Public Employee Press

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 - passed after beatings, bombings and murders of activists
Giant step toward equality

By DIANE S. WILLIAMS

Fifty years ago, the movement for racial justice achieved a seismic shift toward a freer, more equal United States. The watershed moment came on July 2, 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, changing the nation's course from a separate and unequal society to one of full citizenship, regardless of race.

By ending the country's system of legalized segregation and discrimination, the law enabled African Americans, who were long relegated to second-class status, to claim their dignity as American citizens and build economic and political power.

Black Americans, long disenfranchised in the Jim Crow South and less so in the North, and many whites felt the sting of oppression and enlisted in the decade's Civil Rights Movement.

Guided by and embodied in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with support from progressive unions, including DC 37 and its parent American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the movement galvanized ordinary people for extraordinary change. The grassroots message of freedom and equality rang out as leaders and activists spoke truth to power at sit-ins and marches and sang "We Shall Overcome" as many were beaten bloody and jailed.

Guns, dogs and bombs

With relentless pressure on elected officials and an indefatigable spirit in the face of armed police, fire hoses and vicious dogs, lynch mobs, bombings of their homes and churches and even death, their all-or-nothing fight for equality and human dignity for every American eventually won the attention and support of young President John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy embraced the call to right the systemic injustices that for too long defined the destinies of both black and white citizens, saw it as his mission and introduced the Civil Rights bill in 1963.

King and civil rights leaders A. Phillip Randolph, Ralph Abernathy, Ella Baker, John Lewis, Andrew Young, Fanny Lou Hamer, Bayard Rustin and others led dozens of nonviolent demonstrations and faced arrest willingly.

They marched where they could not walk, and sat where they were unwanted. Their public acts of civil disobedience aroused the conscience of a nation that was comfortable and fat with new prosperity after winning World War II.

America's cancerous chasm between those who possessed all and people of color - locked out and denied opportunity by legal and practiced racist discrimination and multigenerational poverty - was at once known and ignored.

At the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, King aired America's dirty secret. The African Americans who built the nation, worked its fields and fought in its wars bore the scars of separate and unequal treatment and faced daily humiliations and ugly oppression. King pointed to the path of redemption, calling on America to pay the promissory note its Constitution held.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Supreme Court decision against school segregation, the Montgomery bus boycott, the integrated freedom rides and the dramatic student-led lunch counter sit-ins raised national consciousness about the South's Jim Crow segregation system, and performers like Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee and Nina Simone helped focus bright light on the need for change.

Freedom Summer 1964 united the main civil rights organizations - the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "snick") in a broad campaign under SNCC and local leadership to register African American voters in Mississippi.

Mississippi murders

Just as the gruesome Mississippi murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till for speaking with a white woman had lit the fires of protest, the savage June 1964 killing of three Freedom Summer volunteers - New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and Mississippi native James Chaney - woke up America, Congress and President Johnson.

The three were arrested by local police and never seen alive again. Forty-four days later their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam. The conspiracy of local police and politicians with the Ku Klux Klan and the brutality and entrenched hatred that underlay the killings outraged most Americans.

The shocking assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 had put the politically skilled Johnson in the presidency, and he aimed to honor Kennedy and finish what Lincoln had started a century earlier by ending slavery.

Less than two weeks after the murder of the three, the nation's strongest civil rights protections became law when Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

For the first time, the United States had a law with teeth outlawing discrimination based on race, color, gender and religion to reset its fractured social system. The law established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and led to broad institutional desegregation in housing, transportation, public facilities, employment and unions and was followed quickly by 1965's Voting Rights Act.

While we still have a long way to go to achieve economic equality, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a monumental stride in the long march toward dignity and human rights for all.