Existing comment:
Prologue:
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was rooted in the struggle of Americans of African descent to obtain basic rights of citizenship in the nation. Antislavery initiatives had gradually abolished the "peculiar institution" in the Northern states by the 1830s but free blacks were not accorded full citizenship rights. In the South, political and economic dominance of slaveholders hindered discussion of abolition. Discord between the North and South ultimately led to civil war, and finally, emancipation of slaves.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Northern Republicans in Congress proposed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution that granted the newly freed slaves freedom, citizenship, and the right to vote, respectively. Several civil rights acts were also passed in an attempt to protect the freedom of the freed population. During the Reconstruction era, African American men participated in electoral politics as voters and as public officials. Federal protection of the rights of blacks was dealt a major defeat with the Compromise of 1877, when Southern Democrats conceded the closely contested 1876 presidential election to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. Blacks, however, continued to attend schools and churches, participate in politics, and exert their rights as citizens as much as possible in the face of growing white resistance and violence. In a number of cases culminating with 1883's Civil Rights Cases, the Supreme Court Slaughter-House Cases decisions reinforced white Southern efforts to consign blacks to an inferior legal and social status.
States in the South gradually adopted a variety of methods to disenfranchise black voters and instituted "Jim Crow" (segregation) laws mandating the separation of the races in practically every aspect of life. Debt peonage (involuntary servitude of laborers), sharecropping and tenant farming often reduced blacks to generational poverty. The Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist organizations engaged in lynchings, beatings, and burnings to enforce the new racial order and to keep African American voters away from the polls or any type of political activity. Beginning in the 1870s, blacks migrated in increasing numbers from the South to northern and western regions, a phenomenon that would ultimately transform the racial geography of the country. In 1896 the Supreme Court sanctioned the legal separation of the races with its ruling in the case Plessy v. Ferguson. Popular black leader Booker T. Washington advised African Americans to focus on education and economic self-improvement, strategies he deemed necessary to acquire on the road to civil rights in the face of racism. In reference to blacks and whites, he said in 1895, "In all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." |