Introduction
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the country’s head civil rights enactment. The Act banned segregation on the premise of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, required equivalent access to public spots and employment, and upheld integration of schools and the privilege to vote. It did not end segregation, yet it opened the way to further advance. The Civil War was a crucial moment in the history of the United States as far as freedom is concerned. Even though slavery was obliterated and black men assumed their freedom, there was still widespread discrimination. There was no law available to put an end to discrimination pending John F. Kennedy’s presidency leading to the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was then passed by Congress. Powers given to authorize the demonstration were at first frail, however were supplemented amid later years. Congress attested its power to enact under a few distinct parts of the United States Constitution, primarily its energy to direct interstate business under Article One, its obligation to ensure all subjects measure up to insurance of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment and its obligation to secure voting rights under the Fifteenth Amendment. The Act was marked into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 2, 1964, at the White House. This paper seeks to analyze this federal law as regards to its history and current situation, the rationale for the enactment of the policy, its efficacy in addressing the intended issues, implementation, evaluation, and recommendation of the policy.
History, Rationale, and Current Situation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Despite the fact that the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth alterations banned bondage, accommodated break even with security under the law, ensured citizenship, and secured the privilege to vote, singular states kept on permitting out of line handling of minorities and approved Jim Crow laws permitting isolation of open offices. These were maintained by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1895), which discovered state laws requiring racial isolation that were “particular yet equivalent” to be established. This discovering proceed authorized separation well into the twentieth century (Capozzi, 2006). After World War II, weights to perceive, test, and change disparities for minorities developed. A standout amongst the most eminent difficulties to existing conditions was the 1954 point of interest Supreme Court case Brown v. Leading group of Education of Topeka, Kansas which scrutinized the idea of “discrete yet equivalent” in government funded training. The Court observed that “different instructive offices are intrinsically unequal” and an infringement of the fourteenth Amendment. This choice spellbound Americans, cultivated verbal confrontation, and served as an impetus to urge government activity to ensure social equality.
From 1945 until 1957, Congress considered and neglected to pass a civil rights charge each year. Congress at last passed constrained Civil Rights Acts in 1957 and 1960, however they offered just direct picks up. The United States Commission on Civil Rights in the aftermath of the 1967 Act was formed to examine, write about, and make suggestions to the President regarding matters civil rights. Sit-ins, blacklists, Freedom Rides, the establishing of associations, for example, the SCLC, SNCC, and the neighborhood requests for consideration in the political procedure, all were in light of the expansion in administrative action through the 1950s and mid-1960s. Civil Rights Movement of 1963 was a very crucial year. Social weights kept on working with occasions, for example, the Birmingham Campaign, broadcast conflicts between quiet dissidents and powers, the killings of civil rights specialists Medgar Evers and William L. Moore, the March on Washington, and the passing of four young women in the bombarding of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church (Gold, 2011). There was no turning back. Civil rights were immovably on the national motivation and the government was compelled to react. In light of United States Commission’s report on Civil Rights, J. F. Kennedy suggested, in a broadly broadcast address, a Civil Rights Act of 1963. Days after his discourse, Kennedy presented a bill to Congress tending to civil rights (H.R. 7152). He encouraged African American pioneers to utilize alert when exhibiting since new brutality may caution potential supporters. Kennedy met with representatives, religious pioneers, work authorities, and different groups, for example, CORE and NAACP, while likewise moving in the background to construct bipartisan support and arrange bargains over questionable points (Grofman, 2000).
After Kennedy’s death in November 1963, both Martin Luther King, Jr. and the recently introduced President Lyndon B. Johnson kept on squeezing for section of the bill as King noted in a January 1964 daily paper segment, enactment “will feel the intense focus of Negro interest…It became the order of the day at the great March on Washington last summer. The Negro and his white compatriots for self-respect and human dignity will not be denied.” The House of Representatives wrangled about H.R. 7152 for nine days, dismissing almost 100 alterations intended to debilitate the bill. It passed the House on February 10, 1964 following 70 days of open hearings, appearances by 275 witnesses, and 5,792 pages of distributed declaration (Hasday, 2007). The genuine fight was holding up in the Senate, in any case, where concerns concentrated on the bill’s development of government forces and its capability to outrage constituents who may counter in the voting stall. Adversaries propelled the longest delay in American history, which endured 57 days and conveyed the Senate to a virtual halt. Senate minority pioneer Everett Dirksen sustained the bill through bargain discourses and finished the delay. Dirksen’s bargain charge passed the Senate following 83 days of level headed discussion that filled 3,000 pages in the Congressional Record (Hasday, 2007). The House moved rapidly to favor the Senate charge. Inside hours of its section on July 2, 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson, with Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Height, Roy Wilkins, John Lewis, and other social liberties pioneers in participation, marked the bill into law, pronouncing for the last time that segregation for any reason on the premise of race, shading, religion, sex, or national root was illicit in the United States of America.
In spite of its absence of impact amid its inception, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had significant effect on later social liberties enactment in the United States. It made ready for future enactment that was not constrained to African American social liberties. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which has been called “the most critical bit of government enactment since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was impacted both by the organization and element of the past Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Hazen, 2004). The demonstration was ostensibly of equivalent significance, and draws generously from the structure of that historic point enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) matched its point of interest forerunner fundamentally, endless supply of similar titles and statutes. For instance, the first title of the ADA, which bans employment discrimination by private business on the premise of handicap, matches Title VII of the Act. So also, Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits segregation on the premise of handicap openly lodging, tracks Title II of the 1964 Act while developing the rundown of open facilities secured. The Americans with Disabilities Act broadened the standard of nondiscrimination to individuals with incapacities, a thought unsought in the United States before the entry of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Kootz & Seidman, 2011). The Act additionally impacted later civil rights enactment, for example, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, supporting African Americans, as well as women.
Notably, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not end the social liberties development because White Southerners still utilized lawful and extralegal intends to deny black Southerners of their established rights. Also, in the North, true isolation implied that frequently African-Americans lived in the most noticeably bad urban neighborhoods and needed to go to the most noticeably awful urban schools. But since the demonstration took an intense stand for civil rights, it introduced another time in which Americans could look for legitimate review for civil rights infringement. The demonstration not just drove the route for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 additionally made ready for projects like governmental policy regarding minorities in society (Philip A. Goduti, 2012). Today, even though there are instances of discrimination, which often go unreported, the nation has been integrated and high social equality in communities across the United States is the order of the day. That is to say, discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, and country of origin is not as prevalent as it was before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent civil rights acts.
Policy Efficacy
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 rushed the end of legitimate Jim Crow. It secured African Americans have equal access to school, transportation, restaurants, and other public places. It empowered African Americans, women, and different minorities to eliminate hindrances in the working environment. It additionally made access to equivalent training a reality for the numerous Southern and Northern African Americans who started going to coordinated schools in the wake of the demonstration’s implementation. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 extended these assurances to voting and lodging, and gave new insurances against racially persuaded brutality (Risen, 2014). The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and President Johnson’s War on Poverty supplemented these social equality breakthroughs by assaulting the monetary imbalances that had so since quite a while ago went with racial separation and avoidance. The social liberties battle and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 likewise served as motivation for some different groups of Americans looking for uniformity and get to.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which banished business segregation in light of sex and in addition race, shading, religion, and national roots, empowered the women’ development and prompted to the establishing of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 (Risen, 2014). Encouraged by the noteworthy accomplishment of the 1964 demonstration, activists have persuaded Congress to secure such groups as more seasoned Americans, individuals with incapacities, and pregnant women so they could take an interest completely openly and private life. All things considered, the battle for equality is a long way from being done. As transformative as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its successors have been, the prohibition, abuse, and separation that it focused on were profoundly settled in and have demonstrated hard to end. The demonstration and its consequent requirement keep on prompting new open deliberations about what balance implies, what government can do to advance it, and how ordinary Americans can keep on achieving it. The eventual fate of social equality, similar to its past, will be molded by subjects’ interest in campaigning, case, legislative issues, and open challenges.
Implementation
The traditional story of the implementation of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 hinges on political mobilization. This is because, the story conceptualizes along courts and judges from the social and political world in which they live. Judges do not just appear from thin air, instead they are named through a strongly political process. The more political enlistment there is around anti-segregation law, the more probable it is that judges will be named who are compassionate to its goals. This recommends the fate of anti-segregation law generally relies on upon political activation. The development that influenced Congress to act in 1964 has never again come to a similar level of force and influence. The outcome has been a variance in the Act’s execution. The fact of the matter is straightforward: without the sort of political assembly that prompted the introduction of the Act, the fight to end separation is far-fetched to make significant steps. The significant part of political activation is all around represented by the treatment of sex segregation in Title VII (Schwartz, 2014). Interestingly, despite the fact that the Act was intended to end victimization targeting African-Americans, women have extraordinarily profited. This is generally as a result of the political assembly of women that happened in the late 1960s and mid-1970s.
The consideration of the disallowance of sex segregation in Title VII shows up to have brought about huge part from the disappointment of a strategic move by rivals of the civil rights charge. The reasoning was that disallowing sex segregation in employing was such a senseless thought, to the point that its consideration in the bill would doom it. The adjustment was presented as “my little alteration” by Representative Howard W. Smith, director of the House Rules Committee and an unappeasable adversary of civil rights. After this activity that, Caroline Bird reports, “cut down the house,” Smith restricted exchanging the alteration to Title X, Miscellaneous, in light of the fact that, women too are qualified for higher respect than that (Tate, 2014). The sex modification was bolstered by a large group of Southern individuals recognized by their memorable resistance to social liberties and was restricted by solid liberal supporters of the bill. Unions sympathetic of making racial segregation unlawful contradicted the modification, just as Esther Peterson, Director of the Women’s Bureau and Assistant Secretary of Labor did.
Given this foundation, despite the fact that the correction passed, the recently made Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) chose to treat the preclusion on sex segregations as a joke. Herman Edelsberg, its first official chief, openly expressed that the sex change was a stroke of luck that was merely conceived. He expressed that he and others at the EEOC trusted that men were “entitled” to female secretaries. An EEOC part going to a White House gathering on equivalent opportunity in August 1965 trivialized sex segregation, saying it was indistinct if the law would require Playboy clubs to contract male bunnies (Uhl, 2015). The New York Times got into the demonstration, naming a Commission authority the Agent Guide on Bunnies. Summing up the initial years of EEOC activity on sex discrimination, Agent Martha Griffiths, said that the EEOC had begun by throwing discourtesy and criticism on the law but its amateurish and entirely negative demeanor had changed for the more awful. The consequence of this state of mind was inaction with respect to the government. For the following four years, the Justice Department did not record a single sex segregation suit.
The explanation behind this inaction, a Justice Division attorney told the President’s Task Force on the Status of Women, was that the Justice Department reacts to social turmoil and the actuality that women have not gone into the avenues is demonstrative that they do not take business segregation too genuinely. That was soon to change. In about a decade later the legitimate specialists on women’ rights could relevantly describe Title VII the most exhaustive and imperative of all government and state laws precluding employment discrimination (Wright, 2005). This happened in light of the fact that the women’ development detonated in a long time taking after the section of the Act, making weight for change to which judges and chose authorities reacted. The National Organization for Women, for instance, was established in 1966, in expansive part in response to this negative reaction to Title VII. Different groups emerged too, going from associations of expert women to cognizance raising groups of generally more youthful women. Through mass shows, dissents, and campaigning, these groups brought the issue of sex-discrimination decisively into open verbal confrontation. Both Congress and the courts reacted. In 1972, surprisingly and with extensive dominant parts, the Congress passed and sent to the states for endorsement the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
The Ninety-second Congress (1971-1973) passed a wide range of women’ rights legislation considerably more than the whole of all significant enactment that had been already go ever. Included among this enactment, for instance, was Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which disallows instructive organizations that get government reserves from segregating on the premise of sex. The courts, as well, reacted to the political preparation, as the Supreme Court started the way toward increasing present expectations over which sexual orientation based groupings needed to bounce to survive investigation under the Rise to Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The need and additionally the accomplishment of this political weight is delineated by the treatment of pregnancy under incapacity arranges. In General Electric Organization v. Gilbert, the Supreme Court confronted the subject of whether a incapacity arrange for that bars scope for pregnancy and labor damages Title VII; the Court held that it did not. Accordingly, Congress authorized the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in October 1978, revising Title VII to make pregnancy segregation a kind of taboo sex separation. Women won insurance against a type of sex segregation not due to judges but rather or maybe disregarding them. They won since they could apply adequate political weight on Congress to abrogate the Court (Uhl, 2015).
Impact on Business and Society
The enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has had tremendous impact on the history of the United States in relation to the advancement of society towards achieving equality despite the nation’s multicultural social structure. The Civil Rights Law, a Johnson legacy, influenced the country significantly as it surprisingly precluded segregation in work and organizations of open convenience on the premise of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Johnson worked with Democrats and Republicans from the nation over and contributed huge political funding to go around the lawmakers of the previous Confederacy to pass the Civil Rights Act. Johnson’s endeavors helped out social liberties than any president since Abraham Lincoln. This is nowhere more obvious than in Mississippi, where voter enlistment of the qualified black populace expanded from under 7 percent in 1965 to more than 70 percent in 1967 (Kootz & Seidman, 2011). The world has advanced over the past half century. In 2008, American chose Obama president, the nation’s first African American president. It is a 21st century reality that would have been incomprehensible in 1964. While some Supreme Court decisions have as of late switched a few activities of the twentieth century began to help minorities, different patterns have emerged making social equality correspondence much more strong.
There is currently developing uniformity in women’s rights, disability rights, gay rights, and immigrants’ rights all over the country. The activities of Johnson and Congress in 1964 show what American democracy is about verbal confrontation of the issues, search for the shared view, make effective decision and accomplish something for the good of the country. A closer look on the impact of this Act shows that the America changed for the better. In particular, the Act removed racial barriers to education opportunities not only in relation to race but also in terms of gender whereby the minorities as well as women were allowed to attend schools and have access to quality education as Americans. The disabled alike continue to enjoy even greater opportunities since the inception of the Act, which opened doors for other rights attached to these people in the society. As far as employment is concerned, the act positively impacted on the minorities who were majorly affected in relation to enjoying equal employment rights like other Americans (Capozzi, 2006). Today, companies and organizations have fully embraced equal employment opportunity plan where people irrespective of their race, gender, and political affiliation among others are considered for various positions. Today, there are millions of women who hold senior positions in organizations not only in America but also all over across the world simply because of the Act that set pace for others to follow in the struggle to enhance social equality and development in America.
Policy Analysis
The enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 marked the end of years of civil war in America and essentially the end of discrimination against people with regards to their origin, race, color, sex, and religion. The Act liberated many Americans and opened numerous windows of opportunities for the Americans to realize their potential in realizing their dreams. The Civil Rights Act was a reverberating accomplishment in that it was the capstone of a decades’ in length push to expel and annul the Jim Crow laws common all through the American South since not long after the Civil War (Hazen, 2004). Evacuating the endeavors to disappoint African Americans re-requested the political scene of the country pushing ahead.
The Act’s strength lies on the fact that it had a presidential barking right from its inception and it was non-violent in the sense that it allowed dialogue where politicians deliberated on the same before enacting it. Besides, the Act sought to address the plight of the minority who were indeed subjected to unfair treatment and discrimination based on their color, race, religion, and origin. The Act had a focus to liberate and unite Americans for the greater good. However, its weaknesses were drawn from the fact that the judges, district attorneys, courts who are supposed to enforce the Act are racist. (Hazen, 2004) That is to say, institutional racism is a major weakness impeding this Act. Besides, the system works in favor of those who are moneyed as opposed to its core mandate of protecting the minorities.
I would therefore recommend for the future policy makers to consider the impact of a policy from all possible angles in relation to the social status of the people the policy is set to impact. Additionally, I would recommend for the need to involve different stakeholders especially those who will either be affected directly or indirectly by the policy in order to modify the policy in a manner that it will work for the common good and not just to favor a few in the society.
Appendix
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
- The Eighty-eighth Congress of the United States of America at the Second Session: This act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, 1964, prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal. This document was the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.
- The history of the Civil Rights Acts: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964 by Robert D. Loevy Excerpted from David C. Kozak and Kenneth N. Ciboski, editors, The American Presidency (Chicago, IL: Nelson Hall, 1985), pp. 411-419. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was considered an historic breakthrough because it was the first major civil rights bill to get through Congress in the 20th Century. The new law was badly watered down, however, to meet the criticisms of southern Democrats in the Senate. The 1957 law thus had little or no effect on racial segregation in the United States. A 1960 Civil Rights Act, equally watered-down to meet southern requirements, was regarded as equally ineffectual.
- S. Supreme Court PLESSY v. FERGUSON, 163 U.S. 537 (1895): … The object of the (Fourteenth) amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation, in places where they are liable to be brought into contact, do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power. The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which have been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of states where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced…
- The Eighty-ninth Congress of the United States of America at the First Session leading to the formation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This act was signed into law on August 6, 1965, by President Lyndon Johnson. It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting.
References
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