The Civil Rights Act at 60

On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing racial discrimination in schools, jobs, and public facilities. It's been called one of the most significant achievements U.S. history.

As the law's 60th anniversary approaches, Penn Today reached out to experts from the School of Arts & Sciences and Penn Carey Law School to get their takeaways about the law, where it stands now, and what needs to happen going forward in the fight against discrimination in America.

William Sturkey
Associate professor of history

To me, the most important thing I ever read about the Civil Rights Act was written by a 12-year-old named Archie Richard living in Benton County, Mississippi, during the Freedom Summer of 1964. My first book was a collection of newspapers produced by students who attended the Mississippi Freedom Schools, the first of which opened on July 2, 1964, the day Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Freedom School students were between the ages of about five to 19 years old, and a lot of them wrote about the Civil Rights Act.

They grew up in counties named for Klansmen and filled with Confederate monuments. They grew up in segregated neighborhoods and inferior schools. The Civil Rights Act taught those kids something different. The United States of America, for the first time in their lives, was telling them that they're going to have the same chances that white people do, that they were going to have an opportunity unlike anyone else in their family ever had. That's what they wrote about.

Archie Richard wrote, 'God sees what we have to go through, and that's why he has sent people around to change this law so we, too, can have a fair chance. Now that the civil rights bill have been signed, we children going to school have a better chance of learning the different subjects we wish to, if we put our minds to it. We can finish school, go to college, and make a new start in life: find good jobs, make maybe more than $3.00 a day.'

For those young Black people, the Civil Rights Act meant everything. And I can't think of a more powerful message, to tell a kid that they're going to have a chance in life.

Deuel Ross
Lecturer at Penn Carey Law School

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the beginning of the end of American segregation, the law that finally broke Jim Crow and had the full weight of the federal government behind it.

The 1964 Act is really important and did a lot of great work, but it has been weakened in a lot of ways in the last 20 to 30 years. Some of the gains that we've seen in the past are slowly but surely being rescinded and it makes it more difficult to deal with the kind of discrimination we see today.

For example, one of the most important provisions of the Civil Rights Act is Title VI, which prohibits racial discrimination in any state or local government programs that receive funding from the federal government. Today, many of the civil rights issues that Black Americans and others face concern policing, schools, transportation, or access to other public services that involve less overt forms of segregation and discrimination. Title VI is the provision of the '64 Act that Congress enacted to deal with this type of discrimination. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court decision in 2001, Alexander v. Sandoval, said that private litigants cannot sue to enforce Title VI's regulations banning policies with discriminatory effects. This decision has been a detriment to the people's ability to bring private lawsuits challenging discrimination in a range of areas.

The biggest way to combat this is for Congress to act again. It's important to remember that the Civil Rights Act was never a perfect document. The '64 Act was a really great start, but Congress had to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Acts of 1968 and 1988, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1990 and 1991, to continue the fight against discrimination. These additions were built on the success of the 1964 Act.

The Civil Rights Act is a law that constantly needs updating to address the forms of discrimination that Black people and others continue to face in modern times.

Marcia Chatelain
Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana studies

Most people think of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a watershed moment in terms of African American civil and social rights, this moment that finally gets rid of Jim Crow segregation and provides a mechanism to enforce equal protection under the law. But the important-and sometimes hidden-legacy of the Civil Rights Act is that it fundamentally changes everyone's relationship to the federal government, because embedded within the passage of the Act are provisions to monitor whether or not discrimination is happening.

This may seem like some narrow statistics issue, but this becomes the basis of grievances around inequality; this becomes the basis of data collection. These mechanisms allow us to know the demographics of a public school and leads to having to identify one's race and one's gender and one's status as a veteran on federal forms. All of the information that is now collected, which can be a really contentious issue, is born out of this moment. We now have standards of understanding how goods and services and rights are delivered to people. This changes everyone's relationship to the federal government, because now the federal government has a mechanism to not just protect people, but to also know things about people.

This Act that isn't just about protecting an individual's access to public parks and pools, to restaurants, to travel. It's introducing the idea that the federal government has a real responsibility in your quality of life.

Mary Frances Berry
Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of history and Africana studies emerita

On this 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the passage of laws patterned after it to bring greater equality for Americans is worthy to be praised. The Act's passage also prepared the way for passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. It seemed that the Civil Rights Movement laid a foundation for legal enforcement of equality of rights and opportunities for Black Americans, but in fact the goal has remained contested and increasingly less achievable since 1964. Public support for enforcement has been uneven at best, not helped by negative Supreme Court decisions.

We are at a fork in the road like the one King and the whole Civil Rights Movement faced when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 proved inadequate to protect voting or to force politicians to remedy poverty and discrimination. No matter who was elected, the perpetuation of harm continued. That is why they organized the Poor People's March. Even if King had not been assassinated given the goals and hostility to the disruption of nonviolent direct-action protest, despite the First Amendment, the March would likely have failed.

So on this anniversary, the very least we can do is to pay tribute to Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Gray, Michael Schwerner, and all of the nonviolent protesters, Black and white, who went to jail or who were killed in the struggle. We should also honor those alive today, including Diane Nash, Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, and others, for trying to align reality with the great documents of our national life: the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution. Indeed, freedom is a constant struggle, and each generation must make its own dent in the wall of injustice.