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Willy Ben Chen
Chapter5CivilRights2020.pptxChapter 5 Civil Rights
American National Government
PL-102
Instructor Walter Pearn
Define the concept of civil rights.
Describe the standards that courts use when deciding whether a discriminatory law or regulation is unconstitutional.
Identify three core questions for recognizing a civil rights problem.
Identify key events in the history of African American civil rights.
Explain how the courts, Congress, and the executive branch supported the civil rights movement.
Describe the role of grassroots efforts in the civil rights movement.
Chapter Objectives
Describe early efforts to achieve rights for women.
Explain why the Equal Rights Amendment failed to be ratified.
Describe the ways in which women acquired greater rights in the twentieth century.
Analyze why women continue to experience unequal treatment.
Chapter Objectives
Outline the history of discrimination against Native Americans.
Describe the expansion of Native American civil rights from 1960 to 1990.
Discuss the persistence of problems Native Americans face today.
Discuss the discrimination faced by Hispanic/Latino Americans and Asian Americans.
Describe the influence of the African American civil rights movement on Hispanic/Latino, Asian American, and LGBT civil rights movements.
Describe federal actions to improve opportunities for people with disabilities.
Describe discrimination faced by religious minorities.
Chapter Objectives
Civil rights guarantees the government will treat people equally, particularly people belonging to groups that have historically been denied the same rights and opportunities as others.
The proclamation that “all men are created equal” appears in the Declaration of Independence, and the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires that the federal government treat people equally.
The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, states in part “No State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Thus, between the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, neither state governments nor the federal government may treat people unequally unless unequal treatment is necessary to maintain important governmental interests, like public safety.
Civil Rights
The history of racial prejudice in America began in the seventeenth century, when Native Americans and Europeans first met.
Race relations were further complicated by the arrival of captive black Africans.
The northern colonies had little need for the slaves; but the institution of slavery became a defining feature of the American South, with the backing of the Supreme Court.
In 1857, in the infamous Dred Scott case, the Court ruled that slaves were not citizens and that slave owners had the right to possess human property.
Within a few years of the Court’s decision, slavery proved to be a chasm that only a long, bloody civil war could bridge.
The Rights of African Americans
During the period of reconstruction following the war, a number of civil rights laws were enacted by Congress with the intent of extending civil rights to black Americans.
However, by the close of the nineteenth century, the South was a racially segregated society.
In 1896 the Supreme Court again gave discrimination the force of law.
Its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) established the principle of separate-but-equal as a valid interpretation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Court thus gave constitutional protection to a wide variety of Jim Crow laws, which segregated people of different races in most public and private institutions. Jim Crow remained on the books for the next several decades.
The Rights of African Americans
As long as there’s a reason for treating some people differently that is “rationally related to a legitimate government interest,” the discriminatory act or law or policy is acceptable.
For example, since letting blind people operate cars would be dangerous to others on the road, the law forbidding them to drive is reasonably justified on the grounds of safety; thus, it is allowed even though it discriminates against the blind.
Similarly, when universities and colleges refuse to admit students who fail to meet a certain test score or GPA, they can discriminate against students with weaker grades and test scores because these students most likely do not possess the knowledge or skills needed to do well in their classes and graduate from the institution
Rational Basis Test
Discrimination based on gender or sex is generally examined with intermediate scrutiny.
The standard of intermediate scrutiny was first applied by the Supreme Court in Craig v. Boren (1976) and again in Clark v. Jeter (1988).
It requires the government to demonstrate that treating men and women differently is “substantially related to an important governmental objective.”
This puts the burden of proof on the government to demonstrate why the unequal treatment is justifiable, not on the individual who alleges unfair discrimination has taken place. In practice, this means laws that treat men and women differently are sometimes upheld, although usually they are not.
For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, the courts ruled that states could not operate single-sex institutions of higher education and that such schools, like South Carolina’s military college The Citadel, shown in must admit both male and female students.
Women in the military are now also allowed to serve in all combat roles, although the courts have continued to allow the Selective Service System (the draft) to register only men and not women.9
Intermediate Scrutiny
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Discrimination against members of racial, ethnic, or religious groups or those of various national origins is reviewed to the greatest degree by the courts, which apply the strict scrutiny standard in these cases.
The burden of proof is on the government to demonstrate that there is a compelling governmental interest in treating people from one group differently from those who are not part of that group—the law or action can be “narrowly tailored” to achieve the goal in question, and that it is the “least restrictive means” available to achieve that goal.
Strict Scrutiny
If there is a non-discriminatory way to accomplish the goal in question, discrimination should not take place. In the modern era, laws and actions that are challenged under strict scrutiny have rarely been upheld.
Strict scrutiny, however, was the legal basis for the Supreme Court’s 1944 upholding of the legality of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, discussed later in this chapter.11
Strict Scrutiny
Consists of government programs and policies designed to benefit members of groups historically subject to discrimination. Much of the controversy surrounding affirmative action is about whether strict scrutiny should be applied to these cases.
Affirmative Action
The Civil War marked a turning point for civil rights.
The Republican majority in Congress was enraged by the actions of the reconstituted governments of the southern states.
In these states, many former Confederate politicians and their sympathizers returned to power and attempted to circumvent the Thirteenth Amendment’s freeing of slaves by passing laws known as the black codes.
Black Codes
The spread of slavery into the West seemed inevitable, however, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case Dred Scott v. Sandford, decided in 1857.
Scott, who had been born into slavery but had spent time in free states and territories, argued that his temporary residence in a territory where slavery had been banned by the federal government had made him a free man. The Supreme Court rejected his argument.
In fact, the Court’s majority stated that Scott had no legal right to sue for his freedom at all because blacks (whether free or slave) were not and could not become U.S. citizens.
Scott lacked the standing to even appear before the court. The Court also held that Congress lacked the power to decide whether slavery would be permitted in a territory that had been acquired after the Constitution was ratified, in effect prohibiting the federal government from passing any laws that would limit the expansion of slavery into any part of the West.
Dred Scott v. Sandford,
The first step was the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.
Stated “all persons held as slaves . . . henceforward shall be free,”
The proclamation was limited in effect to the states that had rebelled.
Slaves in states that had remained within the Union, such as Maryland and Delaware, and in parts of the Confederacy that were already occupied by the Union army, were not set free.
Although slaves in states in rebellion were technically freed, because Union troops controlled relatively small portions of these states at the time, it was impossible to ensure that enslaved people were freed in reality and not simply on paper.
Emancipation Proclamation
Reconstruction (1865–1877) during which state governments were reorganized before the rebellious states were allowed to be readmitted to the Union.
The Republican Party pushed for a permanent end to slavery. A constitutional amendment to this effect was passed by the House of Representatives in January 1865, after having already been approved by the Senate in April 1864, and it was ratified in December 1865 as the Thirteenth Amendment.
The amendment’s first section states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” In effect, this amendment outlawed slavery in the United States.
Reconstruction
The Fifteenth Amendment stated that people could not be denied the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
This construction allowed states to continue to decide the qualifications of voters if those qualifications were ostensibly race-neutral.
States could not deny African American men the right to vote on the basis of race, they could deny it to women on the basis of sex or to people who could not prove they were literate.
Fifteenth Amendment
Is the revocation of voting rights, took a number of forms; not every southern state used the same methods, and some states used more than one, but they all disproportionately affected black voter registration and turnout.
Disenfranchisement
Literacy tests, which had been used in the North since the 1850s to disqualify naturalized European immigrants from voting, called on the prospective voter to demonstrate his (and later her) ability to read a particular passage of text.
However, since voter registration officials had discretion to decide what text the voter was to read, they could give easy passages to voters they wanted to register (typically whites) and more difficult passages to those whose registration they wanted to deny (typically blacks).
Literacy tests and understanding tests
In some states, poorer, less literate white voters feared being disenfranchised by the literacy and understanding tests.
Some states introduced a loophole, known as the grandfather clause, to allow less literate whites to vote.
The grandfather clause exempted those who had been allowed to vote in that state prior to the Civil War and their descendants from literacy and understanding tests.
Grandfather clause
To ensure the black vote was largely meaningless, the white elites used their control of the Democratic Party to create the white primary.
White primary elections only whites were allowed to vote.
The state party organizations argued that as private groups, rather than part of the state government, they had no obligation to follow the Fifteenth Amendment’s requirement not to deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
They contended, voting for nominees to run for office was not the same as electing those who would actually hold office. So they held primary elections to choose the Democratic nominee in which only white citizens were allowed to vote.
Once the nominee had been chosen, he or she might face token opposition from a Republican or minor-party candidate in the general election, but since white voters had agreed beforehand to support whoever won the Democrats’ primary, the outcome of the general election was a foregone conclusion.
White primary
The Jim Crow Laws emerged in the southern states after the Civil War.
First enacted in the 1890’s by lawmakers who were bitter over their loss to the North and the end of slavery.
The statutes separated the races in all walks.
The resulting legislative barrier to equal rights created a system that favored whites and repressed blacks, an institutionalized for of inequality that grew in subsequent decades with the help of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Although the laws came under attack over the next half century, real progress against them did not began until the court began to dismantle Segregation. The remints of the Jim Crow system were finally abolished in the 1960’s through the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement.
Jim Crow
In the 1930s, the NAACP developed a legal strategy to challenge the separate-but-equal doctrine in the federal courts by focusing on segregation in public elementary and secondary schools.
After several court victories that chipped away at the separate-but-equal doctrine, it was finally rejected by the Supreme Court as the governing principle in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954).
In its decision, the Court focused on the harmful psychological effects of racial segregation on black children.
A year later, the Court issued an order setting standards for school desegregation. Integration took place relatively quickly in some states, but it moved very slowly in the South, where the Court’s decision in the Brown case was met with open hostility and outright refusals of compliance.
School Desegregation and Brown v. Board of Education
School desegregation did not occur on a truly significant scale until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Title VI of that act permitted the executive branch to cut off federal aid to local and state governments that discriminated on the basis of race.
Even today, three-fourths of black children continue to attend schools with a primarily minority population.
In the North, racial segregation had largely taken the form of de facto (“in fact”) segregation.
This resulted largely from housing patterns and the decisions of private citizens rather than from the actions of government.
This latter form is known as de jure (“by law”) segregation.
The Court has held that de facto segregation does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment because it must be proven that the government helped create the segregated situation.
School Desegregation and Brown v. Board of Education
The slow rate of progress led to frustration within the African American community. Newer, grassroots organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) challenged the NAACP’s position as the leading civil rights organization and questioned its legal-focused strategy.
These newer groups tended to prefer more confrontational approaches, including the use of direct action campaigns relying on marches and demonstrations.
The strategies of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, or the refusal to obey an unjust law, had been effective in the campaign led by Mahatma Gandhi to liberate colonial India from British rule in the 1930s and 1940s. Civil
Civil Rights Movement
Protests against unequal treatment in the 1950s and 1960s prompted the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Civil Rights Act consisted of a number of titles, or sections, designed to strike down segregation and guarantee equal access to public facilities such as restaurants, public transportation, theaters, and hospitals.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
Legacies of the de jure segregation of the past remain in much of the United States.
Many African Americans still live in predominantly black neighborhoods where their ancestors were forced by laws and housing covenants to live.
Even those who live in the suburbs, once largely white, tend to live in suburbs that are mostly black.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, efforts to tackle these problems were stymied by large-scale public opposition, not just in the South but across the nation.
Attempts to integrate public schools through the use of busing—transporting students from one segregated neighborhood to another to achieve more racially balanced schools—were particularly unpopular and helped contribute to “white flight” from cities to the suburbs.
This white flight has created de facto segregation, a form of segregation that results from the choices of individuals to live in segregated communities without government action or support.
de jure segregation /de facto segregation
Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. In the case of Heart of Atlanta v. United States (1964), the Supreme Court upheld the regulation of interstate commerce as a means of outlawing segregation.
To that end, Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbids discrimination in public facilities because of race, color, religion, or national origin.
The act applies to facilities such as motels, hotels, and restaurants that engage in interstate business.
Title II: Equality in Public Places
The Civil Rights Act forbade discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
It further established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which has the power to investigate complaints of discrimination and to resolve disputes through conciliation.
Victims of discrimination may bring class action suits.
These are legal actions brought by one or more individuals as representatives of a group of similarly situated people.
Title VII: Equality in Employment
All intentional acts of employment discrimination are illegal under Title VII.
In recent years, however, the Supreme Court ruled that a city had engaged in illegal racial discrimination when it attempted to discard the results from a promotional exam for firefighters.
The city rejected the exam results after white applicants on the exam outscored black applicants.
The Court ordered the city to accept the results and promote the white firefighters.
Title VII: Equality in Employment
This provision makes it illegal for any educational institution receiving federal funds to discriminate on the basis of race or gender.
Sexual harassment is considered discriminatory if it occurs within a school.
However, the harassment must be pervasive and school officials must have knowledge of it and be deliberately indifferent to it.
Title IX: Equality in Education
The women’s rights movement has a long history in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.
Women eventually received the right to vote in 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.
Women have historically been discriminated against, given inferior roles in society, and denied educational and employment opportunities equal to those of men.
The National Organization for Women and other groups borrowed many tactics from the civil rights movement to improve this situation and had many successes.
Women’s Rights
However, the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have declared that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” was never ratified by the states.
Women’s Rights
During World War II, citizens of Japanese descent living on the West Coast, whether naturalized immigrants or Japanese Americans born in the United States, were subjected to the indignity of being removed from their communities and interned under Executive Order 9066.
On December 7, 1941, just hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the FBI rounded-up 1,291 Japanese community and religious leaders, arresting them without evidence and freezing their assets.
The reason was fear that they might prove disloyal to the United States and give assistance to Japan.
Although Italians and Germans suspected of disloyalty were also interned by the U.S. government, only the Japanese were imprisoned solely on the basis of their ethnicity.
Asian Americans
None of the more than 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans internees was ever found to have committed a disloyal act against the United States, and many young Japanese American men served in the U.S. army during the war.
Although Japanese American Fred Korematsu challenged the right of the government to imprison law-abiding citizens, the Supreme Court decision in the 1944 case of Korematsu v. United States upheld the actions of the government as a necessary precaution in a time of war.
When internees returned from the camps after the war was over, many of them discovered that the houses, cars, and businesses they had left behind, often in the care of white neighbors, had been sold or destroyed.
Asian Americans
Hispanic usually refers to native speakers of Spanish or those descended from Spanish-speaking countries.
Latino refers to people who come from, or whose ancestors came from, Latin America. Not all Hispanics are Latinos. Latinos may be of any race or ethnicity; they may be of European, African, Native American descent, or they may be of mixed ethnic background. Thus, people from Spain are Hispanic but are not Latino.
HISPANIC/LATINO CIVIL RIGHTS
Many Latinos became part of the U.S. population following the annexation of Texas by the United States in 1845 and of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado following the War with Mexico in 1848.
Most were subject to discrimination and could find employment only as poorly paid migrant farm workers, railroad workers, and unskilled laborers.
The Spanish-speaking population of the United States increased following the Spanish-American War in 1898 with the incorporation of Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory. In 1917, during World War I, the Jones Act granted U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans.
HISPANIC/LATINO CIVIL RIGHTS
Laws against homosexuality, which was regarded as a sin and a moral failing, existed in most states throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
By the late nineteenth century, homosexuality had come to be regarded as a form of mental illness as well as a sin, and gay men were often erroneously believed to be pedophiles.
As a result, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people, collectively known as the LGBT community, had to keep their sexual orientation hidden or “closeted.”
Secrecy became even more important in the 1950s, when fear of gay men increased and the federal government believed they could be led into disloyal acts either as a result of their “moral weakness” or through blackmail by Soviet agents.
As a result, many men lost or were denied government jobs. Fears of lesbians also increased after World War II as U.S. society stressed conformity to traditional gender roles and the importance of marriage and childrearing.
CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE LGBT COMMUNITY
There have been significant legislative victories for women’s rights in employment, in particular the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the establishment of the EEOC, and the Equal Employment Opportunities Act of 1972.
Sexual harassment has also been defined and outlawed in the workplace.
Equality in Employment
Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender.
Schools that receive federal funds must, for example, provide equal amounts of money to athletics programs for men and women.
In 2005, the Bush administration changed the Title IX requirements to permit schools to satisfy the requirements by establishing that the demand for women’s sports had been met.
This new regulation came in response to complaints that the rapid growth of women’s athletics on campuses had caused many men’s programs to be eliminated.
Equality in Education
Abortion Rights
Women’s rights groups have been active in the courts, particularly with respect to the right to terminate a pregnancy.
In the landmark decision Roe v. Wade (1973), the Supreme Court declared a Texas abortion law unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated individual liberty protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In the decades following Roe v. Wade, however, the Court has allowed the states to implement certain restrictions on access to abortions as long as they do not pose an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to obtain an abortion.
The Constitution and Women’s Rights
Sex-Based Discrimination
The Court has heard a large number of cases involving claims of illegal sex-based discrimination.
Some members of the Court want to consider laws based on sex classification as suspect, which would place them in the same category as racial discrimination.
The majority of the Court has yet to view sex-based discrimination as worthy of the same regulation as racial discrimination.
Instead, an intermediate standard—skeptical scrutiny—has been created and paired with the substantiality test.
The Court defines this as a new standard that governments must meet to justify policies that treat men and women differently.
The Constitution and Women’s Rights
Affirmative action refers to a variety of policies and programs designed to advance the position of women and minorities.
Affirmative action programs that make use of quota systems have been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
Programs that are narrowly tailored to meet a government interest (such as diversity in student population) are generally permissible.
Affirmative Action
Following the example of other minority groups, disabled persons have organized to put pressure on public and private agencies to grant them equal treatment.
The most significant legislation affecting the disabled is the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
The act bars discrimination against the disabled in employment, transportation, public accommodations, and telecommunication.
The Civil Rights of the Disabled
However, in a series of subsequent court decisions, the Supreme Court has held that the ADA does not apply to conditions that are correctable and it restricted the meaning of the term “disability.”
In 2005, new ADA changes were implemented.
These include requirements for additional parking spaces for the disabled, wheelchair access to upper portions of stadiums, and the lowering of light switches from fifty-four to forty-eight inches off the ground.
The Civil Rights of the Disabled
Historically, the basic right to vote was derived from state rather than federal law.
However, the Constitution and federal law impose important restrictions on the freedom of the states to establish voting requirements, including the Fifteenth Amendment.
Adopted in 1870, it guaranteed the right of suffrage to black males.
Throughout the South, however, numerous barriers were erected to stop blacks from voting.
One such barrier was the grandfather clause, under which a person who had voted before 1866, or who was descended from someone who had, was not required to meet various other requirements for voting.
The Right to Vote
Anyone else had to pass discriminatory literacy, educational, or good-character tests.
Another device was the white primary election system, which assured white control of primary elections.
Poll taxes and literacy tests were also used to deny certain groups and individuals the right to vote, and these remained in use well into the twentieth century.
Right to Vote
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed the use of literacy tests in any state or county in which less than 50 percent of the voting-age population had been registered on November 1, 1964, or had voted in the presidential election of November 1964.
The executive branch was given the power to appoint federal registrars to register voters in targeted communities.
The law has been amended several times to protect groups who neither speak nor write English and to make it easier for civil rights groups to prove that a state or local government has engaged in discriminatory practices.
In recent years, black voting in presidential elections has increased substantially, particularly in the 2004 and 2008 elections.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
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