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The 1964 Civil Rights Act, in conjunction with the Voting
Rights Act of the following year, totally transformed the
shape of American race relations. Supporters of the Civil
Rights Act sought, at minimum, the elimination of racial
segregation in publicly supported schools, hospitals, public
transport, and other public spaces, and an end to open and
blatant racial discrimination in employment practices.
Judged in those terms, the act is a remarkable success
story. It has shown the power of the central government to
change deeply entrenched patterns of behavior. In terms of
the law, blacks are no longer second-class citizens. From
other perspectives, however, the act is seen as a failure.
Either it went too far, by institutionalizing race-specific
forms of preferences, or it did not go far enough, leaving
untouched the socioeconomic differences and lingering
effects of past discrimination that perpetuate race-based
inequities.
Legacies of the 1964 Civil Rights Act brings
together a distinguished group of political scientists,
historians, lawyers, statisticians, and sociologists who
have written extensively on civil rights issues. The editor,
Bernard Grofman, has asked the contributors to stand back
from the immediate controversies about civil rights
reflected in today's news and to provide historical and
comparative perspective about this important legislation.
Organized into four sections, the book covers the origins of
the act and its historical evolution, its consequences in
several different policy domains, and the future of civil
rights in the United States. An appendix contains two
somewhat more technical essays on legal standards for
statutory violations and statistical issues in measuring
discrimination.
Because the moral urgency of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
was triggered by revulsion against racial segregation, the
act's legacy is primarily seen in the life chances of
African Americans. This volume provides a broad and detailed
picture of the act's impact on African Americans' lives.
Contributors:
Paul Burstein, University of Washington
David B. Filvaroff, State University of New York,
Buffalo
Louis Ricardo Fraga, Stanford University
Hugh Davis Graham, Vanderbilt University
Jack Greenberg, Columbia University
Gloria J. Hampton, Ohio State University
Joseph B. Kadane, Carnegie Mellon University
Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School
J. Morgan Kousser, California Institute of Technology
Richard Lempert, University of Michigan
Paula D. McCain, University of Virginia
Caroline Mitchell, Esq., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Gary Orfield, Harvard University
Jorge Ruiz-de-Velasco, Stanford University
Barbara Phillips Sullivan, Ford Foundation
Katherine Tate, University of California, Irvine
Stephen L. Wasby, State University of New York,
Albany
Robin M. Williams Jr., Cornell University
Raymond E. Wolfinger, University of California,
Berkeley
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