Riders -- had been brutally beaten as a young man during a civil rights march in 1964.

"If you're going to do something that changes society to that degree, hopefully forever, it takes heroes like John Lewis, Martin Luther King and others to get it done," Kennedy said.

The bill fractured the Democratic Party, with many southern lawmakers staunchly opposing any attempt to desegregate. Following a series of parliamentary maneuvers to overcome a long, segregationist-led filibuster, the bill made its way through Congress and landed on the president's desk, where Johnson signed it into law.

Republicans gained considerable ground, particularly in the Deep South, throughout the following decades.

"The Democratic Party was seriously wounded and divided post-Civil Rights and post-Vietnam," Ubertaccio said. "There was a brief interlude during the Carter presidency … but I would argue they were really not able to put together a national political coalition until 1990s under Bill Clinton. It wounded the Democratic Party for a good long time."

It is important, Curry said, to recall painful chapters of history. Remembering the legacy of racial oppression and segregation, he said, helps contextualize modern inequalities, such as high rates of poverty in minority communities. Throughout the majority of the nation's history, black Americans haven't had access to the same opportunities as their white counterparts, he said.

"It's also critical that we have a first-of-its-kind national dialogue on history and race," he said. "It's to all of our detriment that we have not had that conversation."

Source