Civil Rights Act of 1964

CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964

CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964. Congressional concern for civil rights diminished with the end of Reconstruction and the Supreme Court's 1883 decision in the Civil Rights Cases holding the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. In 1957, Congress, under pressure from the civil rights movement, finally returned to the issue. However, the congressional response was a modest statute creating the Civil Rights Commission with power to investigate civil rights violations but not to enforce civil rights laws and establishing a feeble remedy for voting rights violations. The Civil Rights Act of 1960 slightly strengthened the voting rights provision.

During his campaign for the presidency in 1960, John F. Kennedy drew support from African Americans by promising to support civil rights initiatives. Once elected, Kennedy was reluctant to expend his political resources on civil rights programs he considered less important than other initiatives. Increasing civil rights activism, including sit-ins at food counters that refused service to African Americans, led Kennedy to propose a new civil rights act in May 1963. Kennedy lacked real enthusiasm for the proposal, which he saw as a necessary concession to the important constituency of African Americans in the Democratic Party. The bill languished in the House of Representatives until after Kennedy's assassination, when President Lyndon B. Johnson adopted the civil rights proposal as his own, calling it a memorial to Kennedy. Johnson had sponsored the 1957 act as part of his campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1960. Although Johnson was sincerely committed to civil rights, he had not allayed suspicion among liberal Democrats that he lacked such a commitment, and his support for the civil rights bill helped him with that constituency as well.

Johnson demonstrated the depth of his commitment through extensive efforts to secure the act's passage. The act passed the House in February 1964 with overwhelming bipartisan support, but southern senators opposed to the bill mounted the longest filibuster on record to that date. Senate rules required a two-thirds vote to end a filibuster, which meant Johnson had to get the support of a majority of Republicans. He negotiated extensively with Senator Everett Dirksen, the Senate's Republican leader, appealing to Dirksen's patriotism and sense of fairness. Dirksen extracted some small compromises, and with Republican support for Johnson, the filibuster ended. Within two weeks, the statute passed by a vote of 73–27.

The 1964 act had eleven main provisions or titles. Several strengthened the Civil Rights Commission and the voting rights provisions of the 1957 and 1960 acts, including a provision authorizing the U.S. attorney general to sue states that violated voting rights. But the act's other provisions were far more important. They dealt with discrimination in public accommodations and employment and with discrimination by agencies, both public and private, that received federal funds.

Title II

Title II banned racial discrimination in places of public accommodation, which were defined broadly to include almost all of the nation's restaurants, hotels, and theaters. These provisions were directed at the practices the sit-ins had protested, and to that extent they were the center of the act. The Civil Rights Cases (1883) held that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give Congress the power to ban discrimination by private entities. By 1964, many scholars questioned that holding and urged Congress to rely on its power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment to justify the Civil Rights Act. Concerned about the constitutional question, the administration and Congress re-lied instead on the congressional power to regulate inter-state commerce. The hearings leading up to the statute's enactment included extensive testimony about the extent to which discrimination in hotels and restaurants deterred African Americans from traveling across the country. The Supreme Court, in Katzenbach v. McClung (1964) and Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964), had no difficulty upholding the public accommodations provisions against constitutional challenge, relying on expansive notions of congressional power to regulate interstate commerce that had become settled law since the New Deal. Although compliance with Title II was not universal, it was quite widespread, as operators of hotels and restaurants quickly understood that they would not lose money by complying with the law.

Title VII

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act banned discrimination in employment. Representative Howard Smith, a conservative Democrat from Virginia, proposed an amendment that expanded the groups protected against discrimination to include women. A similar proposal had been rattling around Congress for many years. The idea was opposed by many labor unions and some advocates of women's rights, who were concerned that banning discrimination based on sex imperiled laws that they believed protected women against undesirable work situations. Representative Smith, who before 1964 supported banning discrimination based on sex, hoped the amendment would introduce divisions among the act's proponents. His strategy failed, and the final act included a ban on discrimination based on sex.

Lawsuits invoking Title VII were soon filed in large numbers. The Supreme Court's initial interpretations of the act were expansive. The Court, in Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971), held that employers engaged in prohibited discrimination not simply when they deliberately refused to hire African Americans but also when they adopted employment requirements that had a "disparate impact," that is, requirements that were easier for whites to satisfy. The Court's decision made it substantially easier for plaintiffs to show that Title VII had been violated because showing that a practice has a disparate impact is much easier than showing that an employer intentionally discriminated on the basis of race. The Court also allowed cases to proceed when a plaintiff showed no more than that he or she was qualified for the job and that the position remained open after the plaintiff was denied it, such as in McDonnell Douglas v. Green (1973). In United Steel-workers of America v. Weber (1971), the Court rejected the argument that affirmative action programs adopted voluntarily by employers amounted to racial discrimination.

Later Supreme Court decisions were more restrictive. After the Court held that discrimination based on pregnancy was not discrimination based on sex in General Electric Company v. Gilbert (1976), Congress amended the statute to clarify that such discrimination was unlawful. Another amendment expanded the definition of discrimination based on religion to include a requirement that employers accommodate the religious needs of their employees. The Court further restricted Title VII in several decisions in 1989, the most important of which, Ward's Cove Packing Company, Inc., v. Atonio (1989), allowed employers to escape liability for employment practices with a disparate impact unless the plaintiffs could show that the practices did not serve "legitimate employment goals." These decisions again provoked a response in Congress. President George H. W. Bush vetoed the first bill that emerged from Congress, calling it a "quota bill." In Bush's view it gave employers incentives to adopt quotas to avoid being sued. Congressional supporters persisted, and eventually Bush, concerned about the impact of his opposition on his reelection campaign, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which included ambiguous language that seemingly repudiated the Ward's Cove decision.

Title VI

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination by organizations that receive federal funds. The impact of this provision was immediate and important. Most school districts in the Deep South and many elsewhere in the South had resisted efforts to desegregate in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). Attempts to enforce the Court's desegregation rulings required detailed and expensive litigation in each district, and little actual desegregation occurred in the Deep South before 1964. Title VI made a significant difference when coupled with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the nation's first major program of federal aid to local education programs. Proposals for federal aid to education had been obstructed previously when civil rights advocates, led by Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., insisted that anyone who received federal funds would be barred from discriminating. These "Powell amendments" prompted southern representatives to vote against federal aid to education. The political forces that led to the adoption of Title VI also meant that southern opposition to federal aid to education could be overcome. The money available to southern school districts through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 broke the logjam over desegregation, and the number of school districts in which whites and African Americans attended the same schools rapidly increased.

Federal agencies' interpretations of Title VI paralleled the Court's interpretation of Title VII. Agencies adopted rules that treated as discrimination practices with a disparate impact. In Alexander v. Choate (1985), the Supreme Court held that Title VI prohibited only acts that were intentionally discriminatory, not practices with a disparate impact. The Court regularly expressed skepticism about the agency rules, although it did not invalidate them. Instead, in Alexander v. Sandoval (2001), the Court held that private parties could not sue to enforce the agencies' disparate-impact regulations. That decision substantially limited the reach of Title VI because the agencies themselves lack the resources to enforce their regulations to a significant extent.

Efforts by courts and presidents to limit the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have been rebuffed regularly. Supplemented by amendments, the act is among the civil rights movement's most enduring legacies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Graham, Hugh Davis. The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960–1972. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Stern, Mark. Calculating Visions: Kennedy, Johnson, and Civil Rights. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Whalen, Charles, and Barbara Whalen. The Longest Debate: A Legislative History of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Cabin John, Md.: Seven Locks Press, 1985.

Mark V. Tushnet

See also Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ; Civil Rights Act of 1875 ; Civil Rights Act of 1957 ; Civil Rights Act of 1991 ; Civil Rights Movement ; General Electric Company v. Gilbert ; Griggs v. Duke Power Company ; Ward's Cove Packing Company, Inc., v. Atonio .