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This chapter examines how the federal government and black protest organizations intervened in southern authoritarian enclaves, with a particular focus on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well as the reform of the National Democratic Party during the period 1964–1972. It first considers state authorities' consensus preference for effecting a “harnessed revolution” before discussing the challenges posed by the Civil and Voting rights acts to southern enclaves. It then describes the degree to which outsiders interfered in enclaves' responses to these landmark statutes, including federal oversight of voting rights in the Deep South and deployments by black protest organizations. It concludes by analyzing the McGovern–Fraser national Democratic party reforms of 1968–1972.

This chapter spans the period immediately following the assassination of President Kennedy to the riots in the Watts district of Los Angeles, which exploded in the summer of 1965. Although Lyndon Johnson was a familiar figure, it was difficult to tell whether he would champion Kennedy’s civil rights legislation, which was working its way through Congress at the time of the president’s death. Much to Wilkins’s relief Johnson proved to be his greatest political ally. Johnson made great efforts to court black leaders, particularly Wilkins and Whitney Young of the Urban League. The president frequently sought Wilkins’s counsel and advice on civil rights issues and, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law, his administration quickly drafted more legislation to secure voting rights. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, however, did little to quell the increasing frustration felt by African Americans marginalized in urban ghettoes, and just days after the bill was signed, violent riots broke out in Watts, warning Wilkins that much more still needed to be done. Frustration was also evident within the Association when a group called the Young Turks, board members dissatisfied with Wilkins’s leadership, challenged him to take more militant action.

Part 3 discusses the growth of basic legal rights. In the twenty-first century it can be hard to appreciate how remarkably welcoming the federal judiciary was to the claims of the civil rights movement. Part 3 includes chapter 7, “Access to Justice”; chapter 8, “Voting Rights and Political Representation”; chapter 9, “Public Accommodations”; chapter 10, “School Desegregation and Municipal Equalization”; and chapter 11, “Employment Discrimination.” Voting rights and political representation were key. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 opened the portals for dramatic increases in black voter registration. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated equal accommodation in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and other public places. Some applications of these rights were realized immediately, others not so much. This was the era in which the promise of the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision became a reality in the Deep South. Desegregation suits proliferated. The Supreme Court dramatically increased the pace of desegregation. The varied forms of pushback were astonishing: the shutting down of a historic black high school lest white students have to attend (even at the expense of double sessions); the hiding of athletic trophies from the historic black high school upon merger; the suspension and expulsion of many black students at the moment of desegregation. The other major accomplishment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the ban on employment discrimination. At the time of its passage, job and labor union segregation were ubiquitous in the Deep South. This all changed.

Rebecca Miller Davis explores politics in Mississippi, one of the South's most notoriously segregationist states, between 1945 and 1964. She argues that Mississippi politics took a decided “right turn” after the war as the federal government showed itself determined to include black people in New Deal, Fair Deal, and successive government programs and activist initiatives in the Democratic administrations of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson (and, to a lesser degree, Republican Dwight Eisenhower). She covers Mississippi's considerable involvement in the 1948 Dixiecrat Revolt through Mississippi's famous “Freedom Summer” of 1964 and the appeal of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater to white Mississippians upset by racial liberalism on the part of national Democrats. The chapter documents Goldwater's appeal to disenchanted white Mississippi Democrats because of his opposition of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the success of former-Democrats such as Prentiss Walker in Mississippi, who rode Goldwater's coat-tails to become the state's first Republican congressman since 1883.

Ezra Taft Benson brazenly asserted that Martin Luther King was a communist agent. Thus, Benson rejected the civil rights movement, claiming that it was an invitation to promote communist aims and organizations. In specific, Benson feared that the unrest unleashed by the “civil rights agitators,” as he called them, would lead to a revolution that would ultimately produce a worldwide depression and a catastrophic failure of money markets in the United States. For Benson, then, the civil rights movement was not about black rights but about communists using them as a pawn to undermine American institutions. This essay traces Benson’s views on civil rights, specifically Birch Society founder Robert Welch and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s influence on Benson’s racialist thinking.

This chapter examines Joe T. Patterson's role in the conservative political effort to derail the advancing civil rights movement. When Patterson won a third term as Mississippi attorney general in 1963, he had to face a number of challenges from the civil rights movement. Among them were the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP); Freedom Summer; the murders of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. During those years, Patterson refused to renounce segregation and took tough stands against the movement. He also shaped a burgeoning brand of conservatism in the South. This chapter first considers how Patterson helped transition southern Democrats into modern-day Republicans before turning to Freedom Summer, an attempt by civil rights activists to bring African Americans access to the voting rolls and adequate educational opportunities. It also discusses the significance of Paul Johnson's tenure as governor of Mississippi to the shift in Mississippi politics.

This chapter examines the role of mainline Protestant religious leaders in building support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Using both archival evidence and public opinion data, it argues that church-based educational campaigns played an important role in the law’s passage. Although the general arc of the story will be familiar from prior histories of the Civil Rights Act, the focus here is on religious authority and its role in shaping the views and actions of average believers. With that in mind, the chapter concludes with a section in which data from the 1964 American National Election Study (ANES) is used to test whether church involvement affected white Protestants’ views concerning the Civil Rights Act. The public opinion data confirm the picture that emerges from the archival record—namely, that the churches’ educational efforts were, in fact, a critical factor in building northern white support for a meaningful civil rights bill.

Martin Luther King Jr. was more radical and angry in 1960 than in 1955, more of both in 1965 than in 1960, and more of both in 1968 than ever. The great demonstrations in Birmingham, St. Augustine, and Selma yielded the civil rights bills, but King struggled to adjust to the rise of Black Power and dared to oppose the Vietnam War, burning his alliance with President Johnson. King provided the theology of social justice that the civil rights movement spoke and sang.

As the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act were put into practice, legal equality was formally established among all American citizens. This, however, led to the black community contemplating how their politics should adapt to such crucial changes, the kind of relationships to be established, how religion could be integrated into their practices, and other such concerns. Politics refers not only to the creation of politics and politics itself, but also to the aspects which are seen as nonpolitical, prepolitical, and peripolitical because these are all based on the concept of a hierarchy that lives by a certain collection of norms or on the fusion of particular binaries. In other words, something “political” takes on a masculine character that displaces any confusion or discrimination around gender or sexuality.

This chapter considers the role of the judicial system in addressing environmental inequalities. The authors begin the chapter with a careful review of empirical studies of environmental litigation outcomes, and conclude that monetary fines and penalties handed down from the courts do not appear to be directly discriminatory. Rather, studies suggest that, if discrimination in sentencing exists, it is likely to be indirect. The chapter next turns to the important question of whether courts can be successfully used by communities to overcome unfairness or bias in facility siting decisions, by providing a venue for individuals and advocacy organizations to challenge what they believe to be discriminatory practices. The authors examine this question in the context of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the National Environmental Policy Act. The analysis reveals that the courts have thus far provided few opportunities for environmental justice advocates to purse change through these venues. The chapter concludes with a set of lessons learned that can be employed to help achieve fairer outcomes in the future.

Chapter 4 examines how plaintiff Celio Diaz successfully used Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to reverse the airlines’ female-only hiring practices. Diaz’s legacy affirms that queer Americans were deeply invested in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, even if they were often unwelcome. The chapter traces the entanglements of male flight attendants with civil rights law from the dawn of Title VII to the final decision in Diaz v. Pan Am. In this light, I treat the Diaz case as an important precursor to future queer equality victories, as it limited social conservatives’ use of homophobia to block gender-based civil rights and prevent the inclusion of gays and lesbians in mainstream society.

Federal judges facing the avalanche of civil rights cases came to a variety of decisions. Some pressed for immediate progress. Others were willing to countenance delay. The circuit courts of appeals bench was more consistent and insistent on compliance, led by Elbert Tuttle, John Minor Wisdom, and Richard T. Rives, but in the localities, desegregation went slowly. Cases involving James Meredith in Mississippi showed how judges like Sidney Mize could bring the civil rights litigation to a halt. In collateral attacks on Jim Crow, the desegregation of lunch counters, city buses, and other public facilities showed that community action by men like Martin Luther King, Jr., and women like Rosa Parks could aid litigation and litigation could protect community action. Southern defiance could not stop Congress from passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This chapter delves deeper into Harry Golden’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s, highlighting his support for President Lyndon B. Johnson over matters concerning racial discrimination and human rights. Like his predecessor, Johnson sought the eradication of inequality by working together with various organizations such as the NAACP. The climax of Johnson’s support to the movement was the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and the Voting Rights Act. The chapter also describes Golden’s reaction to the rise of black militancy. Golden believed that the hard-fought gains made by black nonviolence were being destroyed by the rise of “black power” and could undo progress. He criticized Malcolm X’s “ballot or bullet” school of speechmaking which urged blacks to take a militaristic stance in the fight for equal rights.

This chapter describes Chambers's efforts to enforce Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in restaurants, motels, and other places of public accommodation, against attempts to circumvent the new law's broad reach, confirmed by an earlier U.S. Supreme Court ruling. The Charlotte YMCA argued for a "private club" exemption under Title II, but quickly abandoned that claim and agreed to desegregate when Chambers filed suit. Chambers also sued the Raleigh YMCA, which sought to prevent desegregation of its exercise facilities on a similar claim notwithstanding that the YMCA's officers had desegregated their cafeteria and rental lodging. After a loss at trial before an unsympathetic U.S. District Court judge, Chambers and LDF won an unqualified victory on appeal before the Fourth Circuit. Chambers also prevailed in a suit to open Moore's Barbecue Restaurant in New Bern to black customers despite Moore's claim to have arranged his business affairs so as to be free of any connection to "interstate commerce," a key element of the Supreme Court's basis for upholding Title II. Here, Chambers overcame a hostile federal judge who willingly ignored a fundamental judicial canon by repeatedly communicating privately about the case with Moore's attorney.

This chapter describes the contributions of Julius Chambers and his partners, most particularly Robert Belton, to the LDF's national litigation campaign to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which new law outlawed racial discrimination in the workplace effective July 1965. In October 1965, Chambers filed the nation's first-ever Title VII suit, and soon after filed three additional cases which, when ultimately decided years later, substantially ended overt racial discrimination in American workplaces. These critical victories included Supreme Court triumphs in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971) and Albermarle Paper Co. v. Moody (1975), and the Fourth Circuit's Robinson v. Lorillard Corp. (1971). Griggs, recognized as the era's landmark employment ruling, established the "disparate impact" standard for adjudicating employers' use of "intelligence" tests and other pre-employment screening mechanisms. Together, Griggs, Moody, and Robinson did much to define the federal courts' interpretations of Title VII in a fashion that both opened workplaces to black job seekers and offered some compensatory remedy to those who had suffered under racially discriminatory workplace schemes. By these efforts, Chambers, his partners, and the LDF would leave the American workplace forever changed.

This chapter examines federal environmental justice policy in the area of facility permitting. The chapter provides a detailed analysis of how distributive and procedural environmental justice issues have been adjudicated in several venues important to permitting under major environmental statutes such as the Clean Air Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Much of the analysis focuses on the decisions of the Environmental Appeals Board (EAB), which is responsible for adjudicating administrative appeals of permitting decisions under the major laws that the EPA implements. The author argues that challenges to new permits brought to the EAB on the grounds of disparate impacts to low-income and minority communities have largely been unsuccessful. As a result, there is little evidence that the EPA has integrated environmental justice concerns directly into permitting decisions, although the EAB does now as matter of practice require that EPA permit writers perform an environmental justice analysis and invite broad participation in permitting decisions. The chapter also examines recent policy developments as part of Plan EJ 2014 and the EPA’s implementation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provides some reason for optimism for future consideration of disparate impacts in federal and state permitting decisions.

This chapter examines Joe T. Patterson's stand on the so-called Freedom of Choice desegregation plans. When the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) announced its intention to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Patterson, as a member of the Mississippi Board of Education, came up with the Freedom of Choice. Under the Freedom of Choice plans, students could choose to attend any school within their district. It was the perfect example of Patterson's strategy to maintain white power by appealing to a common American value of freedom without mentioning race at all. This chapter begins with a discussion of Patterson's defense in Coffey v. State Educational Finance Commission, in which he laid out the evolution of his belief in practical segregation. It then considers the emergence of a more sophisticated racism in Mississippi and Patterson's battle with HEW over desegregation of public schools, in which he linked HEW's legal arguments to the civil rights movement. It also looks at Patterson's efforts to bolster Freedom of Choice.

Born on November 5, 1926, in the all-black community of Palmer’s Crossing in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Victoria Jackson Gray Adams got involved in the civil rights movement by accident. In the spring of 1962, Adams was contacted by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field workers Curtis Hayes and Hollis Watkins, who were looking for a place to hold movement meetings in Hattiesburg. Adams was one of the first volunteers to try and register to vote, and one of the few women to serve on the national board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) while Martin Luther King Jr. was president. In May 1964, Adams addressed a northern audience in Wisconsin. This chapter presents Adams’s speech, in which she discussed voting legislation embodied in the pending Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the realities and repercussions of voter registration for blacks in Mississippi.

This chapter describes Chambers's return to North Carolina in July 1964, and his success in quickly elevating North Carolina to the forefront of the LDF's national litigation campaign to translate provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to overcome racial segregation in public accommodation, schools, and employment. Chambers, who opened his small office in Charlotte the same week that Lyndon Johnson signed the new Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, quickly assumed leadership of the Legal Redress Committee of the North Carolina NAACP, which had long spearheaded civil rights litigation in the state. Chambers barnstormed North Carolina to inform black citizens of their rights and prospective new remedies afforded by the Civil Rights Act and soon launched a spate of new legal actions targeting the state's largest school district and employers. In January of 1965, as Chambers addressed a rally at a black church in New Bern, his car was dynamited; local legal authorities showed little enthusiasm to prosecute the Klan-affiliated assailants.