CIVIL RIGHTS

Personal liberties that belong to an individual, owing to his or her status as a citizen or resident of a particular country or community.

The most common legal application of the term civil rights involves the rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens and residents by legislation and by the Constitution. Civil rights protected by the Constitution include freedom of speech and freedom from certain types of discrimination.

Not all types of discrimination are unlawful, and most of an individual's personal choices are protected by the freedoms to choose personal associates; to express himself or herself; and to preserve personal privacy. Civil rights legislation comes into play when the practice of personal preferences and prejudices of an individual, a business entity, or a government interferes with the protected rights of others. The various civil rights laws have made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, handicap, or national origin. Discrimination that interferes with voting rights and equality of opportunity in education, employment, and housing is unlawful.

The term privileges and immunities is related to civil rights. Privileges and immunities encompass all rights of individuals that relate to people, places, and real and personal property. Privileges include all of the legal benefits of living in the United States, such as the freedom to sell land, draft a will, or obtain a divorce. Immunities are the protections afforded by law that prevent the government or other people from hindering another's enjoyment of his or her life, such as the right to be free from illegal searches and seizures and the freedom to practice religion without government persecution. The Privileges and Immunities Clause in Article IV of the U.S. Constitution states, "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States." The clause is designed to prevent each state from discriminating against

the people in other states in favor of its own citizens.

The bill of rights, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, delineates specific rights that are reserved for U.S. citizens and residents. No state can remove or abridge rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution.

In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court held, in dred scott v. sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 15 L. Ed. 691, that the Constitution did not apply to African Americans because they were not citizens when the Constitution was written. After the Civil War, therefore, new laws were necessary for the purpose of extending civil liberties to the former slaves.

In 1865, the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution was enacted to make slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude unlawful. In addition, Congress was given the power to enact laws that were necessary to enforce this new amendment.

The fourteenth amendment, ratified in 1868, provides that every individual who is born or naturalized in the United States is a citizen and ensures that a state may not deprive a citizen or resident of his or her civil rights, including due process of law and equal protection of the laws. Congress is also empowered to enact laws for the enforcement of these rights.

The Origin of Federal Civil Rights Laws

During the period immediately following the Civil War, civil rights legislation was originally enacted by Congress, based upon its power under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to pass laws to enforce these rights. The first two of these laws were based upon the civil rights act of 1866 (42 U.S.C.A. § 1982), which had preceded the Fourteenth Amendment.

The first civil rights law guaranteed equal rights under the law for all people who lived within the jurisdiction of the United States. The second guaranteed each citizen an equal right to own, inherit, rent, purchase, and sell real property as well as personal property. The third original civil rights law, the ku klux klan act of 1871 (17 Stat. 13), provided citizens with the right to bring a civil action for a violation of protected rights. The fourth law made violation of such rights a criminal offense.

Subsequent Legislation

Although these initial laws purported to guarantee the civil rights of all citizens, including African Americans and other minorities,

they were effectively negated for most African-Americans in the late nineteenth century by the passage of jim crow laws, or black codes, in the South. These laws made it illegal for African-Americans to use the same public facilities as whites, restricted their travel, impeded their ability to vote, forbade interracial marriage, and generally relegated them to a legally inferior position.

In the 1896 landmark case plessy v. ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 16 S. Ct. 1138, 41 L. Ed. 256, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Jim Crow law that required the segregation, or separation, of the races on railroad cars. The Court held that the Louisiana law in question was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as long as the facilities that were provided for each race were "separate but equal." This separate-but-equal doctrine was used to support other segregation laws applying to public schools and public facilities.

No significant civil rights legislation was enacted until many decades later, when the commission on civil rights was established by Congress in the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (42 U.S.C.A. § 1975) to monitor and collect facts regarding race relations for consideration by Congress and the president. Congress subsequently passed the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (42 U.S.C.A. § 1971). The statute guarantees that qualified voters have the right to register to vote in any state and that they have the right to sue any person who prevents them from doing so. Voters possess this right to sue regardless of whether the individual who so prevents them is a state official or merely an individual who acting as one.

The civil rights act of 1964 (42 U.S.C.A. §§ 2000a et seq.) is the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in the history of the United States. It contains provisions for parity in the use and enjoyment of public accommodations, facilities, and education, as well as federally assisted programs and employment. Title VII of that act, which prohibits employment discrimination based on an employee's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, is regarded as the most inclusive source of employment rights. All employers who have at least 15 employees, including state and local governments and labor unions, are subject to its provisions, but it does not apply to the federal government, American Indian tribes, clubs, or religious organizations.

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 (25 U.S.C.A. § 1301 et seq.) proscribes discrimination in the sale and rental of most U.S. housing. It also prohibits discrimination in financing arrangements and extends to agents, brokers, and owners. Both the 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts establish the right of an injured party to sue and to obtain damages from any individual who illegally infringes with a person's civil rights, conspires to deprive others of their civil rights, or abuses either government authority or public office to accomplish such unlawful acts.

In the area of education, a significant civil rights milestone was achieved in 1954 with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in brown v. board of education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873. In Brown, the justices unanimously rejected the separate-but-equal doctrine that it had upheld in Plessy. They found that segregating black and white children in different public schools violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Segregation, the Court held, effectively discriminates against African-American children by promoting in them a sense of inferiority that limits their opportunities in life. The Court also required that school districts desegregate "with all deliberate speed." integration, or desegregation, of public schools has been a divisive issue ever since. In particular, arguments arise over the practice of busing students a distance to school, a method that has been used, often by court order, to create a better racial balance.

The issue of segregation continues to cause strife. In 2002, Senate Majority Leader trent lott (R.-Miss.) suggested during comments at the 100th birthday party of retired Senator strom thurmond that he was proud that the state of Mississippi had supported Thurmond in a presidential bid in 1948. Thurmond had run on the so-called "Dixiecrat" platform that advocated segregation. The comments caused a storm of criticism directed at Lott, and he resigned as senate majority leader in December 2002.

In employment, common law permits an employer or labor union to discriminate for a valid reason in its relations with employees, unless otherwise provided by federal or state statute. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (29 U.S.C.A. § 151 et seq.) initially restrained discrimination against employees or job applicants who engage in union activities. Subsequently, the act has been extended through various amendments to prohibit other forms of discrimination, including race and sex discrimination. In 1963, Congress enacted the Equal Pay Act (29 U.S.C.A. § 206), which requires that men and women be paid the same wages when they do substantially similar work. The federal equal employment opportunity commission (EEOC) is the initial forum for claims of illegal employment discrimination. It also publishes advisory guidelines that explain or define the law. Many states have agencies or human rights commissions that are similar to the EEOC.

The 1980s and Beyond

One result of civil rights legislation is affirmative action, which is the effort to enforce race and sex classifications when necessary to correct past discriminatory patterns. The ordering of affirmative action requires employers or labor unions to make concerted efforts to hire minorities who traditionally have been discouraged from seeking employment with them. The basis for affirmative action is that if such efforts are not made, unlawful discrimination will be perpetuated.

Affirmative action and other attempts to end discrimination raise new questions. For example, have efforts to help minorities and women begun to infringe on the rights of individuals outside of those groups, such as white men? Some argue that affirmative action results in reverse discrimination, which is prejudice or bias practiced against a particular person or class of people in order to remedy a pattern of past discrimination against another individual or group of individuals.

Much of the attention on the constitutionality of affirmative action programs has focused upon the federal courts of appeals. The most heated controversy has centered on affirmative action programs in higher education. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Hopwood v. Texas,78 F.3d 932 (5th Cir. 1996) held that a program at the University of Texas School of Law granting preferences to minorities in admissions decisions was unconstitutional. This case stirred a national debate, and several commentators noted that the percentage of minorities who were admitted to the school dropped markedly after the decision. The U.S. Supreme Court allowed the decision to stand when it denied certioari.

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court clarified some of the confusion experienced by the lower federal courts with respect to affirmative action programs in higher education. In Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S.___, 123 S. Ct. 2325, ___ L. Ed. 2d ___ (2003), the Court upheld a practice by the law school at the University of Michigan that considered race one of the factors the school considered when admitting students. The ruling upheld the decision in board of regents of the university of california v. bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 98 S. Ct. 2733, 57 L. Ed. 2d 750 (1978), a controversial decision that had likewise allowed schools to consider race as a factor in admissions. In a companion case to Grutter, however the Court limited the scope of affirmative action programs of universities when it struck down Michigan's undergraduate admissions policies. Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. ___, 123 S. Ct. 2411, ___ L. Ed. 2d ___ (2003). Unlike the law school's admissions policies at Michigan, the undergraduate admissions department added a certain number of "points" to the application of a racial minority. Because the university added these points automatically without consideration of the individual applicant, the Court held that this policy could not pass constitutional muster.

After President ronald reagan appointed three justices to the U.S. Supreme Court during his two presidential terms between 1981 and 1989, the Court proceeded to render more conservative opinions regarding civil rights. For example, in Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 491 U.S. 164, 109 S. Ct. 2363, 105 L. Ed. 2d 132 (1989), it addressed the issue of discrimination in the private sector and held that section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 barred only racial discrimination in hiring, and thus not racial harassment while on the job. Minority-rights groups were disappointed by the ruling and saw it as part of a general trend toward making civil rights violations more difficult to prove. However, Justice anthony m. kennedy, who wrote the Court's opinion, stated, "Neither our words nor our decisions should be interpreted as signaling one inch of retreat from Congress's policy to forbid discrimination in the private, as well as the public, sphere."

Less controversial have been developments in the area of civil rights for handicapped people. In 1990, President george h. w. bush signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (Pub. L. No. 101-336, 104 Stat. 327 [codified in scattered sections of 42, 29, 47 U.S.C.A.] [effective 1992]), which was quickly hailed as the most significant civil rights legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The ADA prohibits discrimination against disabled persons in employment, public accommodations, transportation, and telecommunications. Referred to as the bill of rights for physically and mentally disabled citizens—who were estimated to number 43 million at the time of the act's passage—the act supersedes previous state and local laws and extends protection to any person with a physical or mental impairment that "substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of such individual."

The act includes many features that are intended to improve living conditions for those with disabilities. For example, employers, providers of public transportation, and private businesses with public accommodation (such as theaters, restaurants, hotels, and banks) must make "reasonable accommodations" for disabled persons. Often such accommodations must include wheelchair access. Similarly, all commuter and intercity trains are required to have at least one car that is handicapped-accessible, and telephone companies must provide relay operators for hearing-impaired individuals who use special telecommunications devices.

The Civil Rights Act of 1991 (Pub. L. No. 102-166, 105 Stat. 1071 [codified in scattered sections of 42, 29, 2 U.S.C.A.]) marked another important step in civil rights legislation. The act repudiated several U.S. Supreme Court decisions on civil rights; granted women and disabled persons the right to recover money damages under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and granted congressional employees the protection of Title VII. Among the high court's decisions that were overturned by the 1991 act was Patterson. Section 101 of the act states that employees may sue for damages experienced through racial discrimination in hiring, promotion, dismissal, and all other terms of employment. The changes in Title VII employee-discrimination cases entitle plaintiffs to jury trials and allow them to recover damages in addition to back pay.

Although many minority groups have made rapid advances toward recognition of their civil rights, one group that continues to struggle is the homosexual community. Similar to ethnic and racial minorities, individuals who identify themselves as homosexual, bisexual, or transsexual have long been subject to disparate treatment from the majority. Although gay and lesbian rights groups have made advances toward changing perceptions in society, challenges in the courts have been only marginally successful.

Gay and lesbian rights group claimed a victory in 1996 with the Supreme Court's decision in romer v. evans, 517 U.S. 620, 116 S. Ct. 1620, 134 L. Ed. 2d 855 (1996). In that case, a constitutional amendment in the state of Colorado prohibited governmental units from passing any statute, regulation, or ordinance purporting to protect the rights of homosexuals or bisexuals. The U.S. Supreme Court held that the amendment violated the Equal Protection Clause because it explicitly denies a single group protection under the law.

Although Romer represented one of the first major victories for gay and lesbian groups, other decisions have been less favorable. In boy scouts of america v. dale, 530 U.S. 640, 120 S. Ct. 2446, 147 L. Ed. 2d 554 (2000), the Court held that the Boy Scouts could properly exclude gay boys from their organization based upon the principle of freedom of association. Due in large part to their limited success in the courts and legislatures, gay and lesbian advocates have focused much of their attention on changing societal perceptions of homosexual, bisexuals, and other similar minority groups.

Another issue that has arisen in the courts with respect to civil rights is the limitations placed upon section 1983 actions against governmental officials for violations of constitutional rights. For instance, in Board of County Commissioners of Bryan County, Okla. v. Brown, 520 U.S. 397, 117 S. Ct. 12382, 137 L. Ed. 2d 626 (1997), the U.S. Supreme Court clarified that a plaintiff cannot recover in an action under section 1983 under a theory of repondeat superior. The plaintiff in the case was injured when a police officer forced her to the ground after a chase. The officer had been hired by his great-uncle, a county sheriff, despite the fact that he had had a number of criminal convictions. The plaintiff claimed that the sheriff and the county had shown a reckless indifference toward her constitutional rights through their hiring practices. The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, holding that a plaintiff in a Section 1983 action must prove that a governmental unit, through deliberate conduct, was a moving force behind the alleged injury.

Prisoners' Rights

Lawsuits brought by prisoners to recover damages for alleged violations of their civil rights have caused problems in American legal systems. Many of these cases have involved alleged violations by prisons or prison officials against inmates. Although many of these claims have no valid legal basis, some do, so courts must determine, among the thousands of cases that are filed each year, which ones have merit. In response to these claims, Congress enacted the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995, 28 U.S.C.A. § 1932 (2003), which requires prisoners to pay filing fees and restricts the amount of money damages that prisoners can recover.

Prisoners have prevailed on a variety of claims, notwithstanding limitations placed upon their court actions. For example, in Crawford-El v. Britton, 523 U.S. 574, 118 S. Ct. 1584, 140 L. Ed. 2d 759 (1998), the U.S. Supreme Court reversed an appellate court decision that had imposed a higher burden of persuasion on inmate claims. Similarly, prisoners are periodically successful in claims that prison officials have deprived them of constitutional rights, including due process of law.

However, the majority of claims by inmates fail. For instance, in Correctional Services Corp. v. Malesko, 534 U.S. 61, 122 S. Ct. 515, 151 L. Ed. 2d 456 (2001), the U.S. Supreme Court held that a plaintiff held in a halfway house that was operated by a private corporation under a contract with the federal government could not sue the corporation. The plaintiff had sought to bring the case under the rule in Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388, 91 S. Ct. 1999, 29 L. Ed. 2d 619 (1971) (called a Bivens action), which allows for suits against federal officials who have violated the civil rights of plaintiffs. The Court in Malesko held that Bivens actions do not apply the to acts of government agencies or business entities and ruled against the plaintiff.

further readings

Abraham, Henry J., and Barbara A. Perry. 2003. Freedom and the Court: Civil Rights and Liberties in the United States. Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas.

Hepple, Bob, and Erika M. Szyszczak, eds. 1992. Discrimination: the Limits of Law. New York: Mansell.

Lewis, Harold S. Jr., and Elizabeth J. Norman. 2001. Civil Rights Law and Practice. St. Paul, Minn.: West.

Rutland, George H., ed. 2001. Civil Rights in America. Huntington, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers.

Shull, Steven H. 1999. American Civil Rights Policy from Truman to Clinton: the Role of Presidential Leadership. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.

cross-references

Civil Rights Acts; Ku Klux Klan Act; Section 1983; Voting Rights Act of 1965. See also primary documents in "Civil Rights" section of Appendix.

CIVIL RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES

CIVIL RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES refer to the various spheres of individual and group freedoms that are deemed to be so fundamental as not to tolerate infringement by government. These include the fundamental political rights, especially the franchise, that offer the citizen the opportunity to participate in the administration of governmental affairs. Since these individual and group freedoms may also be abridged by the action or inaction of private institutions, demand has increased for positive governmental action to promote and encourage their preservation.

Constitutional provisions, statutes, and court decisions have been the principal means of acknowledging the civil rights and liberties of individuals; for those rights to be maximized, their acknowledgment must be accompanied by legislation and judicial enforcement. Any conception of individual rights that does not include this action component may actually be instrumental in limiting the exercise of such rights.

Constitutional Provisions

The U.S. Constitution, drawn up in the summer of 1787, included guarantees of the following civil rights and liberties: habeas corpus (Article I, section 9); no bills of attainder or ex post facto laws (Article I, sections 9 and 10); jury trial (Article III, sections 2 and 3); privileges and immunities (Article IV, section 2), later interpreted to be a guarantee that each state would treat citizens of other states in the same way they treated their own citizens; and no religious test for public office (Article VI, paragraph 3). Four years later ten amendments (the Bill of Rights) were added to the Constitution in response to demands for more specific restrictions on the national government. The Bill of Rights guarantees certain substantive rights (notably freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, and of religious worship) and certain procedural rights in both civil and criminal actions (notably a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury). In 1833 (Barron v. Baltimore, 7 Peters 243) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that these amendments were designed to serve as protections against federal encroachment alone and did not apply to state and local governments. The Supreme Court's position in this case, as stated by Chief Justice John Marshall, was to prevail throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite the efforts of attorneys who argued that the intent of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause (1868) was to extend the protection of the Bill of Rights to the actions of states and localities. From 1925 (Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652) through 1969 (Benton v. Maryland, 395 U.S. 784), Supreme Court rulings had the effect of incorporating most of the major provisions of the Bill of Rights into the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, there by making them applicable to states and localities as well as to the federal government.

Prior to the adoption of the Civil War amendments there had been little effort to invoke federal authority to preserve individual rights. Furthermore, revisionist historians have shown that the generation that framed the first state declarations of rights and the federal Bill of Rights was not as libertarian as is traditionally assumed—the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798 being a case in point. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and the five general civil rights acts spanning the years 1866–1875 established the bases for a vast expansion of federal authority. Although the Thirteenth abolished slavery and involuntary servitude and the Fifteenth prohibited the abridgment of a citizen's fight to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, the Fourteenth proved to be of greatest import to the sub-sequent development of individual rights.

The first sentence of section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment defines U.S. citizenship: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." This provision overturned the Supreme Court's 1857 decision in the Dred Scott Case (19 Howard 393) and recognized the primacy of national citizenship. (Citizenship was later described by Chief Justice Earl Warren [Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44, 64 (1958)] as "man's basic right, for it is nothing less than the right to have rights.") The remainder of the first section of the amendment prohibits the states from abridging the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States (which the courts interpreted quite narrowly); depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; and denying any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Judicial Interpretation

The five general civil rights acts of the post–Civil War period were efforts to implement the Civil War amendments. Although Congress was primarily motivated by a concern for the newly freed blacks, these statutes—which provided federal protection of individual rights against interference by either public officials or private individuals—never made specific references to African Americans as such. The last of these nineteenth-century civil rights statutes, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, was designed to guarantee to blacks equal accommodations with white citizens in all inns, public conveyances, theaters, and other public places. In 1883 the Supreme Court (Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3) concluded that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had not intended to enable Congress to prohibit private persons from discriminating against blacks. The Fourteenth Amendment was interpreted as prohibiting discriminatory acts by the states only, and consequently the act was declared void.

The major test of state legislation designed to support the segregation and suppression of blacks came in 1896. In Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537) the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana statute requiring separate accommodations for blacks and whites on public carriers, so long as the accommodations were equal. In the years that followed, segregation of the races on the basis of the separate-but-equal doctrine became commonplace throughout the South, and segregation resulting from Jim Crow legislation continued to be pervasive into the mid-twentieth century; in 1947 President Harry S. Truman's Committee on Civil Rights reported that the separate-but-equal doctrine was "one of the outstanding myths of American history, for it is almost always true that while indeed separate, … facilities are far from equal."

The separate-but-equal doctrine became deeply entrenched in the field of public education in the South, and it was not until 1938 (Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337) that the Supreme Court began to examine the equality requirement. From then until 1950 the Court, in a series of cases involving graduate school education, held that the separate facilities provided for black students were not equal educationally, but in granting relief to black plaintiffs, the Court did not publicly reexamine the separate-but-equal doctrine. Nevertheless, these decisions paved the way for the Supreme Court's landmark decision of 17 May 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483), overturning the Plessy v. Ferguson precedent and unanimously holding that the separate-but-equal doctrine had no place in the field of public education. The Court based its decision on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibited states from denying any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. A companion case that year (Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497) prohibited segregation in the public schools of the District of Columbia.

A year later, in its implementation decree in the Brown case, the Court ordered the desegregation process to be carried out "with all deliberate speed." Massive resistance ensued, most notably in Arkansas and Virginia, and in 1964 (Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 377 U.S. 218) the Court held that the time for mere "deliberate speed" had run out. Subsequent implementation decrees emphasized the obligation of school districts to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate only unitary schools thereafter. When confronted in 1971 with the question of the scope of a federal district court's ability to order school busing to correct state-enforced racial school segregation, the Supreme Court was unanimous in finding that the district court had not transcended the limits of "reasonableness" in its remedial order concerning busing (Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1). After rejecting in 1974 arguments that courts could order metropolitan-wide busing to remedy past discrimination (Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717), the Supreme Court became increasingly skeptical about the ability of courts to eliminate racially identifiable schools in urban areas.

The Court in Plessy v. Ferguson had distinguished between social rights, such as the right to ride on public transportation and the right to education, and civil and political rights, saying that the Constitution protected only the latter. Activist groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union would soon argue against that distinction. Eventually the idea of civil rights expanded to include the right against discrimination in employment, in housing, and in all places of public accommodation.

The Civil Rights Movement and New Legislation

The nonviolent civil rights movement, which had its beginning in the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955–1956 led by Martin Luther King Jr., received increasing national attention during the sit-ins and freedom rides of the early 1960s. Mass demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, also led by King, further heightened the urgency of African American demands and helped precipitate President John F. Kennedy's civil rights legislative proposals of June 1963. This legislation, including provisions regarding access to public accommodations, use of federal funds without discrimination, and equal employment opportunity, was signed into law on 2 July 1964, during the early months of President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration. It was the most far-reaching civil rights legislation since 1875.

The public accommodations title of the 1964 act, Title II, was similar in substance to the 1875 provisions struck down in the Civil Rights Cases; this time the legislation rested upon both the Commerce Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court in 1964 found the Commerce Clause fully adequate to sustain the public accommodations title (Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S., 379 U.S. 241, and Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U.S. 294).

Title VI, which prohibited discrimination in any federally assisted programs, was to prove instrumental in accelerating school desegregation during the Johnson administration. In particular, the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 provided funds of sufficient magnitude so that most school districts would be at a serious disadvantage should they lose federal assistance for failing to desgregate. Finally, Title VII created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which struggled for seven years before it was granted enforcement powers—that is, the ability to institute suits in federal courts to enforce U.S. laws against job discrimination.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed in the aftermath of black-led demonstrations, especially in Selma, Alabama, against discriminatory practices in voter registration in the South. This was the most sweeping voting rights legislation of the century, even though there had been antecedents in the civil rights acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964. The Voting Rights Act of 1970, in addition to being a five-year extension of the 1965 act, included provision for the eighteen-year-old vote in all elections. Before the year was over, the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court was invoked to test the constitutionality of the new minimum voting age provisions. Although the Court sustained them insofar as they pertained to federal elections, it held that the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause and enforcement clause did not authorize Congress to impose such a requirement in state and local elections. This necessitated the adoption of the Twenty-sixth Amendment, which lowered the minimum voting age to eighteen in all elections.

Of the major civil rights problems confronting the country, housing was the last to be dealt with by Congress. It was not until 1968, shortly after the assassination of King, that Congress—in a new Civil Rights Act—prohibited discrimination in the sale or rental of about 80 percent of the nation's housing, the major exceptions being owner-occupied dwellings with no more than four units and the sale or rental of private homes without the services of a real estate agent.

As the nation's largest minority, blacks have been in the vanguard of efforts to secure individual civil rights. However, the other large minority groups—Indians, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Asians—have been victims of the same types of discrimination. Unquestionably, the black revolution has had a salutary effect on the struggles of these minorities to actualize the civil rights guaranteed them by the Constitution. One example is the so-called Indian Civil Rights Act, a rider to the Civil Rights Act of 1968. In view of the anomalous position of the tribal governments of American Indians, the legislation was designed to ensure that tribal governments would be bound by the same limitations imposed by the Constitution on the federal and state governments.

Civil Liberties

The term "civil rights" has been associated with claims by racial minorities against racial discrimination. The term "civil liberties" refers to rights to political participation, particularly freedom of expression and in more recent years the right to privacy, held by every citizen. The scope of protection accorded civil liberties was relatively narrow until the 1960s, in part because the Supreme Court defined freedom of expression narrowly and in part because state infringements on civil liberties could not be challenged until the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment protected people against such infringements. By the late 1960s, however, the Court had developed a robust jurisprudence of civil liberties, insulating speech from punishment unless it threatened immediate social harm, guaranteeing citizens the right to conduct political demonstrations in public places, and protecting the right of privacy in connection with reproductive decisions. Later Court decisions refused to extend these protective doctrines significantly, but the Court's decisions had nurtured a culture of rights that placed political limits on what legislatures could do when addressing concerns that speech caused social harm.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abraham, Henry J., and Barbara A. Perry. Freedom and the Court: Civil Rights and Liberties in the United States. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Garrow, David J. Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality. New York: Knopf, 1975.

To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President's Commission on Civil Rights. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Post Office, 1947.

Urofsky, Melvin I. A March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Wilkinson, J. Harvie III. From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration, 1954–1978. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

MarkTushnet

HowardWhitcomb

See alsoBill of Rights in U.S. Constitution ; Busing ; Civil Rights Act of 1866 ; Civil Rights Act of 1957 ; Civil Rights Act of 1964 ; Civil Rights Act of 1991 ; Civil Rights Movement ; Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 ; Equal Protection of the Law ; First Amendment .

CIVIL RIGHTS

The March On Washington Movement

The modern civil rights movement has its origins in the early 1940s, as civil rights organizers used the Roosevelt administration's condemnation of the Nazis' racist ideology as an opportunity to accuse Roosevelt of being all too tolerant of racism in America. In January 1941, nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, A. Philip Randolph called for a massive 1 July March On Washington to shake up white America. As head of the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Randolph was a powerful labor leader who could mobilize the black masses in ways that middle-class organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) could not. The NAACP stressed legal action; Randolph urged direct action. The NAACP welcomed whites, while the March On Washington Movement (MOWM) excluded them, though not for racist reasons. While separatist in structure, the MOWM had integration as its goal. According to Randolph, "Negroes are the only people who are the victims of Jim Crow, and it is they who must…assume the responsibility to abolish it." If the administration wanted the support of blacks, said Randolph, it would have to offer blacks something other than maintenance of the status quo. The two principal demands put forward by the MOWM were withholding of defense contracts from industries that practiced discrimination and the desegregation of the armed forces and federal employment. On 25 June, facing political embarrassment as well as potential violence in the southern city of Washington, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which required that all government agencies, job-training programs, and defense contractors cease discrimination, while also creating a Fair Employment Practices Committee to investigate violations. Although the MOWM did not achieve all its goals, Randolph called off the march but announced that the nationwide MOWM committees would continue to function. Integration of the armed forces would have to wait. Many white Americans considered black Americans inferior to whites, and it was widely believed that whites would not fight alongside fellow citizens with darker skins than theirs. Both Secretary of War Stimson and Gen. George C. Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff, insisted that segregation had to remain in force for the sake of military morale. Nevertheless, a precedent had been established. The MOWM had proved that the threat of mass action, coupled with organizational unity, could get results. Most important, the success of the movement legitimized black leaders who insisted that the loyalty of black Americans rested on the nation's commitment to equality. Nothing less than the end of second-class citizenship would do. As one African American newspaper put it, "Only a fool would fight for continued enslavement, starvation, humiliation and lynching."

The Congress of Racial Equality

The NAACP was the oldest and best-known civil rights organization in the United States. Its methods centered on exposing problems, propagandizing about them, applying political pressure to elected officials, and using the courts. Many black organizers and their white allies felt these methods were too slow and ineffective. Emboldened by Randolph's direct-action approach, a group of pacifists founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1943. Hoping to promote acts of civil disobedience against discriminatory laws, they drew their inspiration from Mohandas Gandhi in India. Linking direct action to economic issues, CORE favored the tactic of the peaceful but disruptive sit-in, and in the 1940s it was able to desegregate theaters and restaurants in key northern cities such as Chicago and Detroit even though their demonstrations often promoted racial tension. CORE's philosophy and tactics would greatly influence Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Fair Employment Practices Committee

Critics adamantly denounced the FEPC, charging that it kowtowed to the "special interests" of blacks. In the overtly racist tone of the day, one Southern newspaper labeled it "dat cummittee fer de perteksun of Rastas and Sambo," while Sen. John Rankin of Mississippi said the FEPC heralded the beginning of a communist dictatorship. Major businesses refused to hire blacks or train them in skilled jobs. For example, the North American Aviation Corporation stated: "The Negro will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities.…Regardless of their training as aircraft workers we will not employ them." In the labor movement AFL unions continued to segregate black workers into the least-skilled jobs (when they could not exclude them from membership altogether). CIO leaders took up the cause of full job equality, but they had to overcome some rank-and-file opposition. Even FEPC Chairman Mark Ethridge stated that investigation of discrimination—not segregation per se—was the purpose of his committee. Thus, in the Deep South and in border cities such as Baltimore the committee accepted arrangements whereby blacks and whites remained at separate ends of plant facilities.

The Philadelphia Transit Strike

Yet, the FEPC scored a major victory for equal rights in dealing with the Philadelphia transit strike of 1944. In that city the Transport Workers Union had traditionally opposed training blacks as streetcar operators, but in March 1944—acting on instructions from the FEPC to cease discriminatory practices—new union leadership negotiated contracts that left out the usual discriminatory language. Many union members stated that a vote for the contract was "a vote to give your job to a nigger," and on 1 August they staged a walkout. The federal government sent the army to run the transit system, placing armed regular-army troops on the streetcars, while announcing that striking workers would either be drafted or denied unemployment benefits. The strike collapsed within forty-eight hours. A few blacks were trained almost immediately, and by mid August they were operating streetcars. Despite its moderation the FEPC made many political enemies. In summer 1945 Congress ordered the dissolution of the committee within the year, and President Truman failed in his efforts to make it a permanent federal commission.

Segregation and Prejudice Resurgent

The growing activism of black Americans alarmed both Southern Democrats, who opposed any concessions to blacks, and Northern liberals, who thought events were moving too quickly. Oswald Garrison Villard, one of the white founders of the NAACP, said: "I would not go too fast in enforcing social rights…age-long conditions of prejudice and of deliberate white supremacy cannot be cured by legislation or government fiat." The Memphis Cotton-Trade journal denied that any problems existed: "the Southern Negro is not mistreated. He has a care-free, child-like mentality, and looks to the white man to solve his problems and to take care of him." Rumors flew in the South, where it was believed that when white men were drafted, blacks would seize control of the region. In August 1942 Sen. John Bankhead of Alabama requested that blacks drafted from the North be trained only in northern army camps lest they infect Southern black soldiers with irreverent racial attitudes. Because Southerners played a central role in the Democratic coalition (as did blacks), one congressman reminded Roosevelt that the race issue could destroy the Democratic Party. In the midst of such acrimony race riots broke out in several northern cities during the war. The worst, in Detroit in 1943, was the outcome of a volatile mixture of Southern whites drawn to jobs in the automotive-defense industry and blacks recruited under directives from the FEPC.

Voting Rights

In the midst of this unrest the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1944 against all-white party primaries in the South. In eight Southern states such primaries had been designed to get around the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of voting rights. Earlier court decisions had maintained that political parties were private organizations, not subject to the amendment, but in Smith v. Allwright the court reversed itself (to severe denunciation in the South) and enfranchised about seventy-five thousand middle-class blacks below the Mason-Dixon Line. Many barriers to complete enfranchisement for blacks remained, however, including literacy tests and the poll tax, which effectively excluded impoverished blacks. Nevertheless, the wall of de jure segregation had been breached, however slightly.

The Segregated Armed Forces

Black Americans fought in all the nation's wars, though usually under segregated conditions. After World War I, however, a resurgence of Social Darwinism and Ku Klux Klan activity resulted in a virtually all-white military. Military authorities claimed that black troops had performed poorly in World War I, often justifying their conclusions by pointing to "the inherent psychology of the colored race and their need for leadership." Civil rights leaders countered that Jim Crow training facilities and discriminatory provisioning had left black soldiers at a deliberate disadvantage. In 1940 only ninety-seven thousand blacks were in uniform. Blacks were not allowed to join either the U.S. Army Air Corps or the U.S. Marine Corps. In the navy African Americans could serve only as mess men, while in the army segregated service units, called "plantation battalions" by black troops, were commanded by white officers. The handful of black officers were never assigned to white units. The army was a microcosm of the greater society, and calls for desegregation were decried by officials. As Secretary of War Stimson put matters: "What these foolish leaders of the colored race are seeking is at the bottom social equality."

The Impact of World War II on Race Relations

The greatest influence on the future of the civil rights movement was the service overseas of millions of black Americans. Although not expected to perform combat roles, most black army troops were given some infantry training, and the demand for manpower, coupled with the pressure of civil rights leaders, eventually led to the creation of all-black combat regiments. General Patton personally supervised the training of blacks in his tank corps. In the Battle of the Bulge, the critical winter campaign of 1944-1945 when the German counteroffensive almost stopped the American advance into Germany, black troops were called up en masse to plug the gaps. They played an important role during this battle, proving beyond any doubt that they were the equal of any other units. Black troops were also among the first to liberate some of the Nazi death camps. Yet despite these achievements, there was little effort made to recognize them. Indeed, segregation remained the rule even to the extent that blood plasma supplies were divided by race. White soldiers could not be transfused with "black blood" or vice versa, resulting in needless casualties. Nevertheless, African Americans returned to the United States infused with pride in their service. More important, they believed they were owed a debt. Having risked their lives for democracy, few would any longer accept second-class status and ride at the back of the bus. Around the country, black veterans organized local civil rights groups. A new generation of young blacks, tempered in the furnace of war, demanded that the Democratic Party make its promises of social justice meaningful to them.

Truman and Civil Rights

Though he came from Missouri, traditionally a segregationist state, President Truman was a Democrat who understood the importance of the black vote in the North. Black pluralities in major cities enabled him to carry key states in the election of 1948. He also understood that America's reputation on race did not carry well in the emerging states of Africa and Asia. In December 1946, after Congress refused to extend the FEPC as a permanent federal commission, he issued Executive Order 9809, setting up the President's Committee on Civil Rights, which called for an end to segregation in every aspect of American life. Unwilling to go that far, Truman nonetheless proposed major civil rights legislation in early 1948, asking Congress to pass federal laws protecting voting rights, punishing lynching severely, and abolishing the hated poll taxes, as well as creating a new FEPC and establishing a Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department with wide latitude to enforce the new laws. The program was ultimately eviscerated by powerful Southern Democrats in Congress. Archsegregationists, known as Dixiecrats, controlled key committee chairmanships in both houses of Congress. Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi claimed that Truman's bill proved "that organized mongrel minorities control the government." Ultimately, Southerners offered compromises that Truman could not accept. Their measures would have given antilynching jurisdiction to the states. Dixiecrats also offered to put the issue of the poll taxes to a constitutional amendment, knowing that since three-quarters of the states would have to approve, the issue was dead before it got started. Truman found himself thwarted at every turn, but he was able to bypass Congress to some extent in July 1948, when he issued executive orders eliminating discrimination in federal hiring and ending segregation in the armed forces, though it would take the Korean War to force the army to cooperate. The U.S. Supreme Court also began to make a few inroads for racial justice, opening avenues taken even more frequently in the 1950s. In 1948 the court ruled by a vote of six to zero in favor of the NAACP contention that state courts could not uphold discrimination in housing. The stage was being set for a full-scale reversal of the legal bases of racial separation.

Sources:

A. Russell Buchanan, Black Americans in World War II (Santa Barbara, Cal. & Oxford, U.K.: Clio, 1977);

Eric F. Goldman, A Rendezvous With Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (New York: Knopf, 1952; revised and abridged edition, New York: Vintage, 1956);

Ulysses Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, United States Army in World War II, Special Studies, no. 8 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, United States Army, 1966);

Howard Zinn, Postwar America, 1945-1971 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973).

Civil Rights. The concept of civil rights has changed dramatically since it first became a central idea in political discussions in the nineteenth century. Initially referring to a limited class of rights to which all people were entitled, the term has come to refer to a general guarantee against differential treatment in all areas of social life on the basis of what society deems to be an arbitrary grounds.

The Revolutionary War and Antebellum Eras.

The idea of natural rights played an important role in the Revolutionary War Era. Natural rights were those rights people enjoyed in a state of nature, independent of any organized society: the right to life and liberty and the right to attempt to procure property. Civil rights were the rights people possessed once they organized a society. The idea of civil rights came into its own during the abolitionist campaign against slavery. For abolitionists, one fatal characteristic of slavery was that slaves were denied civil rights. They could not own property, enter into contracts, or testify in court. These and a few other rights were what abolitionists understood to be civil rights. Typically the justification was that these rights distinguished organized—civil—society from the state of nature: People organized society so that they could have stable property holdings and secure contractual agreements, and a person's property and contracts could not be protected unless the person could testify about them.

Through the mid–nineteenth century, political activists and theorists sharply distinguished between civil rights, on the one hand, and political and social rights, on the other. Civil rights were associated with all organized societies, whereas political rights were rooted in the particular arrangements of specific societies. Abolitionists believed that freed slaves had a right to own property, but they did not think that emancipation automatically entailed the right to vote or to serve on juries. They could imagine societies in which voting played a small role and in which juries played no role at all; it followed, they believed, that the rights to vote and to serve on juries were political rather than civil rights. The point was perhaps clearest in connection with women, who generally had the right to own property and make contracts, but the view that women had the right to vote was far from the mainstream in the mid–nineteenth century.

The Reconstruction Era through the 1930s.

Congress's first venture into the area of protecting civil rights came with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, passed to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment's abolition of slavery. The act granted all citizens equal rights to sue and testify; enter into contracts; and purchase, sell, or inherit property. The act was adopted over President Andrew Johnson's veto, in which he expressed concern that the Thirteenth Amendment did not give Congress the power to enact it. In part because of that concern, Congress proceeded to propose, and the states to ratify, the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed “equal protection of the laws.” To the extent that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to place the 1866 Civil Rights Act on a secure constitutional footing, it protected core civil rights but did not deal with political rights such as the right to vote. The importance of the distinction was driven home by the perceived need to adopt the Fifteenth Amendment, securing the right to vote against efforts to restrict it on the basis of race.

The distinction between civil rights and political rights came under increasing pressure toward the end of the century. The Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment barred states from denying African Americans the opportunity to serve on juries (Strauder v. West Virginia, 1880). An amendment designed primarily to protect civil rights was thus interpreted to protect one of the central political rights. The increasing activism of woman‐suffrage advocates further strained the distinction between civil and political rights.

In contrast, the distinction between civil rights and social rights survived. In a sense, the category of social rights was simply residual: Everything not encompassed within civil or political rights implicated social rights. In part, the category identified the ways in which politically organized societies arranged their nonpolitical institutions. The Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), upholding a state statute mandating racial segregation on privately owned railroads, asserted that the statute's challengers were claiming that they had a right to associate with whomever they chose. But that claim was mistaken, the Court's holding implied, because the right to associate was a social right, subject to regulation by ordinary legislative decision‐making.

Advocates for African Americans continued to press the claim that racial segregation and discrimination denied their civil rights. The core of their claim was that civil rights were denied whenever race discrimination affected any activity that society deemed fundamental, including education and employment. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), organized in 1909, proved particularly effective in promulgating this broadened notion of civil rights, through political advocacy and support of legal challenges to segregation.

By the 1930s, the older distinctions among civil, political, and social rights had largely been obliterated. For the next decades, civil rights activists struggled to obtain legal protection for civil rights as they had come to be understood. Challenges to state‐mandated segregation culminated in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which repudiated the idea that education was not a civil right. During World War II, the national government created a Fair Employment Practice Committee, which attempted, without much success, to ensure that defense contractors refrained from discriminating in employment on the basis of race. Civil rights statutes enacted in 1957 and 1960 made modest efforts to overcome race discrimination in voting practices in the South.

The Era of the Civil Rights Movement and Beyond.

The full transformation of the idea of civil rights occurred in the 1960s. Civil rights acts adopted in 1964 and 1965 banned race discrimination in employment and in public accommodations such as restaurants and hotels and responded to persistent discrimination in voting by displacing the authority of southern states to adopt voter‐qualification standards. The effects of these two statutes were dramatic. Voter registration in the South expanded, and African Americans became important participants in politics there. Gains in employment were achieved more slowly, as employers resisted hiring and especially promoting workers they believed to be unqualified.

Beyond the 1960s, the idea of civil rights underwent further development. It expanded past the realm of race discrimination to include a significant number of other “protected” classes. Since the early twentieth century, some women's rights activists had pressed for a ban on gender‐based discrimination in employment. That proposal met with resistance from organized labor and from some other women's rights activists, who thought it important to ensure the survival of state laws that they believed protected women against exploitative employment practices. In part to divide the liberal coalition supporting the proposed Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Virginia representative Howard Smith introduced an amendment that would expand the coverage of the proposal's ban on employment discrimination to include discrimination based on gender. This portion of the 1964 act became one of the most important vehicles for gender equality over the following decade. Similar expansions of the notion of civil rights occurred as older Americans obtained protection in the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (1967), and the physically handicapped established their right to accommodation of their disabilities through the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) and other statutes. The list of protected classes continued to increase as gays and lesbians sought protection against discrimination in employment and housing.

By the late twentieth century, the expanded notion of civil rights had begun to develop new elaborations. From the early years of the civil rights movement, activists had divided over whether they sought treatment for African Americans as individuals or as members of a distinctive social group. In employment, this produced strategic divisions over whether to seek a legal regime of nondiscrimination or one of proportional hiring. The strategic disagreements mattered little until the civil rights movement began to succeed. After the adoption of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, however, the differences became important. Proponents of affirmative action and race‐conscious apportionment of election districts contended that their approaches were the best way to ensure that African Americans would obtain fair treatment and the resources to which they were entitled, and that they were effective ways of securing a stable, self‐determining African American community. Their opponents argued that race‐conscious approaches undermined the focus on individual rights that had been the hallmark of previous struggles for civil rights.

The expansion of the concept of civil rights generated concern among some observers. Critics suggested that the discourse of civil rights produced an escalation of rhetoric that made it increasingly difficult to reach accommodations among competing interests. Others expressed concern that the concept had come to cover such a wide range of social life that its moral force had become diluted. These concerns, plus persistent conflicts over affirmative action and continued efforts to claim civil rights by groups that believed themselves to be disadvantaged, ensured that the concept of civil rights would continue to evolve as a new century began.
See also Antislavery; Civil Rights Cases; Civil Rights Legislation; Constitution; Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement; Republicanism; Woman Suffrage Movement; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Hugh Davis Graham , The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960–1972, 1990.
Richard Kluger , Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality, 1976.
Daniel T. Rodgers , Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence, 1987.
Mary Ann Glendon , Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, 1991.
Andrew Kull , The Color‐Blind Constitution, 1992.

Mark Tushnet

Civil Rights And Civil Liberties

Affirmative Action

Since the 1970s many governments, businesses, and universities routinely used affirmative action policies in hiring and admissions to correct the lingering burdens of racism and gender discrimination. Beginning in the 1980s the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist, an opponent of affirmative action, began limiting such programs and making it harder to prove employment discrimination. In an effort to overrule the position of the Justices, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which voided some attempts by the Court to scale back laws and policies designed to redress prior discrimination. The statute, however, prohibited the use of quotas in hiring, promotions, and college admissions. In 1996 the Supreme Court refused to review a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Hopwood v. Texas that declared unconstitutional the race-based preference admissions system used by the University of Texas Law School. This ruling set a precedent by prohibiting separate standards for minority admissions. Affirmative action programs were also assaulted through the ballot. In California and Washington, initiatives limiting preferential hiring and race-based college admissions were adopted. In spite of strong opposition from civilrights and women's groups, California voters in 1997 passed Proposition 209, which proscribed state and local governments, public universities, and schools from giving preferential treatment to any individual on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. In 1998 Washington voters approved a similar measure, known as Initiative 200, which ended racial preferences, quotas, and "reverse discrimination" by any governmental agency in hiring or admissions. Opponents, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Boeing Corporation, contended that the anti-affirmative action initiative would reduce student diversity and limit opportunities for minorities. In 1998 a public opinion poll showed that 41 percent of Americans favored affirmative action programs. There was a sharp difference, however, in the opinions held by blacks and whites. Only 35 percent of whites supported the programs, as compared to 79 percent of blacks.

Religion in Public Schools

The "Establishment Clause" in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits Congress from establishing a national religion. For decades the courts have fluctuated on the issue of prayer in schools. In 1984 Congress passed the Equal Access Act, which barred public schools from discriminating against student groups that wanted to meet at school on the basis of their religion, politics, or philosophy. The law was challenged and reviewed by the Supreme Court in 1990. The Court upheld the law in Board of Education v. Mergens, declaring that the denial of a request by a Christian Bible club to meet in a public high school classroom violated the Act. In Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District (1993) the Court also held that any religious groups must be allowed the use of public school facilities after hours if that access was granted to any other groups. Further lowering the wall between Church and State, the Court ruled in Rosenberger v. University of Virginia (1995) that the failure of school administrators to fund a student magazine written by a fundamentalist Christian group while it provided money for nonreligious publications violated the First Amendment. Justice David Hackett Souter dissented, arguing that "The Court today, for the first time, approves direct funding of core religious activities by an arm of the state."

The Right to Die

Most states, by statute or court rulings, have forbidden assisted suicide. Dr. Jack Kevorkian, referred to by the media as "Dr. Death," brought the right-to-die issue to the political and judicial forefront by repeatedly assisting terminally ill patients in ending their lives. In 1990 the Supreme Court, in Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Healthy ruled against the parents of a young, brain-injured, comatose woman who wished to remove their daughter's feeding tubes. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Rehnquist refused to expand the rights of privacy and personal autonomy. The Court, however, did allow persons to withhold or terminate life-support measures if provisions were made in a "living will." Upholding several state laws, the Court declared in Vacco v. Quill (1997) that terminally ill persons did not have a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide. Many Americans were less willing to accept these decisions, and juries have repeatedly refused to convict Kevorkian or family members who have assisted individuals in taking their own lives.

Homosexual Rights

Most Americans remained uncomfortable with extending rights to homosexuals, as evidenced when President Bill Clinton attempted to lift the ban on homosexuals serving in the armed forces. After much debate, an agreement was reached among Clinton, military leaders, and Congress. The compromise was the "Don't ask, Don't tell" policy, which ended the questioning of military personnel about their sexual orientation, but barred service members from revealing their preference under threat of being discharged. The gay community, which strongly supported Clinton in his bid for the presidency, opposed what they viewed as the "hide and lie" policy. Nonetheless, Clinton refused to pursue the issue further. At the state level, homosexual-rights groups lobbied for antidiscrimination legislation with mixed success. Colorado voters in 1992 passed a state constitutional amendment that nullified several homosexual-rights ordinances. In 1996 the Supreme Court, in Romer v. Evans, struck down the Colorado amendment, the first time the Court had applied the Fourteenth Amendment to protect homosexuals from discrimination.

Same-sex Marriage

Controversy over same-sex marriages also erupted in the 1990s. The Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled in Baehr v. Lewin (1993) that a ban on homosexual marriage violated equal protection rights under the constitution of that state. The threat that Hawaii might possibly legalize same-sex marriage led more than half of the state legislatures in the country to pass measures barring recognition of such unions. In 1996 Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, which President Clinton signed. The "full faith and credit" clause of Article IV of the U.S. Constitution, however, leaves open the possibility of future challenges if states refuse to respect such marriages recognized in other states.

Medical Privacy

With the ever-expanding technological capabilities to disseminate information, such as through the Internet and various on-line computer networks, the privacy rights of Americans became difficult to protect. Confidential materials, such as medical records and personal information collected by state agencies, were increasingly violated. While most states protected the confidentiality of patient information, they seldom had up-to-date comprehensive health privacy laws. Although there were benefits to information technology, such as allowing physicians and researchers to diagnose and track diseases and the side effects of drugs more easily, as well as helping state and federal agencies uncover health insurance and Medicare fraud, the availability of patient information also led to abuses, such as the use of a patient's medical records to identify pre-existing conditions or other high-risk factors in order to exclude individuals from insurance coverages. Some feared that DNA profiling might reveal a person's genetic predisposition for developing certain diseases, which might be used to exclude them from medical coverage or hinder their ability to find employment. In order to provide more comprehensive protection of personal information, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) secretary Donna E. Shalala proposed in October 1999 the first-ever national standards to protect the privacy of medical records created by health care providers, hospitals, health plans, and health care clearinghouses that were transmitted or maintained electronically, as well as paper printouts.

Freedom of Expression

Advances in technology also created a new First Amendment problem. While the Supreme Court had ruled on obscenity laws in past decisions, the Internet made it easier to distribute allegedly obscene materials and images rapidly to millions of people, including minors. Concerned with the easy access that children had to computers and their possible exposure to obscene materials on-line, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act as part of the Telecommunications Reform Act (1996). The legislation assumed that the Internet was not the electronic equivalent to the printing press, and therefore does not merit the free speech protection of the First Amendment. Obscene materials were banned from the Internet, and the transmission of indecent speech and images to anyone under the age of eighteen was criminalized. In 1997 the Supreme Court overturned the law, in Reno v. ACLU, arguing that the statute was too broad and vaguely worded, thus violating free speech protections. Implicit in the decision was the view that the Internet was equivalent to the printing press and therefore protected from government regulation.

Miranda Challenged

On 6 December 1999 the Supreme Court announced that it would review the legal and constitutional basis for the Miranda v. Arizona (1966) ruling, focusing on whether Miranda warnings are rights based on the Fifth and Sixth Amendments or simply rules of evidence to prevent unfair treatment of prisoners. Miranda warnings grew out of the concern held by civilrights organizations and some courts that police officers were using mental and physical abuse to coerce confessions. Dickerson v. United States challenged Miranda as Section 3501, which was designed to tighten loopholes in Miranda by giving the courts the authority to decide on a case-by-case basis whether statements given by suspects in custody were voluntary and therefore admissible. The U.S. Justice Department and police departments nationwide routinely ignore the statute and, as a matter of course, give the Miranda warning to all suspects.

Sources:

Arthur Allen, "Exposed," The Washington Post, 8 February 1998.

Baehr v. Lewin, 74 Haw. 645, 852 P.2d 44 (1993).

George C. Edwards III, Martin P. Wattenberg, and Robert L. Lincberry Government in America: People, Politics, and Policy (New York: HarperCollins, 1996).

CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE CHURCHES

Preachers and Civil Rights

The goals of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s were achieved in large part by African-American preachers who led black southerners in a successful effort to secure the rights guaranteed to them in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. While the drive for this social revolution came from the black community, its success depended upon the support of whites at a time when the federal government had moved slowly to protect the rights of blacks in the South. A major factor in persuading whites to support these changes came from the ability of the civil rights workers to appeal to the religious and moral values of the nation.

Greensboro Demonstrations

In February 1960 white and black Americans were stunned by the sit-in demonstrations at the Woolworth's dime store's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, which students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College had organized spontaneously. Those demonstrations were not the first of this nature, and other groups in other cities were training themselves for the same goals. The Greensboro demonstrations triggered sit-ins by college students across the South. One such campaign was in Nashville, Tennessee, where Rev. James Lawson, a student at the School of Religion at Vanderbilt University, had been working with other black students on nonviolent protest techniques. The Nashville lunch counters were desegregated, but the president of Vanderbilt suspended Lawson, bringing charges of racism against that institution before Lawson was permitted to return and complete his degree.

EDITORIAL: "CHRISTIAN MORALITY
AND RACE ISSUES"

"The faith that renews itself at Easter is the ground of Christian morals; and Christian morals this year are deeply involved in racial issues.…[An] issue from the past is raised by that Broadway play The Deputy: Was Pope Pius XII false to his trust as Christ's vicar on earth when he failed to speak out against Hitler's campaign to exterminate the Jews? … Even when Negroes have all the legal rights Congress can give them, only the willingness of white Americans to treat Negroes on their merits as human beings will make those rights effective.…The race issue will not be solved until every American conscience is involved and clarified by its personal owner,"

Source:

Life, 56 (27 Mardi 1964): 4.

SNCC

The sit-ins of 1960 had some success. Many lunch counters were desegregated, although the separation of the races in public accommodations continued. More important than securing blacks the chance to drink coffee at Woolworth's was the creation in April 1960 of a new civil rights organization, SNCC, and a new vigor for the civil rights movement.

Freedom Rides

SNCC (pronounced "snick") became the advance guard of the movement, as it demonstrated in May 1961 with the Freedom Rides. A group of white and black volunteers with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) rode buses across the South to test the recent order of the Interstate Commerce Commission to end segregation in interstate travel. The riots that erupted in Birmingham, Alabama, brought an end to the first rides, but volunteers from Nashville, led by Rev. James Bevel and Diane Nash, carried the ride on to Montgomery, Alabama, where another riot erupted. The federal government was forced to intervene, and, in time, nonsegre-gated transportation in larger southern cities was established.

SCLC

As SNCC field representatives spread out over the South to organize communities for change, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), headed by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., but strongly supported by other black Baptist ministers, continued to focus national attention on the problems blacks faced in the South. Demonstrations took place in most major southern cities and even in large towns such as Albany, Georgia.

Progressive National Baptist Convention

Not all black Baptists followed King's leadership. In 1961 he was one of the leaders of the National Baptist Convention (NBC), the largest black denomination, who opposed the reelection of Rev. Joseph H. Jackson as president of the convention. Among other things, they believed Jackson was insufficiently committed to the aims of the civil rights movement. When Jackson won reelection, King was deposed as one of the NBC's vice-presidents. Others who opposed Jackson and agreed that Baptists should be more involved in social change left the NBC to form the Progressive National Baptist Convention.

Birmingham

King unquestionably was the most famous figure in the movement, attracting such publicity that the contributions of other activists both in the SCLC and in other movement organizations were obscured. Such a situation occurred in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, where Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, who had organized the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to give direction to the campaign in that city, failed to achieve his local goals in the momentous campaign. But the publicity that King brought to Birmingham and the inescapable evidence of violent racism there forced the Kennedy administration to commit itself to federal action to protect the rights of black southerners. Birmingham was a skirmish in the war for civil rights, which was won in Congress.

Local Involvement

As in Birmingham, the real work of the movement took place at the local level, where the churches offered places to meet and supplied committed leadership familiar with the local situation. Famously, as in the case of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham or Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama, churches were the stages for demonstrations. Because the churches were so important in this function, they became targets of racial hatred and were burned and blown up, as happened to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, where four young girls attending Sunday school were killed. Many small, obscure rural churches throughout the region were destroyed in the course of the struggle.

PREACHERS AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS
MOVEMENT

"The Funeral of Jonathan Myrick Daniels"

"At the church service in Keene [N.H.] …I realized how, in his own person, Jonathan brought together the freedom movement and the Christian church. In the face of a bitterness which ultimately denied him a memorial service in Selma's Episcopal parish itself, he had sought to be an instrument of reconciliation; he had love in the face of hate … Jonathan died quite literally a Christian martyr. His Christian faith and theology had led to his servanthood and his death.…

During the church service … there were only traditional hymns, but, after the interment, a group clasped hands near his grave in a quite spontaneous action and sang "We Shall Overcome.' "

Source:

Malcolm Boyd, Free to Live, Free to Die (New York: Holt, Rinchart & Winston, 1967), pp. 35-36.

Growing White Involvement

As the civil rights movement intensified in the early 1960s, more and more white clergy from the North joined the demonstrations in moral support. For the great set pieces of the movement, such as the March on Montgomery from Selma in 1965 or the Meredeth March in Mississippi in 1966, leading religious figures from around the country—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—flew to the site for at least an expression of support. Some paid heavily. Rev. James J. Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, was beaten by whites in Selma and died from his wounds. The following year Jonathan Daniel, a young student at the Episcopal Theological Seminary, was shot and killed in Lowndes County, Alabama. In both cases the killers were acquitted.

Racial Tensions in the Movement

By mid decade many young black activists were offended that the news media paid more attention to the deaths of white visitors than to the victims of the on-going brutality directed against the black community. White ministers from out-side the South seemed to bring more publicity than all the efforts of black ministers on the front lines. In their rage and frustration black activists began to move toward the black consciousness that became known as black power.

Attacking the North

By the middle of the decade the movement shifted to the North, where discrimination was embedded in society's institutions, housing patterns, and shared racial attitudes rather than in laws. King and the SCLC tackled Chicago, one of the nation's most segregated communities, although separation there was based on housing patterns rather than explicit laws. As usual the news media followed King and recorded the local racial resistance to his demands. The pattern of institutionalized racism was demonstrated in other northern cities, as in Minneapolis, where Fr. James Groppi lead a series of marches demanding open housing in the late 1960s. Racism was not a Southern monopoly.

The Aim of Religion

For many others in the North as well as the South, the activism of religious leaders such as Father Groppi seemed misplaced. This was particularly true among the laity who believed the responsibility of religion was to give support in this life and a chance at a better life in the hereafter. Many objected to the violence that came with the demonstrations, and others to the aims of the movement itself. Religion, as frequently happens, was a vital force for change and a foundation of resistance. But in the privacy of their homes many Americans still harbored segregationist views.

Sources:

Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years: 1954-1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988);

David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Morrow, 1986);

James Davison Hunter, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983);

Harold E Quinley, Prophetic Clergy: Social Activism Among Protestant Ministers (New York: John Wiley, 1974).

Civil Rights

CIVIL RIGHTS AND DIFFERENT TREATMENT OF INDIVIDUALS

CONSEQUENCES OF THE ABSENCE OF CIVIL RIGHTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The term civil rights refers to equal treatment for individuals under the law. Political scientists Morris Fiorina, Paul Peterson, D. Stephen Voss, and Bertram Johnson define civil rights as “embody[ing] the American guarantee to equal treatment under the law—not just for racial groups, as people often assume, but more generally” (2007, p. 381). Civil rights are related to, but distinct from, civil liberties and human rights. In the American context, civil liberties are the freedoms granted to citizens in the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. These include, among other things, the freedoms of speech, peaceable assembly, and religion; protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, forced self-incrimination, and cruel and unusual punishment; and, for criminal suspects, the rights to a trial by jury and to representation by an attorney. These protections derive largely from the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, all part of the Bill of Rights. Many other nations also grant both civil rights and civil liberties to their citizens through their constitutions or legislation.

Human rights are those rights that most scholars believe all human beings should have, regardless of which nation they live in. In 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declares that human rights include, among other things, rights to life, liberty, security, travel, property ownership, education, free thought and religion, work, rest, leisure, and an adequate standard of living. The declaration also prohibits governments from certain practices, including torture and arbitrary arrest and detention. Human rights, then, are conferred not by individual nations, but by virtue of being human. Human rights may also be more broadly defined to include some rights outside the reach of both civil rights and civil liberties.

CIVIL RIGHTS AND DIFFERENT TREATMENT OF INDIVIDUALS

Civil rights derive from the U.S. Constitution, specifically the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, which states that government cannot “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” In practice, government often draws distinctions between individuals, and the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits some, but not all, of these distinctions. When governments can treat people differently is a question often resolved by the courts. Some distinctions, such as race, are automatically suspect; the courts apply “strict scrutiny,” where government must demonstrate a “compelling state interest” and show there is no other way to pursue that interest. This test is very difficult to meet. In 1978 the Supreme Court prohibited a strictly race-based quota system for admitting students to the medical school at the University of California at Davis. In 1995 the Court prohibited a program that awarded municipal contracts to minority-owned firms on the basis of race.

Other distinctions, such as gender, receive “heightened scrutiny,” which is somewhat less demanding. Still, the courts often overturn government actions that treat men and women differently. In 1976 the Supreme Court overturned an Oklahoma law that established a drinking age of twenty-one for men but eighteen for women. And in 1996 the Court prohibited the state-run Virginia Military Institute’s policy of admitting only male students. Still other distinctions, such as age, are evaluated by the courts based on whether the government can show a “rational basis” for its action. For example, states seeking to place special restrictions on issuing driver’s licenses to people over seventy-five years old must only show that the state’s actions are reasonably related to promoting a legitimate government purpose. In short, the answer to the question “when can government treat individuals differently?” depends on the basis for classifying people.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE ABSENCE OF CIVIL RIGHTS

Civil rights are widely regarded as essential in democratic societies. The absence of civil rights would mean governments have few limits against enacting laws that enshrine unequal treatment by declaring some groups superior to others. American history provides many examples. The extreme racial segregation and discrimination against southern blacks between 1880 and 1965 resulted from the conviction among most southern whites that civil rights did not exist for blacks. Without civil rights, government could pass laws prohibiting blacks from holding certain kinds of jobs or requiring black and white schoolchildren to attend segregated schools, as many, mostly southern, states did before the Supreme Court prohibited segregated public schools in 1954. Without civil rights, government could not require that women be admitted to state-supported military academies, be allowed to practice the occupation of their choice, or even be allowed to hold checking accounts in their own name. Without civil rights, public buildings would not necessarily be accessible to the physically disabled, as the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act requires. Without civil rights, governments would be free to declare same-sex sodomy (but not opposite-sex sodomy) illegal—as Texas and several other states did before the Supreme Court overturned such laws in 2003. Without civil rights, governments could pass restrictive immigration laws targeting people of certain national origins, denying them entry.

Guarantees of civil rights, then, protect people based on race and ethnicity, but also other factors, including nationality, gender, disability status, and sexual orientation. The presence of civil rights protects citizens against discrimination by their government, and often, by private action. The absence of civil rights opens the door to group-based domination, discrimination, and oppression, and would raise serious doubts about any society’s claim of upholding “liberty and justice for all.”

SEE ALSO Black Power; Citizenship; Civil Disobedience; Civil Liberties; Civil Rights Movement, U.S.; Constitution, U.S.; Disability; Due Process; Equal Protection; Human Rights; Public Rights; Sexual Orientation, Social and Economic Consequences

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fiorina, Morris P., Paul E. Peterson, D. Stephen Voss, and Bertram Johnson. 2007. America’s New Democracy. 3rd ed., 2006 election update. New York: Pearson Longman.

United Nations. 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html.

U.S. Supreme Court. 1954. Brown v. Board of Education. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=347&invol=483.

U.S. Supreme Court. 1978. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=438&invol=265.

U.S. Supreme Court. 1995. Adarand Contractors v. Pena. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=u10252.

U.S. Supreme Court. 1996. United States v. Virginia. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=u20026.

U.S. Supreme Court. 2003. Lawrence et al. v. Texas. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=02–102.

Fred Slocum

civil rights rights that a nation's inhabitants enjoy by law. The term is broader than "political rights," which refer only to rights devolving from the franchise and are held usually only by a citizen, and unlike "natural rights," civil rights have a legal as well as a philosophical basis. In the United States civil rights are usually thought of in terms of the specific rights guaranteed in the Constitution: freedom of religion, of speech, and of the press, and the rights to due process of law and to equal protection under the law.

Civil Rights in the United States

Since the Civil War , much of the concern over civil rights in the United States has focused on efforts to extend these rights fully to African Americans. The first legislative attempts to assure African Americans an equal political and legal status were the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1870, 1871, and 1875. Those acts bestowed upon African Americans such freedoms as the right to sue and be sued, to give evidence, and to hold real and personal property. The 1866 act was of dubious constitutionality and was reenacted in 1870 only after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment . The fourth Civil Rights Act attempted to guarantee to the African Americans those social rights that were still withheld. It penalized innkeepers, proprietors of public establishments, and owners of public conveyances for discriminating against African Americans in accommodations, but was invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1883 on the ground that these were not properly civil rights and hence not a field for federal legislation.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1875 there was no more federal legislation in this field until the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, although several states passed their own civil-rights laws. The 20th-century struggle to expand civil rights for African Americans involved the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , the Congress of Racial Equality , the Urban League , the Southern Christian Leadership Conference , and others. The civil-rights movement, led especially by Martin Luther King , Jr., in the late 1950s and 60s, and the executive leadership provided by President Lyndon B. Johnson , encouraged the passage of the most comprehensive civil-rights legislation to date, the Civil Rights Act of 1964; it prohibited discrimination for reason of color, race, religion, or national origin in places of public accommodation covered by interstate commerce, i.e., restaurants, hotels, motels, and theaters. Besides dealing with the desegregation of public schools, the act, in Title VII, forbade discrimination in employment. Title VII also prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex.

In 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed, which placed federal observers at polls to ensure equal voting rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 dealt with housing and real estate discrimination. In addition to congressional action on civil rights, there was action by other branches of the government. The most notable of these were the Supreme Court decisions in 1954 and 1955 declaring racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional and the court's rulings in 1955 banning segregation in publicly financed parks, playgrounds, and golf courses (see Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans. ).

In the 1960s women began to organize around the issue of their civil rights (see feminism ). The federal Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, and by the early 1970s over 40 states had passed equal pay laws. In 1972 the Senate passed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) intended to prohibit all discrimination based on sex, but after failing to win ratification in a sufficient number of states, the ERA was abandoned. Since the 1970s a number of gay-rights groups have worked, mainly on the local and state levels, for legislation that prevents discrimination in housing and employment (see gay-rights movement ). In a further extension of civil-rights protection, the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) barred discrimination against disabled persons in employment and provided for improved access to public facilities.

Bibliography

See W. E. Nelson, The Fourteenth Amendment (1988); R. Berger, The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights (1989); L. W. Levy, Civil Rights (1989); T. Branch, Pillar of Fire (1997); F. M. Wirt, We Ain't What We Was (1997); A. Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000 (2001); D. McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001); C. Polsgrove, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement (2001); C. Carter et al., ed., Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941–1973 (2 vol., 2003); J. Rosenberg and Z. Karabell, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes (2003); J. Carrier, Traveler's Guide to the Civil Rights Movement (2004); N. Kotz, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America (2005); T. Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (2006); L. F. Litwack, How Free Is Free? The Long Death of Jim Crow (2009).

civil rights Rights which are recognized as belonging to all individuals in a society, which can be upheld by appeal to the law, and are not subject to arbitrary denial either by individuals or the state. They are usually defended in terms of the protection of the individual from the state, and subject to clear limits, themselves identified in relation to the rights of others or else the common good.

Although the idea of rights being embodied for citizens in legal doctrines was hardly new, it took on a new meaning in the twentieth century, as a result of the Civil Rights Movement. The distinctively modern form of civil rights is often dated from the American Civil War, after slaves gained the right to be free. It is embodied in the Civil Rights Legislation of the late twentieth century—such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the United States. The history of this legislation is discussed in M. Berger , Equality by Statute (1978)
. See also CITIZENSHIP; CIVIL SOCIETY.

Civil Rights Commission US federal commission that investigates complaints alleging that citizens are being deprived of their right to vote because of their race, colour, religion, sex or national origin, or, in the case of federal elections, by fraudulent practices. It appraises the laws and policies of the federal government and submits reports of its activities, findings and recommendations to the president and Congress.

http://www.usccr.gov

civ·il rights • plural n. the rights of citizens to political and social freedom and equality.

CIVIL RIGHTS

Slavery

From Segregation to Civil Rights

Women's Rights

Native American Rights