In early 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led what would become known as the “Birmingham Campaign” with the Southern Leadership Conference in which confrontations between protestors and police were widely publicized. Protesters included elementary school students who would be seen worldwide on television being hosed with high-pressure water hoses and attacked by police dogs. 1963 and 1964 saw sit-ins at lunch counters such as the Woolworth’s and wade-ins at pools in places like St Augustine, Florida. These confrontations were televised and brought the Civil Rights movement into the American home.
In June 1963, Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader, was shot in the back while entering his home. In September 1963, four little girls died in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. President John F. Kennedy, who had long struggled with the moral issue of civil rights, addressed the nation about the topic of civil rights on June 11, 1963, declaring that “[t]hose who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence [and t]hose who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.” From this era of protest and violence was born the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (the “Act”). Now fifty years later we reflect on the Act’s promise, whether the promise of the Act has been fulfilled and for whom, and consider the future of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
On June 19, 1963, President Kennedy sent a Civil Rights Act to Congress. The bill sent by President Kennedy sought to address discrimination in public places but refrained from addressing discrimination in employment. Also, President Kennedy’s bill did not contemplate gender equality. Title VII as originally introduced in the House of Representatives merely authorized a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, which would have the powers “to prevent discrimination on the ground of race, color, religion or national origin in Government employment.”
Title VII of the equal employment provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took shape over a long amendment and debate process. Gender equality was added only two hours before a vote on the Act, and was only included as means of derailing it. This last minute addition has significantly shaped the application of the Act over the course of the past 50 years.
Fifty years after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, some parallels can be drawn between the debates and amendments that shaped the Act and the controversy surrounding the Supreme Court’s decision in 2013, in which it significantly reshaped provisions for voting equality hard fought for in the debates of 1964 and 1965 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the progeny to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Periodically, we pause to reflect on great moments in history such as the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 2014, fifty years after the enactment of the Act, which sought to end segregation in public places and ban employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex and national origin, we must reflect and ask—has the Civil Rights Act of 1964 lived up to its promise?
In many ways the promise of the Act has been realized in areas likely not visualized by its framers. For example, it has provided the legal basis for advancement with respect to sexual orientation discrimination and disability discrimination. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has received and investigated nearly a million charges of employment discrimination in the last decade. At the same time, efforts to bring about racial equality through such means as affirmative action have been curtailed, and in many ways the reach of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been slow with respect to its original promise of racial equality. We need not go further than our own profession of law, which has experienced painfully slow and at times nonexistent increases in diversity and inclusion. The American Lawyer has discussed the “Diversity Crisis” in big law firms across the nation. “More than a quarter century after the first national efforts to boost the presence of black lawyers at large firms, African-American partners” remain rare at most firms, notwithstanding the fact that large firms have “more than doubled in size in the past two decades.”