Martin Luther King Jr. shakes hands with President Lyndon B. Johnson during the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Credit: AFP/Getty Images
The “special institution” of slavery was abolished nearly a hundred years after the Declaration of Independence called for freedom and equality for all in 1776. But it took another century before a Historic legislation only begins to address the basic civil rights of African Americans.
This slow progress is the fruit of decades of work between constitutionalists, activists and anti-slavery abolitionists. They agitated in Congress, in the courts and on the streets. The fruits of their labor were not enacted immediately and were often foiled by highly adaptable discrimination architecture. Local taxes and literacy tests kept African Americans from voting in the aftermath of the Civil War. Likewise, the equal access promised in the 1960s did not mark the end of de facto segregation.
Between 1865 and 1968, much was on the agenda: the abolition of slavery, the extension of legal protections for the emancipated and their descendants, birthright citizenship and the end of segregation in the public establishments.
1. 13th Amendment
When President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 in the midst of the Civil War, he was not ending slavery or declaring it illegal. The Executive Order was a wartime measure that promised Confederate slaves their freedom if they made it to Union lines. He even deliberately neglected slaves in border states that had not joined the Confederacy. Instead, the 13th Amendment of December 6, 1865 abolished slavery.
Yet African Americans were vulnerable to subjugation. “The South was adopting so-called black codes that effectively attempted to re-enslave freed people, creating a form of neo-slavery by criminalizing black behavior,” said Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “So there were laws that forbade vulgarities or spitting, or if you didn’t have a job you could be imprisoned and then hired out as white labor in a form of debt bondage.”
2. Civil Rights Act of 1866
The first Civil Rights Act established that everyone born in the United States must obtain American citizenship. It was a radical notion for its time, seeking to grant birthright citizenship and all associated rights and protections, helping to counter the black codes of 1865.
Darren Lenard Hutchinson, director of the Center for Civil Rights and Social Justice at Emory University, said the Civil Rights Act of 1866 also sought to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1857 Dred Scott case. that black people were not American citizens and had no legal status. rights. Opposition to the act soon followed.
“President Andrew Johnson vetoed the legislation on the grounds that it discriminated against white people. hurt white people,” says Hutchinson.
3. 14th Amendment
The 14th Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, prohibits state governments, not just the national government, from restricting the rights and privileges enjoyed by citizenship. Congress now had the power to enforce and protect citizens against state and federal encroachment. However, the 14th Amendment did not promise political rights, which the next amendment dealt with.
4. 15th Amendment
The 15th Amendment expressly prohibited states and the U.S. government from denying citizens the right to vote “because of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Signed into law on February 3, 1870, the Monumental Act also gave Congress the power to enforce the legislation.
These rights were further restricted when states devised their own electoral qualifications, such as literacy tests and other regulations. These onerous requirements were sometimes disguised as neutral but were applied in a completely arbitrary and discriminatory manner.
“As far as voting goes, the laws didn’t say black people couldn’t vote; instead, they imposed literacy tests on black people, asking them things like, “How many bubbles are in this bar of soap?” » How many jellybeans are in this jar? Klan and Southern sheriffs terrorized black people who tried to register to vote with violence, so there was almost no black voting in the Deep South until the Rights Act was passed. vote in 1965,” explains Azmy.
5. Civil Rights Act of 1871
The Civil Rights Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act or Law Enforcement Act, gave the federal government the authority to use military force against conspiring individuals and organizations to violate the constitutional rights of other citizens. This act targeted racial terrorism in the South (particularly in South Carolina) and attempted to dismantle not only the KKK and other white supremacist organizations, but also organizations like gun clubs that threatened or used violence.
“The period from 1865 to 1871 was one of the most dramatic and sweeping conversations about freedom and equality probably in human history,” Azmy says. “During Reconstruction, the United States government was fully committed to rebuilding the South in the image of the North, and an image based on equality, which included American troops in the South to enforce laws and protect black people. He created massive proportions of black representation in southern state houses and produced three black senators and several congressmen from Mississippi and Alabama in 11 years.”
6. Civil Rights Act of 1964
This giant piece of legislation is a landmark law that prohibits workplace discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and passed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, it also ended racial segregation in public facilities, public education, and federally funded programs.
“This law, along with more aggressive judicial enforcement of Brown v. Board of Education, helped accelerate desegregation in southern schools,” says Hutchinson. “When the legislation was passed, less than 3% of blacks attended schools with whites in the South, despite the fact that Brown had been ruled out 10 years earlier. In the decade following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, southern schools became the most integrated in the United States.
7. Voting Rights Act 1965
In addition to the outright violence and intimidation that existed at the local level, states developed a range of tools to prevent African Americans from voting: the grandfather clause, literacy tests and election taxes. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 resolved these issues with force.
According to Hutchinson, a key nuance of the legislation includes prohibiting, not just specific harmful policies (such as literacy testing), but more generally any policies that may have a racially disproportionate effect.
In addition to enforcement rights, the law requires states with a history of discrimination to receive the green light from the federal government before any changes to their voting practices. (In 2013, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 judgment in Shelby County vs. Holder gutted those protections by arguing that they were “based on 40-year-old facts that have no logical relationship to the present”.)
8. Civil Rights Act of 1968
A week after the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the Civil Rights Act of 1968, also known as the Fair Housing Act, was signed into law and outlawed housing discrimination.
“The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in public housing and some private housing. The law covers actions that discriminate by impact as well as intent. Thus, it has been used to override arguably racially neutral policies, such as zoning laws that make housing unaffordable for people of color in a particular jurisdiction,” Hutchinson explains.
