Building Toward Major Policy Change: Congressional Action on Civil Rights, 1941–1950

Abstract

The mid-1960s witnessed a landmark change in the area of civil rights policy in the United States. After a series of tortuous internal battles, with Southern legislators using all available procedural tools to maintain their states' discriminatory Jim Crow legal systems, the United States Congress adopted two statutes—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—which insured civil and political equality for all Americans. The Acts of 1964 and 1965 were the culmination of a decade-long struggle by black Americans to secure the citizenship rights that had been denied to them for more than a half century. Beginning with the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court decision, the civil rights movement built momentum, as formal organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) grew in strength and informal (grass roots) organizations spread throughout the South and the Nation. As national public opinion shifted increasingly toward providing new civil rights guarantees for blacks, Congress responded with new legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (the first civil rights law since 1875), the Civil Rights Act of 1960, and a legislative proposal to prohibit the poll tax in 1962 (which would be ratified by three-quarters of the states in 1964 and become the 24th Amendment to the United States Constitution).

Estimating Disenfranchisement in US Elections, 1870–1970

“…Three Southern states-North Carolina (1920( ), Louisiana (1934, and Florida (1938) -were early (re)movers with Georgia (1945), South Carolina (1951), and Tennessee (1953 following suit by the early 1950s. The remaining five Southern states held out, even as Congress tried repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) in the 1940s to push for a federal law banning the poll tax (Jenkins and Peck 2013). 13 Eventually, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s led Congress to adopt legislation (in 1962) to constitutionally prohibit the use of poll taxes in federal elections.…”

The South in American Political Development

“…Here the emphasis is on supermajoritarian rules or the multidimensionality of the issue space. The Senate's cloture rules meant southerners needed only a few allies to block legislation, making Congress an unpromising site for civil rights action in the 1940s and 1950s ( Jenkins & Peck 2013). Of more general significance is the fact that, despite southern extremism on slavery and Jim Crow, these issues usually came embedded in others (and in no period did they exhaust the policy agenda).…”

Litigating Change? Social Movements and the Court System

“…On the other hand, Meyer and Staggenborg (:1648) comment that a closed political opportunity structure, in which lawmakers are highly resistant to movement demands, may compel activists to approach the court system as a venue in which they perceive a better chance of gaining legal change. Southern Democrats in Congress in the 1940s and early 1950s, staunch supporters of the South's segregationist policies, made it difficult for early civil rights movement activists to succeed using a legislative route to change, rendering a litigation strategy all the more appealing (Jenkins and Peck ). Additionally, a new study by Dorf and Tarrow () indicates that same‐sex marriage litigators were, to a significant degree, compelled to respond to countermovement mobilization among those opposed to gay and lesbian rights as that counter mobilization was manifested in Congress' passage of the Defense of Marriage Act and similar moves by conservative state legislatures.…”