1964 Civil Rights Act: Religion, Politics, and Aftermaths

The 1964 Civil Rights Act provided a historic breakthrough for the enshrinement of racial equality under the law in the United States on several levels. By some measures, it represents the legislative highpoint of the midcentury Black freedom movement, particularly the nonviolent wing of the international campaign’s activists. Those activists, predominantly Christians, often relied on their faith to persuade their fellow Americans to support the bill at local, state, and national levels. Fascinatingly, the reality that these activists had to persuade so many of their fellow Christians to support the Civil Rights Act reveals the many Christianities actively being practiced in the United States after World War II. For instance, at the Act’s signing, Martin Luther King Jr. and J. Edgar Hoover stood in the same semi-circle while President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation. Figures who used their moral authority and appeals to their Christian faith to fight for and against racial equality appealed to their religious identities and logics. Christianity has never been a monolith. Neither has the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This roundtable seeks to incorporate many approaches to understanding the interplay of religion and politics in the fight for, the passage of, and actions that grew out of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. SPEAKER 1 On August 6, 1965, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and other civil rights activists looked on as President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. Despite this significant achievement in the struggle for civil rights, another sore was festering over 3,000 miles away, and on the evening of August 11, 1965, this sore exploded in Watts, California. This paper chronicles how a geographic re-reading of the Civil Rights movement reveals how Black religious communities in Los Angeles interpreted and re-imagined new economic and racial tensions not remedied by nonviolent strategies. SPEAKER 2’s paper addresses the Nation of Islam’s and Muslim Mosque Inc.’s responses to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Each organization’s reaction to the legislation reveals how Black radicals who had rejected Christianity reacted to a document that relied so closely on understandings of racial justice refracted through a Protestant-secular legal lens. In due course, Stuart will highlight the departures between Black Islamic groups’ pursuit of racial justice and the nonviolent approach of liberal Protestants in groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to better understand the core aims and religious tenets of African American Muslims in America. SPEAKER 3 The 1964 Civil Rights Act contained laws long desired by civil rights activists. However, while it primarily addressed segregation, it lacked many of the desired protections for voting rights. This led civil rights organizations to work within the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to develop Freedom Summer. During the summer of 1964, activists, often students from across the nation, developed and implemented protest tactics and community organizing strategies that would have implications for other movements, including the growing farm labor movement associated with Cesar Chavez. This paper considers how the immediate civil rights response to the Civil Rights Act was replicated and modified to fit the farm labor movement. SPEAKER 4 On September 29, 1969, the Rev. Bruce and Eugenia Johnson were found brutally murdered in their home while their three preschool children lay asleep. Their murders remain unsolved to this day. They lived in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood where they pastored the Armitage United Methodist Church. This paper will explore the activism and political engagements of the Johnsons through the primary organization where they affiliated, the North Side Cooperative Ministry. Organized in 1963, the North Side Cooperative Ministry served as a non-profit cooperative ministry composed of twenty-six Protestant churches concerned with such issues as racial discrimination in housing, daycare facilities, mental health services, neighborhood public schools, and the Vietnam anti-war movement. SPEAKER 5 is interested in exploring how American evangelicals came to embrace Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. When Congress amended Title VII in 1972 to require businesses to accommodate the religious needs of their employees, it did so at the behest of marginalized groups like Sabbath-observing Jews and Seventh Day Adventists. There was little sense that Title VII’s protections might extend to dominant groups like mainline or evangelical Christians. Yet today, evangelicals regularly appeal to Title VII, both through explicit legal claims and through political arguments meant to make greater space for religion at work. This is part of a broader story through which evangelicals have mobilized rhetorics of religious freedom to position themselves as vulnerable minorities in need of protection. In due course, he will trace some of the broader religious, political, and economic currents that have given rise to this shift. SPEAKER 6 In 1963, the largest American Presbyterian denomination appointed Gayraud Wilmore to lead its newly formed racial justice agency, which he did for nearly a decade. Its initial focus was desegregation/integration, using Christian rhetoric and networks to lobby Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act. But Wilmore and other Black mainline clergy gradually became disenchanted with their denominations’ white paternalism and integrationism, and between 1963 and 1969, they gravitated toward a Christian form of Black Power, creating radical Black clergy organizations and developing the academic discipline of Black Theology, while also continuing to leverage mainline church resources for racial justice. SPEAKER 7 On September 14, 1964, Dr. Lena Edwards, a leading African American obstetrician-gynecologist and devout Roman Catholic, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Lyndon B. Johnson. An advocate for racial equity in maternal healthcare, Dr. Edwards served working-class communities in Jersey City, NJ, delivering an estimated 5,000 infants. In the early 1960s, she relocated to Hereford, TX, where she established Our Lady of Guadalupe Maternal Clinic to provide prenatal care for Mexican migrant workers. This paper explores Edwards’s public health advocacy to consider how African American Catholics promoted racial and gender equity in healthcare in response to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1963-1964 Pontifical Commission on Birth Control, and Vatican II.