American Government and Politics Today, Brief Edition, 2014-2015

CHAPTER FivE • Civil RigHTs 99

n    It provided for the withholding of federal funds from programs administered in a

discriminatory manner.

n    It established the right to equality of opportunity in employment.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the cornerstone of employment- discrimination

law. It prohibits discrimination in employment based on race, color, religion, gender, or

national origin. Under Title VII, executive orders were issued that banned employment

discrimination by firms that received any federal funding. The 1964 Civil Rights Act created

the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), to administer Title VII. It was not

until 1972, however, that Congress gave the EEOC the right to sue employers, unions, and

employment agencies. Litigation then became an important agency activity.

The voting Rights Act of 1965. As late as 1960, only 29 percent of African Americans

of voting age were registered in the southern states, in stark contrast to 61 percent of

whites. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 addressed this issue. The act had two major provi-

sions. The first outlawed discriminatory voter-registration tests. The second authorized

federal registration of voters and federally administered voting procedures in any politi-

cal subdivision or state that discriminated electorally against a particular group. The act

also provided that certain political subdivisions could not change their voting procedures

and election laws without federal approval, a provision revoked by the Supreme Court

in 2013.

The act targeted counties, mostly in the South, in which fewer than 50  percent of

the eligible population were registered to vote. Federal voter registrars were sent to those

areas to register African Americans who had been kept from voting by local registrars.

Within one week after the act was passed, forty-five federal examiners were sent to the

South. A massive voter-registration drive covered the country.

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 and other Housing Reform legislation. The Civil

Rights Act of 1968 banned discrimination in most housing and provided penalties for

those attempting to interfere with individual civil rights (giving protection to civil rights

workers, among others). Subsequent legislation added enforcement provisions to the fed-

eral government’s rules against discriminatory mortgage-lending practices.

Consequences of Civil Rights legislation. As a result of the Voting Rights Act of

1965 and its amendments, and the large-scale voter-registration drives in the South, the

number of African Americans registered to vote climbed dramatically. By 1980, 55.8 per-

cent of African Americans of voting age in the South were registered. In recent national

elections, turnout by African American voters has come very close to the white turnout.

In 2008, with an African American on the presidential ballot, African American turnout

exceeded that of whites for the first time in history.^9

Political Participation by African Americans. Today, there are more than ten thou-

sand African American elected officials in the United States. After the 2012 elections, the

U. S. Congress included forty-two African Americans. The movement of African American

citizens into high elected office has been sure, if exceedingly slow. Notably, recent poll-

ing data show that most Americans do not consider race a significant factor in choos-

ing a president. In 1958, when a Gallup poll first asked whether respondents would be

9. A widely reported study claimed that African American turnout did not quite match that of whites,
   but this conclusion was based on an overestimate of the number of African Americans eligible
   to vote.

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