[60 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson—fresh off his successful re-election campaign—created his Great Society program, pushing Congress to help him (as he put it in his 1964 speech acceptance the presidential nomination) “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a number of Great Society laws, leading up to a post on what we still desperately need to learn from these histories.]
On one smaller
but still important detail in each of three pivotal civil rights laws.
1)
The
Civil Rights Act of 1964: Among the many protections against discrimination
and segregation in this groundbreaking law, I’d highlight Title VII’s
prohibition against discrimination “based on sex.” There’s apparently a great
deal of debate of whether that section, introduced as an amendment by the
powerful Representative
Howard W. Smith (D-VA), was intended sincerely or as an attempt to derail
the bill’s protections for African Americans. But while Smith was a
segregationist, he was also a longtime sponsor
of the Equal Rights Amendment, so it seems likely to me that he did hope to
include these protections in the final law—and in any case, the amendment
passed and was included in the Civil Rights Act.
2)
The
Voting Rights Act of 1965: The many General and Special Provisions included
in this landmark law could be the subject of an entire weeklong blog series in
their own right, especially since so many of them connect to overarching
American histories and issues. Here I’ll highlight just one: Section 203c,
which created
a census-based formula to determine which jurisdictions are required to
provide election materials in multiple languages. Given the (stupid and racist)
ways in which 21st century Americans have responded to things like “Pressing
2 for Spanish,” I can only imagine how divisive this provision was in 1965—making
me even gladder that it’s there.
3)
The
Civil Rights Act of 1968: There’s a lot of goodness in this follow-up Civil
Rights Act, including not just the protections that came to be known as the
Fair Housing Act, but also the countless rights it helped grant to Native
American communities through the “Indian
Bill of Rights.” But because everything in our history is complicated and
much of it contradictory, I’ll highlight here the law’s Title X, the Anti-Riot
Act, which made it a felony to “travel in interstate commerce with the
intent to incite, promote, encourage, participate in, and carry on a riot.” As
I’ve written many times,
“riot” is one of the most fraught terms in our political discourse—and when we
learn that this act was signed
into law during the uprisings after the assassination of Martin Luther King
Jr., we realize just how fraught this particular usage of the term was and
remains.
Next Great
Society law tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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