Civil Rights Act of 1957 71 Stat. 634
CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1957 71 Stat. 634
Although this law marked the end of an eighty-two-year period of congressional inactivity in the field of civil rights, it accomplished little. The act created the civil rights commission but granted it only investigative and reporting powers. The act also created a separate civil rights division within the Department of Justice to be headed by an additional assistant attorney general. More substantively, the act made it unlawful to harass those exercising their voting rights in federal elections and provided for federal initiation of proceedings against completed or potential violations. Offenders receiving more than slight penalties were entitled to trial by jury, a watering-down provision inserted by Senate opponents.
The act is as significant for important deletions from the original bill as for what was ultimately enacted. Southern senators managed to eliminate a provision authorizing the attorney general to seek injunctive relief against all civil rights violators, a provision opponents feared would enhance the federal presence in school desegregation disputes and one they characterized as reimposing Reconstruction on the South. The emasculated act was viewed as a victory for southern segregationists. It was not even worth a filibuster.
Theodore Eisenberg
(1986)
Bibliography
Brauer, Carl M. 1977 John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction. New York: Columbia University Press.