Chapter
16: Equality and Civil Rights
Synopsis
This chapter provides a historical overview of the
process by which civil and political rights have been
extended to blacks, women, and other minorities. The
search for social and economic equality has been slow and
often filled with controversy and violence.
Americans continue to struggle over the difference
between equality of opportunity and equality of
outcome. While nearly all Americans agree on equality
of opportunity, not everyone agrees that individual
outcomes should be equal or that society should limit
certain individual freedoms in order to insure that
others are "equalized."
The adoption of the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth
Amendments following the Civil War was designed to
provide American blacks with the civil and political
rights that had been denied to them by slavery. The
Supreme Court, however, systematically prevented blacks
from exercising their rights by declaring that the
federal government could not regulate private forms of
discrimination. Throughout the South, blacks were denied
the right to vote by the use of the poll tax,
education requirements, and proof of property
ownership.
"Jim Crow" laws, requiring separate housing and public
facilities for blacks and whites, became the basis of an
official system of racial segregation. In a
landmark case, the Supreme Court upheld racially
motivated segregation as long as separate but
equal facilities were provided for blacks. The Court
overlooked the existing differences in facilities
available to blacks and whites in reaching this decision.
Nevertheless, the separate-but-equal doctrine allowed
blacks later to challenge the discriminatory admissions
policies of all-white universities.
The political mood of the 1950s favored the successful
challenge to the separate-but-equal doctrine in the
famous Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka case in 1954. With this decision the Court
approved several remedies, such as busing and racial
quotas, to achieve the integration of schools.
The advancement of political equality beyond the
classroom, however, required more extensive political
mobilization, which came to be known as the civil rights
movement. During the 1960s, the unconventional political
tactics of the civil rights movement, which included
boycotts and sit-in demonstrations, brought national
attention to the problem of racial discrimination. As a
result, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the
most comprehensive legislation to date designed to
eliminate racial discrimination.
Although the legislative efforts of Lyndon Johnson's
Great Society program did much to improve race relations,
the problem of black poverty and unemployment in urban
areas remained unsolved. This lack of progress toward
economic equality was in part respon-sible for the rise
of militant black nationalist movements during the 1960s.
Other minorities have had mixed fortunes in improving
their lot. Hispanics have only recently been able to
exercise significant political and economic clout in
urban areas. Native Americans have had worse treatment.
Other nonblack ethnic minorities had to wait until 1987,
when the Supreme Court extended civil rights protection
to them. In 1990, the protection of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 was extended to the disabled.
The movement toward equal civil rights for women also has
a long history of confron-tation and struggle. Laws
discriminating against women in education and employment
were upheld by the courts on the grounds that they
protected the "weaker sex" from the harsh realities of
life. Women were also "protected" from participating in
the electoral process until the adoption of the
Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. During the 1960s,
the prohibition of sex-based discrimination was heralded
in the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil
Right Act of 1964. Despite some clear gains in
dismantling sexist stereotypes in the work force, most
working women are still relegated to lower-paying jobs
than men. When the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)
failed to be ratified by the 1982 deadline, much of the
controversy regarding the civil rights of women was put
to rest.
One of the more controversial issues the Court has dealt
with recently concerns affirmative action. The
depth of the Court's ambivalence on this issue is
illustrated by the 1978 Bakke case, in which the
Supreme Court ruled against the use of racial quotas. In
1987, however, in Johnson v. Transportation
Agency, Santa Clara County, the Supreme Court upheld
the use of affirmative action programs. Overall, the
Supreme Court has shown sympathy for the concept of
affirmative action while requiring that such practices
not deviate excessively from common employment practices.
In 1995 however, in Adarand Costructors v. Pena,
the court ruled that minority set-aside programs would be
subject to "strict scrutiny".
Americans will continue to work through their differences
over the competing values of freedom and equality, and
many of those debates will occur in the judicial
system.
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