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Standard and Short Edition:
1 American Political Culture
2 The Founding and the Constitution
3 Federalism
4 Civil Liberties
5 Civil Rights
6 Public Opinion
7 The Media
8 Political Participation and Voting
9 Political Parties
10 Campaigns and Elections
11 Groups and Interests
12 Congress
13 The Presidency
14 Bureaucracy In A Democracy
15 The Federal Courts
16 Government and Economy
17 Social Policy
18 Foreign Policy and Democracy
Texas Edition:
19 The Political Culture, People, and Economy of Texas
20 The Texas Constitution
21 Parties and Elections in Texas
22 Interest Groups, Lobbying, and Lobbyists
23 The Texas Legislature
24 The Texas Executive Branch
25 The Texas Judiciary
26 Local Government in Texas
27 Public Policy in Texas

Chapter 5: Civil Rights

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The Struggle for Civil Rights

In the United States, the history of slavery co-exists uneasily with a strong tradition of liberty. Indeed, for much of our history, Americans have struggled to reconcile exclusionary racial practices with our notions of individual rights.

I. The struggle for Civil Rights

  • Minorities, especially African Americans, have been denied full citizenship rights for the vast majority of our history.
  • Subjugation of blacks was deeply ingrained in the Southern culture and economy.
  • In 1848, radicals such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, called a convention in Senaca Falls, New York to promote women’s rights.
    • Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions -- “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”
    • The women were ridiculed, but their efforts helped end slavery.
    • Also, within a year of the convention, the New York legislature did pass a law that allowed married women to own property

II. What is the legal basis for civil rights?

  • The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified shortly after the end of the Civil War and, combined with the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, seemed to guarantee civil rights to the newly freed slaves.
  • “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
  • Discrimination refers to the use of any unreasonable and unjust criterion of exclusion.

III. How has the equal protection clause historically been enforced?

  • After the Civil War, the US government, dominated by the Republican Party, forced the Democratic-dominated South to allow blacks civil rights. 
    • Many African Americans voted and even won office in the years immediately after the Civil War.
    • Republicans eventually dropped their support for Civil Rights and the white Southerners began to persecute and terrorize the black population under a system we refer to as “Jim Crow.”
  • The U.S. Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional on the grounds that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to the states and not to private businesses.

IV. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that state segregation statutes were constitutional as long as the states followed the “separate but equal doctrine.”

  • In response to the Plessy decision, W.E.B. Dubois and others set up the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to try to chip away at Plessy.
  • In 1938, the Supreme Court rejected a Missouri plan that paid for qualified black students to attend law schools out of the state rather than admit the students to the all-white University of Missouri Law School.
  • In 1950, the Supreme Court found that the University of Texas Law School failed to comply with the separate but equal doctrine and ordered the admission of a black student to the all-white law school
  • The Supreme Court also struck down the practice of holding white primaries and ruled against “restrictive covenants,” which forbid homeowners from selling their homes to non-whites or non-Christians.
  • The NAACP was so successful in its criticism of discrimination, that President Truman desegregated the military after World War II.

V. What is the critical Supreme Court ruling in the battle for equal protection?

  • In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court reversed its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson and struck down segregation in public schools.
  • The Brown decision resulted in showdowns between federal and state authorities throughout the South (i.e., school busing, federal control of local school districts).
  • Southern states put up massive resistance to the Brown ruling, with some states even threatening to close any schools that agreed to end segregation.
  • Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas illustrates the tensions in the aftermath of the Brown decision
  • Ten years after Brown v. Board of Education, fewer than 1% of black schoolchildren in the Deep South attended schools with whites

VI. How has Congress tried to make equal protection a reality?

  • The Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960  were attempts to bolster the protections guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment
  • However, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most important because it put teeth in previous laws and prohibited discrimination in the operation of businesses.
  • The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to increase minority participation in the democratic process, yet problems in the 2000 election demonstrate significant problems still exist.
  • The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was enacted to prevent discrimination in the sale and rental of housing.

VII. In what areas did the civil rights legislation seek to provide equal access and protection?

  • Public accommodations – The 1964 Civil Rights Act was key in removing some of the most visible forms of discrimination.
  • School desegregation—The 1964 act ordered the federal government to withhold federal money from any state or local government that discriminated.
  • Employment –The 1964 act also used Congress’ constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce to ban discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
  • o Proving employment discrimination is extremely difficult, since employers rarely admit discrimination.
  • Voting rights – The 1965 Voting Rights Act was important because it banned literacy tests and provided federal monitoring of voting registration in areas that had a record of discrimination; however, the 2000 election problems in Florida illustrate that blacks still face obstacles to voting.
  • Housing—In 1968, Congress passed a law that banned discrimination in the sale and renting of housing, but some discrimination still persists.

 

The Universalization of Civil Rights

I. What groups were spurred by the provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing discrimination in employment practices based on race, religion, and gender, to seek broader protection under the law?

  • Other groups took advantage of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination not just on the basis of race, but also on the basis of sex, religion and national origin.  Age discrimination was later banned, but the federal government still allows discrimination against homosexuals, although some states have banned it.
  • Women, like African Americans, were excluded from political life until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920.
  • Despite active involvement in the abolition and suffrage movements, women were politically marginalized until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
  • Title VII provided a valuable tool for the growing women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s.
  • The National Organization of Women (NOW) unsuccessfully pushed for an equal rights amendment to the Constitution.
  • Title IX of the 1972 Education Act was extremely important in forcing schools to stop sexual harassment and to provide more opportunities for women’s athletics.
  • However, it was not until 1996 that the Supreme Court banned discrimination against women in all-male publicly-funded academies (in cases regarding VMI and the Citadel).
  • In 1986, the Supreme Court took a strong stand against sexual harassment, prohibiting both “quid pro quo” and “hostile environment” forms of harassment.
  • Similarly, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Disabled Americans relied on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to pursue equality under the law.
    • The Courts have ruled that schools must provide education for students with limited English and that illegal immigrants must be granted education and medical care.
    • After hundreds of years of maltreatment by the federal government, Native Americans began to mobilize in the 1960s with the founding of the American Indian Movement (AIM).  By the 1970s, the government began to give Indians more control over their land.
  • The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 makes age discrimination in employment illegal.
  • In Lawrence v Texas (2003), the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that criminalized homosexual sex.  However, while states can no longer imprison homosexuals, homosexuals are NOT protected under the various civil rights acts.  Hence, it is still legal to discriminate against gays and lesbians in most states.  The legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts and of civil unions in Vermont has raised a nation-wide debate of that issue.

II. What is the politics of the universalization of civil rights?

  • Under Title VII, any group or individual can try to convert goals and grievances into questions of rights and of the deprivation of those rights.
  • Today, the list of individuals and groups claiming illegal discrimination is lengthy.

 

Affirmative Action

I. What is the basis for affirmative action? What forms does it take? Affirmative action is a compensatory action to overcome the consequences of past discrimination.

  • President Lyndon Johnson ordered the first affirmative action programs in the federal government in the late 1960s.
  • The Bakke ruling severely limited affirmative action to cases where: Previous discrimination has been shown, and it was used as a guideline for social diversity rather than a ratio.
  • By the 1990s, federal courts began to strike down affirmative action programs that were viewed as overly broad and discriminatory toward nonminorities (i.e., Adarand Constructors v. Pena and Hopwood v. University of Texas)
  • In 2003 (Gratz v Bollinger and Grutter v Bollinger), the Supreme Court attempted to clear up the use of affirmative action in two cases involving the University of Michigan.
  • The Court upheld the Bakke decision and ruled that diversity in education is a compelling state interest and that race can be a “plus factor” (but not the most important factor) in admissions decisions.         

II. How does the debate over affirmative action reflect the debate over American political values?

  • The conflict over affirmative action centers around the core values of liberty and equality. Giving benefits to one group over another is a form of discrimination.

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