Leid Stories - The Civil Rights Act of 1964: The High Price for America’s Redemption (Part 2) - 07/03/14

Leid Stories continues yesterday’s discussion on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  On July 2 that year, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation that prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender or national origin; protected the voting rights of disfranchised citizens; and forbade racial segregation in schools, the workplace, and in public accommodations.

The passage of Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments and of various civil-rights measures since then is the story of an ongoing struggle by African Americans for freedom, equality and justice. The popular narrative, however, is that these legislative victories not only are testimony of the confluence of interests between this group and the apparatus of government, but also evidence that race-based discrimination and oppression in America have been eliminated.

The narrative, of course, differs markedly from reality, says Leid Stories, and all Americans (African Americans in particular) should disabuse themselves of naïve notions about the so-called “civil-rights era.”