2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. Find them all under the American Documents tab!
Subscribe to get these articles in your inbox. They’re free. Upgrade to paid and there will be additional perks, including essay subjects at your request.
President Kennedy had as one of his key domestic initiatives the improvement of race relations in America, and there was no easier target than the Jim Crow South with its segregated institutions. The Civil Rights Act aimed to desegregate places of business and education through various means—a goal that is right and noble on its face, but had since been applied in ways that run contrary to its goal at the output.
The 1964 Act is distinct from its 1991 successor under President G.H.W. Bush, which caused more problems for Americans than it solved, and I may yet do an article on that bill when the time comes. For now, the ‘64 Act established the following (taken from an Internet search) :
Title I — Voting. Bars unequal application of registration rules in federal elections. Does not kill literacy tests.
Title II — Public accommodations. No discrimination by race, color, religion, or national origin in hotels, restaurants, theaters, and other businesses affecting interstate commerce. Private clubs exempted.
Title III — Public facilities. Justice Department can sue to desegregate state-owned parks, libraries, and the like.
Title IV — Public schools. Attorney General can sue to desegregate. The text explicitly says it does not authorize busing kids around to manufacture racial balance.
Title V — Extends the Civil Rights Commission.
Title VI — No discrimination in programs that take federal money.
Title VII — Employment. Bans discrimination by race, color, religion, sex, or national origin for employers above a size threshold. Creates the EEOC. “Sex” was added on the House floor (Howard Smith of Smith Act fame). Section 703(j) says the Act shall not be read to require racial or other preferential treatment to correct imbalance.
Titles VIII–XI — Census data on registration, intervention in pending cases, a Community Relations Service, and miscellaneous procedure.
—This was all copied from an AI summary during my research. —GB
Passage of the bill was a true multipartisan accomplishment, and required the work of both Democrats and Republicans in the first two branches of government. Principle holdouts were the Dixiecrats of the aforementioned South, who viewed the bill as an encroachment on their rights of self-government.
Back when I was reading the Federalist Papers, I described the mechanisms of the Constitution like a surgeon’s scalpel, trying to figure out exactly where to cut so as to do the least amount of damage to healthy tissue in the pursuit of remedying a medical malady. “Both sides” of the Civil Rights debate had their points: black Americans were, by statute, locked out of equal opportunities in employment, education, and commercial accommodation, and that put them in an institutional hole that other races (mainly whites) didn’t have to deal with. White Americans in the South had the right to govern themselves and didn’t want to be told what their laws should be by distant politicians, most of whom weren’t from their states.
Nevertheless, there were unequal treatments applied on the basis of race as a matter of legal code, and those codes ran afoul of Constitutional rights enjoyed by black Americans, at least on paper. The South was right to resist impositions from Washington as a matter of principle, but wrong to deny American citizens entry to various accommodations on the basis of race alone.
What went right:
If certain Southern programs relied on federal dollars to continue operating, then the Fed was within its own rights to withhold those dollars if it determined that Constitutional violations were being enacted in the process. (Some of you are laughing when I say this in the year of our Lord 2026, and you’re right, just hear me out.) If race was the only distinguishing factor in the consideration of a candidate for education, employment, or commercial accommodation, then there was a problem.
However.
What went wrong:
Agencies and courts stopped enforcing a code and started enforcing a theory, aiming for equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. This is where opponents of the Civil Rights Act today have their strongest argument: in far too many instances, a claimant can accuse a defendant of discrimination even if said defendant has a grounds other than race for denying access to employment, education, or accommodation, and the law will quickly take the side of the claimant.
Any Act will be stress-tested for situational application in the courts, and the CRA of ‘64 was no different. Title VII as passed forbids discrimination. Griggs v. Duke Power (1971) read it to forbid neutral rules that produce unequal group results unless the employer can justify them. Congress later wrote disparate-impact rules into the 1991 Civil Rights Act. That is a different statute than the one President Johnson signed in ‘64. A test, a hiring standard, or a promotion rule can be lawful in every individual case and still be treated as suspect because the numbers do not match the local census (if you’re looking at the race category especially.)
Those disparate impact rules took a huge kick to the nuts at SCOTUS recently, some 35 years after they were passed, and should never have been implemented in the first place, but here we are.
If you’ve ever heard of a Michigan Supreme Court case involving the Dodge Brothers that allegedly resulted in corporations valuing shareholder stock over employee compensation, you can think of the CRA in the same terms: there’s what the law says, and then there’s how it’s been twisted and applied to do something it doesn’t actually say.
In short: discrimination based on immutable characteristics alone doesn’t pass the smell test, especially if federal funds are involved. But the application of such an ideal has been unevenly applied (or even wrested off-course of its original path) to say the very least. A 1991 follow-up to the 1964 Act made the problem worse, and it wasn’t until a 2020s SCOTUS decision that the “disparate impact” consideration got the axe.
History is complicated, and law makes it more so. Legislatures can write laws, executives can enforce them, but if a judge interprets them wrong, you’re in for a bumpy ride.
There’s a lot more to be said about this, but I’m keeping it short. It’s good that we ended one form of discrimination. It’s bad that we turned around and created another one. Someday we’ll learn.
Visit Nauvoo Supply to order HEARTLANDERS, the most American novel I’ve ever written. It’s like if National Treasure happened during Fallout with G.I. Joes.
My Amazon page has my other books, including FOSSIL FORCE for young boys and Engines of Liberty for all ages.
I post several times per week on YouTube.
Subscribe here for more book reviews and for articles on what I continue to learn as I read.