On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation in history — the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
For more than sixty years, the Civil Rights Act and the executive orders and rules that followed have helped countless Americans who face systemic discrimination and employment, with one department, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, responsible for investigating and fighting employment discrimination for one-fifth of the U.S. labor force.
But on his second day in office, President Donald Trump labeled O.F.C.C.P.’s efforts to enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act illegal and discriminatory — against white people. Within a week, Trump’s acting secretary of labor ordered the O.F.C.C.P. to “immediately cease and desist all investigative and enforcement activity” and close all open cases.
While previous Administrations of both parties have celebrated past anniversaries of this historic date, the Trump Administration has focused instead on shutting down anything it can tar with the label of D.E.I. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission even created a web page dedicated to helping white Americans file complaints based on being victimized by diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
NOW members know that these attacks have not come out of nowhere.
For decades, extremists have been slashing civil rights protections and working to weaken the national commitment to address racial inequality. Since the racial reckoning of 2020, they’ve targeted affirmative action in college admissions, banned books and shut down school libraries, and called the honest history of race in the U.S. as “anti-white” and “divisive.”
What’s more, polling shows the majority of Republicans see efforts to dismantle racism as “making life more difficult for white Americans” and believe that racism against Black Americans was a problem in the past, but today is more of a problem for white Americans.
We must keep fighting for the values that drove the original campaign for the Civil Rights Act, and which today empower its’ defense. Here’s what those values looked like on July 2, 1965, one year after the signing of the Civil Rights Act, in this TV documentary created by the U.S. Information Agency to commemorate the occasion.
Sixty years later, we must recommit ourselves to continuing the work the Civil Rights Act began.
