The Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law on July 2, 1964. Its principal genesis was to secure for African-Americans full equality under our Nation's laws. It also prohibited sex discrimination in employment, an amendment proposed by a reactionary Virginia congressman, Howard Smith, who at the time was Chair of the House Rules Committee.
In the July 21, 2014, edition of The New Yorker, Louis Menand reviews and discusses two recently-published books commenorating the 50 year anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, "The Sex Amendment: How Women Got In On the Civil Rights Act." The books are "The Bill of the Century" by Clay Risen and "An Idea Whose Time Has Come" by Todd Purdom.
The review is interesting reading and some of the factual tidbits show how things change very quickly, even where their gestation, as with racial and gender equality, is very long. Those tidbits include the following:
- In 1956, when Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, soundly thrashed Adlai Stevenson in the second straight Presidential election, Stevenson, a Democrat from Illinois, carried only seven states, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, all of which had laws mandating racial segregation.
- In the 1960 Presidential campaign, Jackie Robinson, then the most admired African-American in the country, campaigned for Richard Nixon. When it was suggested by Nixon's running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts, that Nixon might select an African-American for his campaign, John F. Kennedy condemned the suggestion as "racism at its worst."
- The Kennedy campaign did surreptiously intervene on behalf of Martin Luther King, Jr. when Dr. King was sentenced to four months hard labor in Atlanta. The campaign spread word of these actions among black voters and Kennedy received about 70% of the African-American vote in the 1960 election. No gratitude was shown, however, and the Kennedy administration put civil rights on the back-burner until events forced its hand.
- The spring of 1963 brought the graphic images of the Birmingham, Alabama police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor turning fire hoses and attack dogs on young protestors, some of them children. After Alabama Governor George Wallace's famed and staged "stand in the schoolhouse door" at the University of Alabama in June 1963, the international embarrassment for our Nation combined with the obvious moral imperative caused the Kennedy administration to send the bill that became the Civil Rights Act to Congress on June 19, 1963.
- Republicans in Congress settled on what seems now the remarkable strategy of proposing their own and maximalist civil rights legislation; they perceived advantage in putting Democrats in the position of watering-down civil rights legislation.
- The Republican strategy made some sense: James Eastland, a Democratic Senator from Mississippi and Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, described the civil rights bill as a "complete blueprint for a totalitarian state."
- Faced with the possibility of a discharge petition, Congressman Smith proposed the one-word "sex" amendment during debate on February 8, 1964. Liberal Democrats in the House reacted furiously, believing it to a cynical ploy to poison the bill's future.
- Congressman Smith, it turns out, had supported an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution since 1945. He was friends with a woman named Alice Paul, who had been a militant suffragist to the point of chaining herself to the White House fence and burning President Wilson's speeches in public. The review mentions a biography of Alice Paul, "Alice Paul: Claiming Power" (Oxford) by J.D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry. After the Nineteenth Amendment secured for women the right to vote in 1920, Paul and other activists turned their attention to the ERA. In 1923 and every year after that an equal rights bill had been introduced in Congress. Anti-union conservatives believed that the ERA would favor business; Smith was one of them, as textile mills in his district employed large numbers of women.
- Alice Paul founded the National Women's Party (NWP) in 1913, and it became, over the course of the next several decades, a lobbying group. Seeing the opportunity presented by the Kennedy administration's civil rights bill, Paul asked two NWP members from Virginia to lobby Congressman Smith; they wrote him in December 1963 asking him to add "sex" to the bill.
- The "sex" amendment was met with derision and ridicule when Congressman Smith introduced it. But the opposition was cowed by arguments offered by Martha Griffiths, a Congresswoman from Michigan, who pointed out that the failure to adopt the amendment would leave white women with no legal protection against employment discrimination.
- After passage of the Civil Rights Act, the "sex" amendment became known as "the Bunny Law," after a hypothetical case in which a man is turned down for a job as a Playboy Bunny. However, almost one-third of the charges received by the EEOC in its first year alleged sex discrimination.
- The EEOC proved reluctant to enforce the prohibition against sex discrimination. The National Organization for Women (NOW) had to secure a mandamus writ from the courts ordering EEOC to enforce the sex discrimination prohibition.
- In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Phillips v. Martin Marietta that the company's policy of not hiring women with children of preschool age violated Title VII. The plaintiff, Ida Phillips, a white woman, was represented by the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund.
And, of course, much has happened since. Sandra Day O'Connor became the first woman on the Supreme Court in 1983. Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman on a major party's Presidential ticket in 1984. Senator Eastland, who had called the civil rights bill the beginnings of a "totalitarian state," was reelected, hired many blacks as staffers to the Judicary Committee and worked closely with Ted Kennedy, until declining to run for re-election in 1978 when challenged by Republican Thad Cochran, who recently prevailed in a Republican primary based in significant part on the support of black voters, "It Looks Like African-Americans Really Did Help Thad Cochran Win." Howard Smith, however, lost his seat in the 1966 midterms.
Robert L. Abell
www.RobertAbellLaw.com
