Civil Rights Act of 1964

It's true.

And Kirk's self-described very, very radical view that the country made a mistake when it passed the Civil Rights Act.

Also true.

I'm asking you

So it is very mixed.

And this is why you need a Southern strategy, because as we're about to talk about the Civil Rights Act, but there is this moment when white Southerners say, and to a certain extent, white Northerners will get there, but say this party.

Is no longer going to represent my racial and therefore my economic and political interests.

And I need a new home.

Let's talk about 1964.

Yeah, exactly.

Let's talk about 1964 and the Civil Rights Act.

You know, we've done episodes about this.

Uh, tell us about that moment.

So the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is monumental in that it is the first real federal dismantling of Jim Crow segregation.

And so all of the physical infrastructure of Jim Crow, your white only, your Black only, your ability to be able to bar someone from a restaurant or prevent someone from going to a school or prevent someone from sort of, you know, participating in these public spaces, all of that is shattered, and it's fair to say white Southerners lose their mind.

Didn't [laughs] like the idea that...

Hmm

...

I'm about to ask, but, you know, LBJ signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and I take your point, Kelly, that it's a long time to implement-

Mm-hmm

Disc jockeys, more commonly known as DJs or MCs, would compete with each other by layering and remixing beats at their turntables and rhyming over the beats while friends battled it out in informal breakdancing competitions.

After the civil rights victories of the 1960s, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black communities experienced a decreased interest in their political and economic well-being from the government and policymakers.

The result was a lack of investment in Black communities and their social infrastructure, resulting in staggering poverty rates, increased police surveillance, and ambiguous messaging from former allies of the Black liberation struggle.

At the same time, the country was seeing the burgeoning Black arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which emphasized radical visions of reimagining Blackness through music, visual art, poetry, theater, and literature.

Yeah.

Though they were working, though, they wouldn't earn rights against employment discrimination and they wouldn't earn protection for equal pay until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

So, yes, there are more women working, but these women are facing so much crap in the workplace and they're not getting paid the same.

Received

When did it become a rubber stamp for people of color to always be Democrat?

Well, I don't know when it became a rubber stamp for people of color, but I know it became, and I don't know if I would call it a rubber stamp for black people behind the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

See, when we say terms like rubber stamp, you have to look at a people who, let's say like my family, for example, my mother and father that came out of Jim Crow South.

So when I became a certain age and I asked my mother, how do I vote? My mother told me Democrat, because she lived through a period of time where the Democrats did legislation that bought her out of Jim Crow.

You need to wear them down so badly that they're willing to go to that.

That's exactly what happened with the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

You eventually got to a cloture vote because Mike Mansfield wouldn't let anything else happen on the floor until that happened, and he kept a group of Republican and Democrat senators willing to keep the quorum going.

to make people have to suffer if they wanted to filibuster on it.

One of the things that happens in the mid 1960s is we pass a series of civil rights laws.

There's the 64 and 65 Civil Rights Act, there's the Voting Rights Act, and then later we have the Equal Employment Opportunity Act.

The Voting Rights Act actually says, oh, well, actually, if you're going to allocate those representatives and then the states are going to go further and distribute political power through redistricting, which is where the drawing of the maps happens.

And to be clear, that's often often called in the public language of gerrymandering, which has its own fun history.

And I think this is where we, I keep thinking about Pam Heard and Don Moynihan's book, Administrative Policymaking by Other Means.

which is when you can't get what you want through Congress, you find other ways of making it happen through, you know, this micromanagement of policy.

And I think that that's part of what we're seeing, you know, which is that you don't like the Civil Rights Acts.

You can make them impossible to enforce by erasing the data that they depend on.