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Rayford LoganMichael J. Klarman, ''The Betrayal of the Negro[https: //www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195310187/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0195310187&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=dcf46674172d1c74db4454dade9281cb From Rutherford B. Hayes Jim Crow to Woodrow WilsonCivil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Equality]'' (New York: Da Capo Oxford University Press, 19972006).
Clay RisenRayford Logan, ''Bill [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0306807580/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0306807580&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=66d244df65572b59618c27b1e6cd99ad The Betrayal of the CenturyNegro: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights ActFrom Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson]'' (New York: Bloomsbury Da Capo Press, 20151997).
Admin moved page What is the History of Civil Rights Legislation in the United States? to What is the History of Civil Rights Legislation in the United States
[[File:CRA1866.jpg|275px|thumb|left| A newspaper announces the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866]]__NOTOC__
Though much of the discourse around civil rights is rightly linked to the 1960s, the history of civil rights has a much longer and complicated history. The legislative history of civil rights reveals the ways in which citizenship was broadened to not only include peoples who were of African descent, but also all who would be identified as citizens. Civil rights legislation, in other words, was grounded in the desire of fairness, justice, and equity. But it was not a straight road.
====After the Civil War====
The conclusion to the Civil War in 1865 led to conditions that transformed over four million people into citizens. Before the passage of the 14th amendment these formerly enslaved persons lacked a political definition. If they were not enslaved, what were they? And if they were citizens, were they equal? In order to resolve this question, the country needed new laws. Because of the complicated question of proportional representation, things became thorny. The paradox was that making peoples of African descent citizens meant increasing the representation of the former Confederate states from three-fifths of every Black person to five-fifths. If that declaration of citizenship came without voting rights for the newly emancipated Blacks it would be subjecting the country to the same predicament that it had before the war: a dictatorship of whites over Blacks. But the opposite was also true. The South, it was thought, would never agree to being readmitted on the basis of Black citizenship and Voting Rights.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, it must be remembered, the South had instituted the Black Codes. These were laws that simply stripped newly emancipated Blacks of the privileges of merely living their lives. Passed in each former Confederate state, these laws generally varied but most of them prohibited Black people from participating in markets of all kinds, including the labor market on their own terms; they sought to control Black people’s movement, outlawing loitering and vagrancy; they instituted forms of unequal civic identities, for instance prohibiting Black people from testifying against whites, but not the reverse; and they developed draconian penalties for violating such codes which included imprisonment.
[[File:Brownvboard.jpg|thumb|left|George E.C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James Nabrit, attorneys for plaintiff in Brown V. Board of Education celebrate a victory, May 17, 1954]]
The resistance to Jim Crow reached a fever pitch by the 1950s. The context for that shift is important to understand. Legal scholar, Derrick Bell, is perhaps prescient when he argues that it was “interest convergence.” That is to say, it there was an alternative benefit that accrued to the United States that motivated attempts to protect the civil rights of African Americans. For Bell, it was the ongoing conflict with the Soviet Union, which had utilized Jim Crow in its propaganda wars with the United States. As a result, by the late 1940s, federal laws began to shift, a Civil Rights Commission was formed in 1947, and the Supreme Court formally abolished Jim Crow in 1954, with ''Brown v. Board of Education''. But there was still more to be done, particularly with the question of enforcement as Brown II mandated segregation but with “all deliberate speed.” In 1957, a minor law was passed to create a civil rights division in the Department of Justice and nominally protect Black voting rights. It became the first Civil Rights Act since the Reconstruction period. And in 1960, these protections were strengthened with the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
====The Civil Rights Act of 1964====
Derrick A. Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest Convergence Dilemma,” ''Harvard Law Review'' 93 (January 1980): 518-33.
W.E.B. Du Bois, ''[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684856573/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0684856573&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=40e7feea8c60172175ca8f81b094efd7 Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880]'' (New York: Free Press, 2000). Michael J. Klarman, ''From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Equality'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Clay Risen, ''[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1608198243/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1608198243&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=12c6b04d6e0cdd82e91abaef1bbe658a Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act]'' (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015).
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====References====
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[[Category:African American History]] [[Category:Wikis]][[Category:United States History]] [[Category: 20th Century History]] [[Category:19th Century History]] [[Category:Political History]]
