March on Washington 95Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission:
A federal agency estab-
lished in 1964 to invest-
igate claims of job
discrimination.virtually wiped out Jim Crow in a single stroke, blacks no longer had to file
their own lawsuits to stop segregation in schools, housing, employment, and
public accommodations; that was now the attorney general’s responsibility.
Any school, business, or program that discriminated against blacks would
lose its federal money. Title VII outlawed job discrimination by creating a
permanent watchdog federal agency – the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission – that succeeded Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime FEPC. A
Community Relations Service would mediate racial problems. The law’s
weakest provision concerned voting rights, a shortcoming that prolonged the
civil rights movement.
Having secured this sweeping civil rights law, Johnson challenged
America to solve its race problem by breaking the cycle of poverty and wel-
fare dependency. To build a ‘great society,’ Johnson established an Office
of Economic Opportunity, headed by president Kennedy’s brother-in-law,
Sargent Shriver. Under OEO, Shriver established a comprehensive, but
under-funded, ‘war on poverty’ that included programs such as Head Start
for disadvantaged preschoolers, Job Corps for high school dropouts needing
vocational training, Upward Bound for troubled youth, food stamps for the
poor, legal aid for those who could not afford an attorney, Medicaid to treat
the poor’s health problems, and VISTA as a domestic Peace Corps to eco-
nomically depressed areas. Underlying the Great Society was the cultural
assumption that blacks were poor because they had not learned the middle-
class value of work. Nothing was done to create new jobs that paid a living
wage or to stop blatant discrimination by employers and labor unions.
Despite their limitations, Johnson’s initiatives improved the quality of life for
many Americans.
While one hand of the government helped blacks, the other hand warred
on them. When Martin Luther King received the Nobel peace prize in
December 1964, an enraged J. Edgar Hoover called him ‘the most notorious
liar in the country’ and plotted his death. The FBI mailed a package to King
that contained a lurid recording of King’s hotel room, as well as an unsigned
note urging him to commit suicide: ‘You are done.... There is only one
thing left for you to do. You know what it is....You better take it before
your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.’ In the hope that
King’s suicide was likely, the FBI selected King’s successor, a conservative
black New York City attorney. Hoover did not recognize that the civil rights
movement was not the creation of a single leader. The events in Mississippi
in the early 1960s proved yet again that the movement relied on many
indigenous and imported workers.
Great Society: President
Lyndon Johnson’s plan to
end racism and poverty by
enacting civil rights laws
and establishing federal
assistance programs.