The Struggle for Civil Rights Chapter 6CHAPTER 6 T.docx

The Struggle for
Civil Rights
Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6: THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS
In this chapter you will:
Explore the seven steps to winning civil rights.
Review the African American experience that set the pattern for
civil rights.
Assess women’s quest for economic and political rights.
Examine the political experience of Hispanics and Asians.
Consider the rights of other groups, including disabled people
and same-sex partners.
Seven Steps to Political Equality
A group defines itself.
The group challenges society.
The stories change.
Federalism comes into play.
The executive branch often breaks the ice.
Congress legislates a blockbuster.
It all ends up in court.

How the Courts Review Cases
The courts have evolved three categories for determining
whether laws or actions violate “the equal protection of the
laws” guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Suspect categories
Any legislation involving race, ethnicity, or legal aliens faces
strict scrutiny.
Quasi-suspect categories
In 1976, women’s advocates won a special category for gender
cases. Any legislation—federal, state, or local—that introduces
sex-based categories has to rest on an important state purpose.
Nonsuspect categories
Other categories do not face special scrutiny—at least not yet.
Legislation based on age, sexual orientation, or physical
handicaps simply has to show a rational basis to survive in
court.
The Clash Over Slavery
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the dream of freedom
had become a kind of religious faith in the slave quarters.
Abolition: an abolition movement rose up, branded slavery
sinful, and demanded its immediate end.
Economics: it was impossible to avoid the slavery question for a

fundamental economic reason.
As the United States spread west, every new settlement
prompted the same question: Would it be slave or free?
Politics: every time a territory applied for statehood, it raised
the question of the political balance between slave states and
free states in the Senate.
The Senate managed to negotiate the tensions with a series of
artful compromises. The Missouri Compromise (in 1820) drew a
line through the Louisiana Territory (at 36˚30′ North).
The Compromise of 1850 simply turned the decision over to the
people in the territories. Known as popular sovereignty, it
permitted the people of each territory to decide the question for
themselves—slave or free.
The Clash over Slavery
Continued
Dred Scott v. Sandford
In 1857, the Supreme Court stepped in with a shattering
decision that upset all the careful arrangements and

compromises.
A slave named Dred Scott sued for freedom. He argued that he
had been taken to live in a free territory before returning to
Missouri and that experience meant he should be free.
Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that he was not free because
neither the territories nor the federal government had the power
to limit slavery or give a black man rights.
Dred Scott v. Sandford decision ruled that no territory could
restrict slavery, much less elevate blacks to citizenship.
The Republican Party rose to national prominence by explicitly
rejecting it.
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the presidency on a platform
that flatly opposed the extension of slavery into any territories.
The Second American Founding:
A New Birth of Freedom?
President Lincoln announced “a new birth of freedom.”
Lincoln’s bold innovation was institutionalized in four
documents. In 1863, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed
the slaves.
When the Civil War was finally over, Congress wrote three
“Civil War Amendments.”
The Thirteenth Amendment (ratified in 1865) abolished slavery.
The Fourteenth Amendment (ratified in 1868) offered protection
to the former slaves and gave them their freedom.
The Fourteenth amendment applied the federal Constitution and
the Bill of Rights to the states.

The Fifteenth Amendment (ratified in 1870) guarantees the right
to vote.
Freedom Fails
Black empowerment met fierce resistance—especially in the
South.
Southern state and local governments reacted by passing black
codes.
These regulations tied blacks to the land, restricted their
movements, established curfews, and stripped them of rights
such as owning property, voting, or owning guns.
Legal restrictions were backed up by the violent Ku Klux Klan,
which sprang up to intimidate the former slaves.
A great effort known as Reconstruction tried to rebuild the
South around a vision of racial justice. Congress organized a
freeman’s bureau to assist the former slaves.
Obstructions to Fifteenth Amendment
The grandfather clause: by the 1890s, the state governments
had found ways to gut the Fifteenth Amendment right to vote.
Forbade people from voting if their grandfathers didn’t vote
Poll taxes required paying a fee that most black people could

not afford.
Literacy tests required voters to read and interpret any passage
in the state constitution.
The white majority built a system of segregation known as Jim
Crow (named after the minstrel shows in which white singers
and dancers blackened their faces and pretended to be
Africans).
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that
there was nothing inherently discriminatory in separating the
races.
Discrimination
Great Migration: Beginning in the 1920s, many African
Americans left the South and moved to more lucrative factory
jobs in the northern cities.
Legal discrimination is known by its Latin term, de jure
discrimination.
It involves laws and practices that explicitly deny civil rights.
A second kind of discrimination—known as “in fact” or de facto
discrimination—exists without explicit rules and regulations.
It is more subtly embedded in society.

The Civil Rights Campaign Begins
In 1909, black leaders formed the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, and began fighting
segregation.
1941 first executive order on race since Reconstruction
President Franklin Roosevelt signed an order barring racial
discrimination by defense contractors.
Created Fair Employment Practices Committee to ensure
compliance.
The NAACP also went to court and chipped away at Jim Crow
laws enforcing segregation.
Brown v. Board of Education
In May 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Court ruled
that segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of
the Fourteenth Amendment.
Brown was a historic moment.
The Court did not impose a strong timetable or implementation
plan.
Brown v. Board of Education would neither crack segregation
nor integrate the schools.
The Civil Rights Movement

It took more than a year and direct intervention by the Supreme
Court to desegregate the buses in Montgomery.
In 1961 groups of young people rented Greyhound buses as
Freedom Riders to protest segregated interstate bus lines and
terminals.
The stalemate was finally broken by a civil rights campaign in
Birmingham, Alabama.
Fire hoses sent marchers sprawling, police dogs snapped and
bit, and a cop pressed his knee at a woman’s throat.
The police overreaction illuminated the pain of segregation
more effectively than anything that had come before.
Civil Rights Act of 1964
It forbade state and local governments to deny access to public
facilities on the basis of race, color, or national origin.
The law prohibited employers from discriminating on the basis
of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
The Civil Rights Act also empowered the federal government to
withhold funds from segregated schools.
The following year Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of
1965.
The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed the right to vote. African
Americans surged to the ballot boxes, and following behind
black voters came black elected officials.
Affirmative Action in the
Workplace

In the 1960s and 1970s, a new approach emerged as a way to
assist groups that had faced discrimination.
Affirmative action means taking direct, positive steps to
increase the representation (especially in schools and
workplaces) of groups that have faced discrimination in the
past.
The Supreme Court propounded a doctrine called
disproportionate impact in 1971. Companies could not employ
hiring or promotion mechanisms that created, as the Court put
it, “‘built-in headwinds’ for minority groups [that] are unrelated
to measuring job capability.”
Affirmative action eventually created a backlash from people
who failed to get jobs.
In 2009, the New Haven fire department offered a written exam
for promotions.
Gender Issue: Suffrage
The first convention for women’s suffrage, the 1848 Seneca
Falls Convention, grew directly from the abolition movement.
After the Seneca Falls Convention, women began to campaign
for political rights and economic independence.
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union enrolled almost
200,000 women.

During World War I, women took on new roles while men went
overseas.
The Nineteenth Amendment cleared Congress, over stiff
opposition in the Senate, in 1919 and was ratified by the states
in 1920. Seventy-two years after the Seneca Falls Convention,
women had won the right to vote.
Despite the recent rise, the United States ranks seventy-first
(tied with Turkmenistan) in the percentage of women in
Congress. Why?
Gender Issue: Suffrage
Continued
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act barred discrimination based on race, color,
religion, sex, or national origin.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC),
charged with monitoring compliance with the Civil Rights Act,
considered it a “mischievous joke.”
The National Organization for Women (NOW), formed in 1966,
drew directly on the tactics of the civil rights campaign.

Hispanics
Lived in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and parts of
Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Texas before lands were taken by
the US in 1848.
Today, Hispanics make up 16.5% of the American population.
They constitute the largest minority group—and one of the
fastest growing segments—of the American population.
They organized the League of United Latin American Citizens
(LULAC) in 1929.
In Menendez v. Westminster, decided in 1947, the Court struck
down Latino school segregation in Orange County, California.
Chicanismo—a defiant pride in Latino heritage and culture.
The United Farm Workers (UFW) became a symbol of Latino
mobilization.
Latinos and the
Politics of Immigration
Since 1965, the United States has experienced an era of high
immigration.
Hispanics and other immigration groups fall into three different

categories with very different legal claims on civil rights.
Those who were born in the United States of immigrant parents
or have become American citizens (roughly 60% of the Latino
population)
Foreigners who have not become citizens fall into a second
category known as resident aliens. They may work in the United
States, they must pay taxes, but they cannot enjoy the benefits
of citizenship.
Some immigrants are unregistered—they are not legal residents
of the United States. Most arrived on a temporary visa, got a
job, settled down, and simply remained in the country after their
legal time in the country expired.
The Controversy over Language
In Lau v. Nichols the Court ruled that equal protection required
schools to provide assistance to a student whose primary
language was not English (the family was Chinese American).
In 1974 Supreme Court ruled equal protection required schools
to assist students whose primary language was not English.
No specified remedy
Bilingual education established
Many Latinos support English-language education—they are
eager to give their children a good opportunity to achieve the
American dream.

Asian Americans
Asian Americans are the third-largest minority in the United
States—after Hispanics and blacks.
Asian Americans range from Indians to Vietnamese, from
Koreans to Laotians.
As a group, Asian Americans have the highest education level
and the highest median personal income among American
population groups.
Asian Americans range from Indian Americans with high
income and education levels to Hmongs from the mountains of
Laos with income levels about one-third the US average.
Asian Americans do not form a majority in any electoral
districts except Hawaii, although this is changing
Indians and the
Federal Government
The dark side of American expansion was the policy of “Indian
removal.”
In 1831, the Supreme Court ruled that Indian tribes were
“domestic dependent nations” —essentially, separate peoples
but without the rights of independent nations.
Native Americans were not considered citizens, protected by the
Constitution, until Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act

in 1924.
Many Native Americans live on tribal reservations, which are
independent jurisdictions not subject to state governments.
Social Problems and Politics
Indian poverty rates are approximately three times as high as
the national rates and stand at 32.2%.
Native American life expectancy is about 2.4 years lower than
the national average.
Native Americans also suffer from low education levels and
high infant mortality rates.
In recent years, some tribes have used their exemption from
state laws to create highly profitable gambling businesses and
resorts.
Divided over political response:
The ethnic minority perspective argues that Indians should
mobilize for rights and equality precisely like other minority
groups.
The separatist tribal movement advocates withdrawing from
American politics and society and emphasizing instead Native
American traditions.
Groups without Special Protection
Americans with Disabilities
People with disabilities leveraged an obscure bureaucratic rule,

used it to mobilize, and eventually won the sweeping rights of
the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
The goal is to mainstream disabled people as much as possible.
The ADA forbade companies of 25 or more employees from
discriminating against handicapped people.
The Gay and Lesbian Movements
Stonewall Riot (1969) marks moment LGBTQ community
stopped apologizing and announced identity
The gay community was the first to confront AIDS—a
harrowing plague (in its early years) that pushed them into
politics, health provision, and community building.
Barriers to military service, civil unions, and marriage have
eroded.
Nevertheless, the conflict over marriage and childrearing
remains a flash point of contemporary culture wars.
Conclusion
No American idea is more powerful than the idea of inalienable
rights.
The Civil Rights Act, for example, ended de jure segregation,
focused the women’s movement, changed gender relations in
schools and workplaces, and inspired the disabilities rights
movement.
Ultimately, the quest for rights lies with the public.
Through their passion and their activism, the people are
constantly answering the key American question: Who are we?

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The Struggle for Civil Rights Chapter 6CHAPTER 6 T.docx