United States Commission on Civil Rights

views updated

United States Commission on Civil Rights


The Commission on Civil Rights was established as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Originally known as the President's Commission on Civil Rights, it was intended to be a temporary commission. The commission's purpose was to investigate complaints about voting rights infringement because of race, color, religion, or ethnicity; to compile information on the denial of equal protection under the law that could be used in further civil rights protection; to serve as a clearinghouse of information on equal protection in the United States; and to submit a final report and recommendations to Congress and the president within two years.

Of the first six commissioners appointed by the president and Congress, only one was blackJ. Ernest Wilkins, an assistant secretary of labor in the Eisenhower administration. The first chair was Stanley Reed, a former U.S. Supreme Court Justice who resigned almost immediately, citing "judicial improprieties" in the commission's charter. Reed was replaced by Dr. John Hannah, who served as chair until 1969. The commission, which had its mandate extended by the Civil Rights Act of 1960, served to focus attention on the U.S. government's responsibilities regarding civil rights. The commission was also a place to which African Americans could bring complaints about legislative and extralegal, violent attempts to keep them from voting. In February 1963 the commission issued Freedom to the Free, a report marking the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. It pointed out that while the problem in the South remained de jure segregation and discrimination, in the North it was de facto: "The condition of citizenship is not yet full-blown or fully realized for the American Negro. The final chapter in the struggle for equality has yet to be written." The commission's powers were enlarged and its existence extended by the 1964 Civil Rights Act to encompass investigation of allegations of denial of equal protection of any kind. Its two-volume report, Racial Isolation in the Public Schools (1967), pointed out increasing racial segregation in schools, especially in metropolitan areas, as whites left the cities for the suburbs, laying responsibility at the feet of housing discrimination as practiced by private citizens and local, state, and federal government. In 1969 Rev. Theodore Hesburgh of the University of Notre Dame, a noted liberal on civil rights and segregation issues, succeeded Hannah as chair.

During the busing crisis of the early 1970s, the commission reaffirmed the view that Congress had the responsibility for establishing a "uniform standard to provide for the elimination of racial isolation." It chided President Richard Nixon for being overly cautious about ending de facto segregation in the North in a 1970 report. Largely because of this, Nixon forced Chairman Hesburgh to resign in 1972 and replaced him with the more conservative Arthur S. Fleming the following year. The fifth report of the commission, released in November 1974, documented the failure of the government to fulfill its obligations to blacks in employment. The commission's term was extended by the Civil Rights Commission Authorization Act of 1978, as it had been previously extended every time its term was up.

During Ronald Reagan's administration, the commission became the stage for a debate about affirmative action. In 1980 it endorsed racially based employment quotas in a report titled "Civil Rights in the 1980s: Dismantling the Process of Discrimination." However, in 1981 President Reagan fired Chairman Arthur Fleming and replaced him with Clarence Pendleton Jr., an archconservative and the first African American to serve as chair; all subsequent chairpersons have also been African American. In 1983 Reagan dismissed three other commissioners because they were critical of his administration's civil rights policies. One of the dismissed members, noted African-American historian Mary Frances Berry, successfully sued the Reagan administration to retain her position on the board, citing the commission's loss of independence. Following several months of negotiations involving the administration, Congress, and the commission itself, a compromise was reached and the body was reconstituted as the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, with the president and Congress each appointing half the members, now numbering eight. More importantly, commissioners now had eight-year terms that could be terminated "only for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office."

In 1985 Chairman Pendleton declared that affirmative action programs should be ended and the commission ultimately abolished. The next year he proposed that minority contract setasides should be ended; the rest of the commission disagreed with him, as did the National Black Republican Council, so the plan did not go forward. During the George H. W. Bush administration, the debate over quotas continued. Pendleton died in 1988 and was replaced by William Barclay Allen, an African American, who was forced to resign in October 1989 following the disclosure that he had been arrested for kidnapping a fourteen-year-old girl in a child custody battle. The commission's authorization expired September 30, 1989, and the reauthorization process was an occasion for Congress to examine the body's composition and future. Its new chair, Arthur A. Fletcher, former executive director of the National Urban League, appointed in February 1990, vowed to be more active than his predecessors and to make the commission the nation's conscience once again. In August 1991 the commission issued its first significant report on discrimination on six military bases in Germany, and followed it six months later with a report on pervasive discrimination against Asians, based on barriers of language and culture. The Civil Rights Commission was stalled through much of the mid-1990s by a battle between the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress over Bill Lann Lee, a former Inc. Fund attorney who was appointed commission chair in 1995. When Congress filibustered on the nomination because of Lee's support for racial preferences, Clinton appointed Lee as a recess appointment.

In 2001 the Civil Rights Commission called for a probe of the 2000 presidential election, stating that thousands of African American voters had their votes rejected as a result of faulty voting machines in areas highly populated by African Americans.

See also Affirmative Action; Civil Rights Congress; Civil Rights Movement, U.S.; Politics in the United States

Bibliography

Blaustein, Albert P., and Robert L. Zangrando, eds. Civil Rights and the American Negro: A Documentary History. New York: Trident Press, 1968.

Lowery, Charles D., and John F. Marszalek, eds. Encyclopedia of African-American Civil Rights: From Emancipation to the Present. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Ploski, Harry A., and James Williams, eds. The Negro Almanac:A Reference Work on the African American, 5th ed. Detroit, Mich.: Bellwether, 1989.

alana j. erickson (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005

About this article

United States Commission on Civil Rights

Updated About encyclopedia.com content Print Article

NEARBY TERMS

United States Commission on Civil Rights