2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Imagine if our civil rights champions had the same disdain for pragmatism as some BS supporters have [View all]Empowerer
(3,900 posts)The NAACP legal strategy formed the VERY FOUNDATION of the legislative strategy and victories.
Ever heard of Clarence Mitchell? He was the NAACP's top lobbyist aka the "Lion in the Lobby" and "101st Senator" who was largely responsible for the passage of all of the major civil rights legislation of the 1950s. It wasn't Martin Luther King that did it - he actually had very little to do with it - it was Clarence Mitchell, Roy Wilkins, the NAACP lawyers and many others who made this happen.
Are you actually a lawyer? The fact that you would actually position your fingers to type such a completely erroneous comment about the civil rights movement and the legislative history makes me wonder. Did you not learn in Con Law I that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was not the first Civil Rights Act? There were previous Civil Rights Acts passed through the years, including the Civil Rights Act of 1957, signed into law by President Eisenhower. Among other things, the 1957 law contained protections for voting rights (which were later improved upon by the 1965 Voting Rights Act), created the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and provided federal jurisdiction for prosecuting violations of individual civil rights. The law didn't go as far as the civil rights leadership and some Democratic senators wanted it to go but they agreed to it, even after it was watered down by Southern senators, because they knew some progress was better than none and they were not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. So they compromised, got the best bill they could and then went to work to get an even better bill, which they finally got seven years later.