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This chapter centers on the people who crafted, debated, and made into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Of the various provisions in this landmark legislation, none was recognized as more important or more controversial at the time of passage than Title II, the section that prohibited racial discrimination in restaurants, hotels, and other public accommodations. The focus of this chapter is on a lesser-known element in the history of this famous piece of federal legislation: the role the constitutional questions that the sit-in movement raised about the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment played in the struggle for a federal public accommodations law. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Congress would do what the Supreme Court had not: provide a national remedy for the claim to nondiscriminatory treatment that the sit-in protesters had demanded four years earlier at lunch counters across the South. The chapter concludes by returning to the Supreme Court, where the justices considered constitutional challenges to the Civil Rights Act and the effect of the new law on the thousands of sit-ins cases that remained on appeal.

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 many changes legislated for American food aid as, first, American nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) succeeded in receiving expanded legislative authority to use food aid for development objectives; second, “food security” became the primary objective of all forms of American food aid; and, third, Title III, Section 416(b) and Title I dwindled into non-availability. The remaining forms (Title II, Food for Progress, and Food for Education) seemed primed to focus on development objectives linked to improving food security. Unfortunately, the combination of budget stringencies, the increasing cost of food, the unwillingness of Congress to “untie” food purchases from domestic American sources, and a rapid increase in emergency relief needs conspired to greatly reduce the amount of food available to NGO and WFP development programs.

In this panel discussion, John Dearie, Executive Vice President of the Financial Services Forum, lists several shortcomings of Dodd-Frank, but contends that the banking system is far stronger than it was in 2008. Professor James Barth provides examples of regulators failing to supervise and regulate financial institutions properly and suggests a sentinel to oversee regulators. Professor David Skeel discusses the virtues of the single point of entry strategy for resolving troubled financial firms, and also expresses several concerns about the procedure. Professor Arthur Wilmarth raises questions about whether the new resolution procedures will incentivize banks to use even more short-term financing.

By 1954, U.S. government-owned food stocks were expanding rapidly, the result of a broad failure in domestic agricultural policy. Not only had it been extremely costly for taxpayers to pay farmers for these unneeded commodities, but the surpluses threatened to destabilize agricultural markets. Congress determined that the subsidized sales of these commodities to overseas customers was a good way to reduce the size of domestic surpluses and passed legislation to sell them for local currencies, which would be reinvested in the recipient countries to spur growth, or to barter them for raw materials the United States needed. At the last minute, a grant program was added to the legislation providing food relief to undernourished people in the world’s poorer countries. President Eisenhower signed the bill in July 1954. This was the beginning of America’s modern international food aid programs.

The department store movement succeeded in opening this world to African Americans and provided them with the means with which to make claims to middle-class citizenship, but it certainly did not foresee the dramatic decline of these retail institutions. The struggle for racial equity in work and consumption, thus, continues. Racial discrimination in the retail industry persists in ways that are consistent with early forms of discrimination—not hiring African Americans in skilled and status positions, and limited black consumers’ mobility in and access to retail institutions. Discrimination is also shaped by and reflective of the changing nature of American retailing, employment, and consumption in the twenty-first century—in that African Americans are hired in sales vis-à-vis cashiering and denied managerial, supervisory, and executive positions.