Teaching the Civil Rights Act of 1964

As is the case with most historical events, the key to teaching the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA) is context. The CRA by itself is simply a piece of congressional legislation—structurally complicated and textually byzantine. Still, the CRA was revolutionary in its purpose, scope, and impact. It is challenging, maybe even impossible, to teach the late twentieth century without a clear understanding of the CRA and its consequences. With this in mind, I focus here on how to place the CRA into its proper historical context while providing suggestions for supplemental materials that can assist in carrying out this task.

One of the most important things to communicate to students about the CRA is why it was needed. Why, by the mid-1960s, did Congress have to pass such sweeping legislation focusing not only on public acts of discrimination but also on private prejudice as well? For those teaching a class on legal, constitutional, or African American history, most of the background is familiar. The roots of the CRA lay in the failure of Reconstruction (1865–1877) and the unwillingness of the US Supreme Court, then and later, to give effect to the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. For those teaching a general US history class, an overview of these topics might be helpful.

In the 1870s, with the end of Reconstruction in sight, the Supreme Court—concerned with federal governmental overreach and largely unconcerned with the plight of the newly freed African American slaves—began a decades-long process of first curtailing and then undermining the equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. As early as 1873, in the Slaughterhouse Cases [83 U.S. 36 (1873)], the Court began to draw distinctions between federal rights (protected under the Fourteenth Amendment) and state rights (left unprotected by the amendment), thus limiting the amendment’s reach. In U.S. v. Cruikshank [92 U.S. 542 (1876)] and U.S. v. Reese [92 U.S. 214 (1876)] the Court denied the federal government authority to punish directly those who (within and outside the scope of government authority) assaulted African American civil rights. In The Civil Rights Cases [109 U.S. 3 (1883)], the Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which (much as the CRA did later) provided that "all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color." The Plessy v. Ferguson decision [63 U.S. 537 (1896)], which upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine, finished the Court’s demolition of the Fourteenth Amendment’s usefulness in protecting African American civil rights.

The major result of the Supreme Court’s actions was to allow the white South to impose Jim Crow segregation upon the region. And this is where context becomes important, because to understand the need for the CRA, students must understand what it meant to live in the Jim Crow South. When fully put into effect, Jim Crow segregation combined repressive government, racist cultural norms, and extralegal violence to shape not only political relationships between the races, but social and economic ones as well. At its heart, Jim Crow meant imposing absolute white control over the region’s African American population with the specific intent of keeping power in the hands of those who already had it (white southerners) and away from those who might make claims upon it (black southerners).

The outcome of such repressive efforts, formal and informal, was the eventual expulsion of African Americans from most aspects of southern public life. Black people could not vote or hold office. They were barred from riding on the same train cars as white people, and later they were exiled to the back of public buses. They were excluded from many of the services, amenities, and locales of everyday life—places to eat or sleep, good schools, adequate public transportation—that white southerners took for granted. Jim Crow also meant danger as black southerners who spoke out too loudly against the limitations imposed on their lives by segregation faced the daily threat of death by lynching or by police brutality.

To help students understand the severity of life under Jim Crow, a teacher might show them an excellent documentary such as The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till (2005) or the early episodes of Eyes on the Prize (1986).Two extremely effective works that teachers might present to their students on the realities of life under Jim Crow are James Baldwin’s indictment of racism in the United States, The Fire Next Time (Dial Press, 1963), or Ann Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (Dell, 1992). Pairing Baldwin’s and/or Moody’s books with documentaries or readings on the student sit-ins and freedom rides of 1960–1961 makes clear the practical necessities that prompted the call for a federal law that banned both governmental and private discrimination in public accommodations, government services, and interstate travel (Titles II, III, and IV of the CRA, respectively).

This, however, is only part of the story of the CRA. Titles IV and VI of the CRA also gave the federal government new powers to enforce integration of the nation’s public schools. To grasp the importance of this legislation, it is essential to go back to Brown v. Board of Education I [347 U.S. 483 (1954)] which declared "separate but equal" in education unconstitutional and especially Brown v. Board of Education II [349 U.S. 294 (1955)] which allowed enforcement of the Brown I ruling to progress at "all deliberate speed"—a phrase that Thurgood Marshall, lead lawyer for the NAACP in this case, described as meaning "S-L-O-W." The failure of the federal courts to implement desegregation in the South—brilliantly described by J. W. Peltason in his book, Fifty-Eight Lonely Men (University of Illinois Press, 1971)—demanded a legislative response if effective integration were ever to occur. Title IV of the CRA gave the federal government authority to intervene in these matters, and Title VI gave teeth to this intervention by denying federal funds to any government agency that discriminated based on race, color, or national origin—a coercive power that the federal government lacked in its relations with state and local governments prior to the CRA’s enactment.

To emphasize the significance of Title VII, one of the most impactful elements of the CRA, teachers should make their students aware of the pervasive job discrimination that African Americans regularly suffered. Where blacks could even find work, they were regularly paid less than whites, were limited in the types of jobs they were allowed to do, and often were victims of the "last to be hired, first to be fired" syndrome. Useful here as an example of the practical realities of life under Jim Crow is Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (Signet, 1952), in which the narrator faces the near-impossibility of finding a job. Title VII is also unique in that, unlike the other sections of the Act, it explicitly includes gender under its enforcement provisions. Given the long history of gender-based discrimination in America, some have speculated that the stipulation of gender equality in Title VII was a "poisoned pill" intended to ensure the defeat of the CRA. Well into the twentieth century, women, like African Americans, faced laws, rules, and cultural norms that limited their employment options to a small number of low-paying "women’s jobs." The labor needs of World War II—during which large numbers of women entered the industrial workforce for the first time—changed this pattern for a time, but by the end of the 1950s women again faced significant job discrimination. In fact, to the surprise of those tasked with enforcing Title VII of the CRA, fully one-third of all cases filed in the first year of the CRA’s enforcement were cases of gender-based discrimination.[1]

Both Titles I and Title VIII addressed African American disenfranchisement. A large topic in and of itself, the history of African American vote denial parallels the experiences of living under Jim Crow. One of the keys to enforcing segregation was the explicit denial of a political voice to the black community. Since the 1890s, the white South increasingly disenfranchised African American voters through a multi-layered mix of formal laws, semi-formal policies, and informal voter intimidation. A good summary of these efforts and their effects appears in chapters two and three of my document book, The Supreme Court and Elections (CQ Press, 2009). In particular, documents 3.11 (an appendix from an Alabama voting rights case in which the judge describes the difficulties in registering black voters) and 3.12 (a discriminatory 1965 Alabama voter registration test) give dramatic examples of how hard it was to combat race-based disenfranchisement. Unique among the provisions of the CRA, the statute’s voting-rights requirements proved less than revolutionary in their impact. In fact, the voting rights elements of the CRA are now mostly regarded as a prelude to the much more effective Voting Rights Act of 1965. Still, in recognizing the failures of the CRA with regard to voting rights, and the reasons why these efforts failed in the face of entrenched white southern intransigence, we realize how revolutionary—and effective—the other elements of the CRA were.

This brings us to the last contextual element to understanding (and teaching) the CRA: its impact. Space precludes going into full detail as to the CRA’s practical effects over the last fifty years. However, from the end of explicit job discrimination to school integration to the prohibition of private discrimination in public accommodations, the CRA helped change the ways in which Americans live their daily lives. Though many problems of race and gender discrimination still exist, the formal elements of that discrimination—so prominent before the enactment of the CRA in 1964—are now largely gone. By contrasting the conditions of everyday life today with those of fifty years ago, we can make clear to our students the impact of the CRA on American society. At the very least we can provide them a useful basis on which to evaluate the role of the CRA in American history and law.

Charles L. Zelden is Professor of Constitutional History, Law, and Politics at Nova Southeastern University. His most recent book is Thurgood Marshall: Race, Rights, and the Struggle for a More Perfect Union(Routledge, 2013).