Civil Rights Act of 1964

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Civil Rights Act of 1964

United States 1964

Synopsis

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most significant piece of civil rights legislation since the Civil War, bans discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, and gender in the areas of public accommodation, federally funded programs, and employment. The act created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce the employment provisions of the act.

Timeline

1944: Allies land at Normandy on 6 June, conducting the largest amphibious invasion in history.
1949: Soviets conduct their first successful atomic test. This heightens growing cold war tensions, not least because the sudden acquisition of nuclear capabilities suggests that American spies are passing secrets.
1954: The French military outpost at Dien Bien Phu falls to the communist Vietminh. France withdraws after decades of trying to suppress revolt; meanwhile, the United States pledges its support for the non-communist government in the south.
1959: Two new leaders appear on the scene in January as General Charles de Gaulle becomes the first president of France's Fifth Republic, and Fidel Castro takes control of Cuba after the collapse of the corrupt Batista regime.
1962: Publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring heightens Americans' awareness of environmental issues.
1964: On 7 February, in the midst of both a literal and figurative winter in America following Kennedy's assassination, the Beatles arrive at New York's newly renamed JFK Airport. The enthusiasm that greets them is partly the result of a clever marketing campaign—one of the first of its kind—but it also has a great deal to do with the sheer talent and charm exerted by the four. In their 9 February Ed Sullivan Show performance, they break a record set seven years earlier by their idol Elvis Presley, with 70 million viewers, or roughly 60 percent of the U.S. audience.
1964: In Mississippi, civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Cheney are murdered. Twenty-one conspirators are arrested, and seven are convicted by a federal jury.
1964: U.S. Congress approves the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, giving President Johnson broad powers to prosecute the by now rapidly escalating war in Vietnam.
1967: The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band tops the list of releases for a year that will long be remembered as a high point of rock history. Among the other great musical events of the year are releases by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Doors, and Jefferson Airplane; also, the Monterey Pop Festival marks the debut of Hendrix and Janis Joplin.
1968: The Reverend Martin Luther King is assassinated on 4 April. Senator Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated on 6 June.
1969: On 20 July, assisted by pilot Michael Collins, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin become the first men to walk on the Moon.
1974: On 30 July, the House Judiciary Committee adopts three articles of impeachment for President Nixon, but rather than undergo a lengthy trial, Nixon on 8 August becomes the first president in U.S. history to resign. His successor, Gerald Ford, pardons him in September.
1979: After years of unrest, the Shah of Iran leaves the country, and Islamic fundamentalist revolutionaries under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini take control. Later in the year, militants seize control of the U.S. embassy in Teheran and take more than 50 Americans hostage.

Event and Its Context

Origins of the Civil Rights Act

The Civil Rights Act emerged as the result of four principal factors. The first was the economic plight of African Americans, who historically had been underrepresented in professional fields and even in jobs that required little or no education. In 1964 the median income of black families was half that of white families, and blacks were only half as likely as whites to work in white-collar jobs as opposed to blue-collar and service jobs.

The second factor was the civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, which pricked the conscience of the American public. Television brought into American living rooms the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, which had been sparked by Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger; the sit-ins led by students at North Carolina A&T College to protest segregation at lunch counters in that state in 1960; the 1963 clashes between civil rights demonstrators and police, who brutally dispersed crowds with dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama; the 28 August 1963 March on Washington, where 200,000 participants gathered for Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech; and, that same year, the federalization of the Alabama National Guard to thwart Governor George Wallace in his effort to block the enrollment of African Americans at the University of Alabama. In response to these momentous events, President John F. Kennedy, who had earlier been lukewarm in his support for civil rights legislation, appeared on national television on 11 June 1963 to make an "appeal to conscience" to the American people and urge the passage of a civil rights law. A week later he sent a sweeping civil rights bill to Congress, legislation that went far beyond bills introduced in 1957 and 1960.

The third factor leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act was Kennedy's death at the hands of an assassin on 22 November 1963. In the minds of many Americans, including his successor, Lyndon Johnson, a civil rights bill would be the most fitting eulogy to the slain president—which leads to the fourth factor, the political conversion of Johnson. As Senate majority leader from Texas, Johnson had joined many southern members of Congress to oppose civil rights legislation. Indeed, during the Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act, many of Johnson's words would be thrown back in his face. It may never be clear whether Johnson, ever the consummate politician, just wanted to be on the right side of a change that he saw as inevitable, or whether he had a genuine change of heart; ultimately the distinction may be unimportant. What is important is that Johnson became an avid supporter of civil rights, declaring in his first state of the union address, "Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined."

The Congressional Debate

Passage of the Civil Rights Act was complex. The Senate debate lasted 80 days and filled 7,000 pages with 10 million words in the Congressional Record. This included the longest filibuster in Senate history and occasioned the rare invocation of an obscure Senate procedure called cloture, which put an end to the filibuster and limited debate.

Debate on President Kennedy's bill began in the House of Representatives on 31 January 1964. House leaders from both parties were determined to pass the bill, so they curtailed debate and strong-armed it through on 10 February by a vote of 290 to 130. The bill's first real hurdle should have been the Senate Judiciary Committee, but the committee's chairman, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, was an opponent of civil rights legislation. To bypass the committee, from which the bill might never have emerged (confirming Woodrow Wilson's wry view that in going to committee, a bill crossed "a parliamentary bridge of sighs to dim dungeons of silence whence it will never return"), Democratic senator Mike Mansfield of Montana introduced it directly to the floor of the Senate. Mansfield's motion met vigorous opposition, even from many supporters of the bill, who squirmed at the notion of violating procedure. The motion, however, passed, and the bill was placed on the Senate's calendar. To ensure bipartisan support, Democrat Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the majority whip, and Republican Thomas Kuchel of California, the minority whip, managed the process. Additionally, detailed discussion on the floor of each piece of the bill was assigned to pairs of Democratic and Republican senators.

Predictably, the bill met stiff opposition from most southern senators, who filibustered it. In an unusual move, supporters took part in the filibuster, presenting their case for the bill, interrupting their opponents, and even sharply questioning them. To break the filibuster, Senate leaders concluded that they had to recruit the support of minority leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who had reservations about some provisions of the bill. Accordingly, the leadership, with the help of the U.S. attorney general and other members of the Justice Department, negotiated the so-called Mansfield-Dirksen substitute, a compromise bill that softened the House version (by, for example, giving state agencies the opportunity to act before the federal government in cases of employment discrimination) but retained its most crucial features. In the debate that followed the introduction of the substitute bill, southern senators introduced amendment after amendment, all but two of which were defeated. They also called for a record 34 roll-call votes in one day. Their rear-guard action was futile, however, and the Senate overwhelmingly voted to replace the House bill with the Mansfield-Dirksen substitute. On 19 June the Senate passed this version of the bill by a vote of 73 to 27 and then sent it back to the House. With little debate or fanfare the House, by a vote of 289 to 126, passed the Senate version of the bill. President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law the same day, 2 July 1964.

The Major Provisions of the Civil Rights Act

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 consists of 11 titles, the most important of which are Titles II, VI, and VII.

Title II bars discrimination in places of public accommodation, as did the Civil Rights Act of 1875; the earlier act, however, depended for its enforcement powers on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Although the amendment guaranteed citizens due process and equal protection under the law, the courts in intervening years had interpreted it to apply only to state action, not to the actions of private citizens or individual business enterprises. In contrast, the teeth of Title II was the power of Congress to regulate commerce granted in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which the courts had been interpreting expansively in recent years. Under Title II, Congress could extend to private action its authority to prohibit discrimination.

Title VI relies on the taxing and spending power of Congress to ban discrimination in federally funded programs. To labor, the most important part of the Civil Rights Act is Title VII, which prohibits discrimination in employment practices byemployers, labor unions, and employment agencies based on race, color, religion, national origin, or gender in any industry that affects commerce. Past efforts to eliminate employment discrimination had been piecemeal and ineffective. In 1941 President Franklin Roosevelt, by executive order, created the Fair Employment Practice Committee to combat job discrimination by defense contractors. In 1948 President Harry Truman, again by executive order, created the Fair Employment Board within the Civil Service Commission to promote equal opportunity in federal employment. Johnson himself established the Office of Federal Contract Compliance in the Department of Labor with the goal of putting an end to racial discrimination at the work sites of contractors and subcontractors performing federally funded projects. These efforts, however, tended to be more symbolic than substantive. The Civil Rights Act was the first effort by Congress to bring to bear the full power of the federal government to enforce equal opportunity in employment throughout the economy. Like Title II, Title VII relies on the commerce clause to regulate the actions of private employers rather than being bound by the state action limitation implicit in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Congress vested authority for enforcing Title VII in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which began operations on 2 July 1965. In addition, the EEOC enforces the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the Civil Rights Act of 1991. With over 2,500 employees in 50 field offices and a budget of approximately $300 million, the EEOC for the 10 years ending with fiscal year (FY) 2001 received an average of just over 59,000 complaints a year, about half of which were found to be without cause. Generally, charges are filed by individuals who believe they have been the victim of discrimination, but individual commissioners can initiate charges. Until 1972 the EEOC had to refer discrimination cases to the U.S. Justice Department, but the law was amended that year to enable the commission itself to bring suit in federal court against employers for violations of the act. Over the same 10-year period, the commission litigated an average of 226 Title VII suits per year; resulting monetary benefits ranged from $7 million in FY 1993 to a peak of $95 million in FY 1997. Generally, the commission's purpose is to resolve cases that have merit through conciliation and alternative dispute resolution. In FY 1992 the commission awarded monetary benefits of $52.5 million, but by FY 2001 that figure had risen to $141.1 million.

The Role of the Courts

As early as the 1940s, the U.S. Supreme Court had heard cases involving employment discrimination. In Steele v. Louisville and Nashville Railroad (1944), for example, the Court prohibited unions from practicing racial discrimination, and in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. (1968) it relied on the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to affirm that both blacks and whites have an equal right to contract for work. The Court, however, heard relatively few such cases because whatever protections existed for workers were generally based on state statute, not on the Constitution or federal law.

In the late 1960s the Warren Court allowed lower courts to interpret the 1964 act, but by the early 1970s employment discrimination cases were making their way to the Supreme Court and providing important early tests of the legality not only of the act but of actions taken to implement it. Perhaps one of the most important decisions reached by the Court, then led by Chief Justice Warren Burger, was in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. in 1971. African American employees at the Duke Power Co. in North Carolina challenged the company's requirement that both new hires and employees seeking a transfer must have a high school diploma or score a passing grade on an intelligence test. Title VII prohibits any employment practice that discriminates on the basis of race. The power company's requirements adversely affected the employment opportunities of blacks, who faced discrimination in the state's public schools and who graduated from high school at a rate about one-third that of white students. More importantly, the company could not demonstrate a relationship between either the diploma or scores on the intelligence test and job performance. In ruling against the company, the Court noted that employment practices that seem neutral on their face, like those of Duke Power, may have discriminatory effect. Thus, the employees did not have to prove that the intent of the company was to discriminate, only that the consequences of its actions were discriminatory. With regard to diplomas and intelligence tests, the Court concluded that "the touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited."

Two years later, in 1973, the Court ruled in McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green that under Title VII job applicants can make a prima facie case for discrimination by showing that they are members of a racial minority, were denied the job despite adequate qualifications for it, and that the position remained open while the employer sought other applicants with the same qualifications. The Court refined this doctrine in Hazelwood School District v. United States (1977), when it held that a prima facie case of discrimination can be made if a statistical comparison of the racial makeup of an employer's workforce, in this case a school faculty, shows an obvious imbalance relative to the racial makeup of the community that supplies that workforce.

Other cases involving the legality of seniority systems had important consequences for labor unions. In International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. United States (1977), the Court ruled that a valid seniority system did not violate Title VII, even if the effect of the system is to perpetuate past discrimination against minority truck drivers. In Firefighters Local Union No. 1784 v. Stotts (1984) the Court was asked to deal with the collision of seniority systems with affirmative action programs. The Court found that the fire department in Memphis, Tennessee, had violated Title VII, and under court order it instituted an affirmative action plan to hire and promote more blacks to remedy past discrimination. When the city later faced a severe budget deficit, it planned to balance the books by laying off city employees with the least seniority. Stotts, a black firefighter who would have lost his job, filed suit in district court, which enjoined the fire department from adhering strictly to its seniority system. The union appealed to the Supreme Court, and the Burger Court lifted the injunction and once again upheld the legality of a seniority system: "Title VII protects bona fide seniority systems, and it is inappropriate to deny an innocent employee the benefits of his seniority in order to provide a remedy in a pattern or practice [discrimination] suit such as this."

Several other early cases involved affirmative action plans, particularly quotas. One, perhaps the most significant, was United Steelworkers of America v. Weber (1979). The Kaiser Aluminum Corporation and the United Steelworkers, in an effort to head off litigation by black employees, voluntarily negotiated an affirmative action plan to correct a gross imbalance in the number of black skilled craftsmen at a Louisiana plant. The program allotted half the slots in a craft training program to blacks until the imbalance was corrected. Weber, who was white, was denied a slot in the training program and filed suit, arguing that he was the victim of racial discrimination under Title VII, which provided that an employer could not be "required" to give preferential treatment to a racial group because of a racial imbalance in the workforce. Weber won in federal court, but the Burger Court overruled the lower court and upheld the legality of the company's affirmative action program. In reaching its decision, the Court noted that the program was not "required," that it was a voluntary program to eliminate segregation. The Court further noted that the legislative history of the act made clear Congress's intent to allow employers to adopt local, voluntary means to improve the economic condition of minorities: "It would be ironic indeed if a law triggered by a Nation's concern over centuries of racial injustice … constituted the first legislative prohibition on all voluntary, private, race-conscious efforts to abolish traditional patterns of racial segregation and hierarchy."

Key Players

Burger, Warren (1907-1995): Burger was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. He left the practice of law when President Eisenhower named him assistant attorney general (1953-1955) and then appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals (1956-1969). President Nixon appointed him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1969, where he served until 1986.

Dirksen, Everett (1896-1969): Dirksen was born in Pekin, Illinois. He served as an Illinois Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives (1933-1951) until election to the Senate, where he rose to Republican whip in 1957 and Republican leader in 1959. He served in the Senate until his death.

Humphrey, Hubert (1911-1978): Humphrey was born in South Dakota and began his career as a pharmacist. He was mayor of Minneapolis (1946-1949) and a Democratic U.S. senator (1949-1964). In 1964 Lyndon Johnson chose Humphrey as his running mate, and he served as vice president until 1969. In 1968 he narrowly lost the presidential election to Richard Nixon.

Johnson, Lyndon Baines (1908-1973): Johnson, born in Stonewall, Texas, entered Democratic politics when he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1937, where he served until he was elected to the Senate in 1950. He rose to Democratic whip and Senate majority leader until John Kennedy chose him as his vice-presidential running mate in 1960. He assumed the presidency on Kennedy's death in 1963 and was reelected for one term in 1964. His exemplary record in civil rights was undermined by the escalating war in Vietnam, and he chose not to seek reelection in 1968.

Mansfield, Michael (1903-2001): Born in New York City but raised in Montana, Mansfield left a faculty position at Montana State University to serve as a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives (1943-1953), then in the Senate (1953-1977), where he was an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. President Jimmy Carter appointed him Ambassador Extraordinaire and Plenipotentiary to Japan (1977-1988).

Bibliography

Books

Burstein, Paul. Discrimination, Jobs, and Politics: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity in the United States since the New Deal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

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

Modjeska, Lee. Handling Employment Discrimination Cases.Rochester, NY: Lawyers Co-operative Pub. Co.; San Francisco, CA: Bancroft-Whitney Co., 1980.

Schwartz, Bernard. Statutory History of the United States: Civil Rights, Part II. New York: Chelsea House, 1970.

Sovern, Michael. Legal Restraints on Racial Discrimination in Employment. New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1966.