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Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, excerpt
Date: Jul 2, 1964
Caption: The 1964 Civil Rights Act carefully defined desegregation to make it easier for northern districts like New York City not to take action on school segregation.
Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on June 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, religion, sex, and national origin. The Act banned segregation in public places, including schools, parks, theaters, and hotels, and it denied the use of federal funds for any program that practiced segregation. The Act even authorized the Office of Education to assist in facilitating school desegregation.
The first version of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was introduced by President John F. Kennedy in June 1963. After President Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson successfully advocated to pass the legislation. Although President Johnson played a key role in pushing the bill through Congress amidst southern opposition, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made clear in January 1964, “the civil rights legislation now before Congress . . . was born in the streets of Birmingham amid snarling dogs and the battering of fire hoses. It was fashioned in the jail cells of the South and by the marching feet in the North.”1 Its passage was the result of decades of organizing and activism that sought justice and equality.
However, the full demands of the activists did not make it all the way through the legislative process. President Johnson signed a watered-down version of the original bill. Both northern and southern politicians scaled back what the law required, especially related to the desegregation of public schools.
Emanuel Celler, a US Congressman from Brooklyn, NY, played a critical role in revising the text of the legislation and pushing it through the House of Representatives. Congressman Celler and colleagues added an “antibusing” amendment that said that school systems could not move students from one school to another to desegregate. Second, Congressman Celler helped limit desegregation to the South, where formal laws had Black and white students at separate schools. What Celler and others called “racial imbalance,” where schools were often all Black or all white because of school zoning and racist housing policies, would not require desegregation.2
Congressman Celler and other northern politicians were aware of white resistance to school desegregation. Indeed, shortly after the Senate opened debate on the Civil Rights Act, the Parents and Taxpayers march brought 15,000 white mothers in New York City to the streets to protest attempts at desegregation. Thus, the political activism of white parents in the North and northern politicians in Congress together helped maintain segregation in northern schools, including in New York City.
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted in Charles Sanders, “Playing Hooky for Freedom,” Ebony, April 1964, 153, https://books.google.com/books?id=-VBKHwdFYAUC&lpg=PA1&pg=PT154#v=onepage&q&f=false. ↩︎
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Matthew Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). See also: Matthew Delmont, Why Busing Failed, accessed April 10, 2024, whybusingfailed.com. ↩︎
Categories: national, K-12 organizing
Tags: legislation, white liberalism, North and South, racist segregation
This item is part of "Responding to the 1964 Boycotts" in "Boycotting New York’s Segregated Schools"
Item Details
Date: Jul 2, 1964
Source: P.L. 88-352, Section 401b.
Copyright: Government document.
How to cite: “Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, excerpt,” in New York City Civil Rights History Project, Accessed: [Month Day, Year], https://nyccivilrightshistory.org/gallery/title-iv-civil-rights-act.
Questions to Consider
- In your own words, describe the document and its significance.
- How does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 define desegregation? Why is that definition significant? Would it challenge New York City school segregation or allow it to continue?
References
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