cival right act 1964
When the Government Stood Up For Civil Rights "All my life I've been sick and tired, and now I'm just sick and tired of being sick and tired. No one can honestly say Negroes are satisfied. We've only been patient, but how much more patience can we have?" Mrs. Hamer said these words in 1964, a month and a day before the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 would be signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. She speaks for the mood of a race, a race that for centuries has built the nation of America, literally, with blood, sweat, and passive acceptance. She speaks for black Americans who have been second class citizens in their own home too long. She speaks for the race that would be patient no longer that would be accepting no more. Mrs. Hamer speaks for the African Americans who stood up in the 1950's and refused to sit down. They were the people who led the greatest movement in modern American history - the civil rights movement. It was a movement that would be more than a !fragment of history, it was a movement that would become a measure of our lives (Shipler 12). When Martin Luther King Jr. stirred up the conscience of a nation, he gave voice to a long lain dormant morality in America, a voice that the government could no
Senate, with a Southern group debating endlessly in an attempt to kill the bill, but the pressure of an outraged nation and an intent administration finally broke the stalemate. Senator Joseph S. Clark speaking of the Senate and its efforts to kill the bill said, "Heedless of its mail, allergic to public opinion polls, apparently unaware of the grave moral issue involved, a minority of this body, day after day, under archaic rules and procedures existing in no other legislative body in the civilized world, prevents a majority of this body to act from acting on this civil rights bill." The Civil Rights Act had finally been enacted. The government had at last sided with the movement (Mooney 778). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed and passed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 2nd 1994, after one of the longest running debates in Senate history. It was an idea that started with President Kennedy, and after his assassination the civil rights groups had to face t! www.google.com www.ask.com www.chuckiv.com personnel during World War II (Ginsberg 131). Title VII establishes a government agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), to enforce the provisions that prohibits discrimination by employers dealing with the federal government or interstate commerce (Ash 797). The Act, despite its many strengths was met with much opposition from many different groups. Immediately after its passage the act was contested all the way to the Supreme Court in the case of Heart of Atlanta Motel vs. United States (Ginsberg A55). The Heart of Atlanta Motel was a whites only establishment, and the owner argued that his property rights allowed him to choose the people that stayed in his accommodations. The Supreme Court disagreed in a unanimous ruling that his business was based on interstate commerce and to discriminate would hinder part of the national economic system. Other opposition included a backlash of riots among working class blacks, who felt the bill insulted them. White gr! f a century was the foremost civil rights agency, bringing mass amounts of litigation to the courts. In its commitment to the ideals of democracy the NAACP pursued equality for all in the eyes of the government. Around the middle of the century gains were being made in small places, with a few minor changes in state laws. Yet blacks were still for all conventional purposes second class citizens (Mooney 776). World War II and its homecoming black veterans brought back even more unrest than before. After fighting the Germans and witnessing Hitler's racial holocaust blacks realized the inequality at home even more. The problem was helped by the migration of black soldiers out West to take advantage of wartime prosperity. The civil rights issue was now gaining a national face. Then the Supreme Court handed down its devastating decision in Plessey vs. Ferguson (1896), that segregation is constitutional as long as facilities are "separate but equal." In the words of the one dissenti! . "The Implications of
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Approximate Word count = 2037
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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