Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act on 1968. Here are five facts about the final great legislative achievement of the civil rights era.
1. The original goal of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was to extend federal protection to civil rights workers, who were being intimidated, assaulted, and sometimes murdered, while organizing and registering black voters throughout the South. The bill was eventually expanded to address racial discrimination in housing, which is why it is most commonly known as the Fair Housing Act.
2. In the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., riots spread through 110 cities throughout the United States. Washington, D.C. was among the most affected cities, as the mayor imposed a curfew and President Lyndon B. Johnson dispatched more than 13,000 federal troops to curtail the riots. At the time, the legislation was languishing in the House of Representatives’ Rules Committee. But as Marion Morris and Charles Mathias, Jr., note, “The Rules Committee, jolted by the repeated civil disturbances virtually outside its door, finally ended its hearings on April 8. The next day, it reported to the full House a rule for debate that agreed to the Senate amendments, including the compromise fair housing title, and prohibited any additional amendments.” The following day, April 10, the House debated for one hour the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and passed it 250–71. The very next day, President Johnson signed the bill into law.
3. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 prohibits housing discrimination because of race, color, religion, familial status, or national origin (gender was added in 1974, and people with disabilities and families with children in 1988). The law makes it illegal to refuse to “sell or rent after the making of a bona fide offer, or to refuse to negotiate for the sale or rental of, or otherwise make unavailable or deny, a dwelling to any person because they belong to the prohibited category.” The Act also makes it unlawful to “deny any person access to or membership or participation in any multiple-listing service, real estate brokers' organization or other service, organization, or facility relating to the business of selling or renting dwellings, or to discriminate against him in the terms or conditions of such access, membership, or participation, on account of the prohibited category.”
4. The Act includes an exemption for religious organizations. According to the law, a religious organization, association, or society, or any nonprofit institution or organization operated, supervised or controlled by or in conjunction with a religious organization, association, or society, is exempted from limiting the sale, rental or occupancy of dwellings which it owns or operates for other than a commercial purpose to persons of the same religion, or from giving preference to such persons, unless membership in such religion is restricted on account of race, color, or national origin.
5. The legislation also included the Anti-Riot Act. This provision is sometimes referred to as the “H. Rap Brown Law” since it was believed to be a response to H. Rap Brown, a member of the Black Panther Party who was arrested and charged with inciting a riot. The text of the law states:
Whoever travels in interstate or foreign commerce or uses any facility of interstate or foreign commerce or uses any facility of interstate or foreign commerce, including, but not limited to, the mail, telegraph, telephone, radio, or television, with intent – (A) to incite a riot; or (B) to organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot; or (C) to commit any act of violence in furtherance of a riot; or (D) to aid or abet any person in inciting or participating in or carrying on a riot or committing any act of violence in furtherance of a riot . . . Shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
Joe Carter
Joe Carter is the author of The Life and Faith Field Guide for Parents, the editor of the NIV Lifehacks Bible, and the co-author of How to Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History’s Greatest Communicator. He also serves as an executive pastor at the McLean Bible Church Arlington location in Arlington, Virginia. Read More
On this date, less than a week after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the House of Representatives passed the Fair Housing Act of 1968—also known as the Civil Rights Act of 1968—which prohibited discrimination in the sale or rental of housing nationwide. Introduced as H.R. 2516 by House Judiciary Committee chairman Emanuel Celler of New York on January 17, 1967, the bill passed the House in August 1967 and made it through the Senate with amendments on March 11, 1968. The bill then entered a legislative limbo as the House Rules Committee—which had long acted as a brake on civil rights initiatives—postponed action on the amended Senate bill until April 9. Rules Committee Chairman William Colmer of Mississippi was, as he put it, “violently opposed to this kind of legislation.” But King’s murder on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee, changed the calculus for passage, igniting a week of intense debate in the House over the fate of the legislation as riots spread through cities across America. On Friday, April 5, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent a letter to Speaker John McCormack of Massachusetts asking him “to bring this bill to a vote” as soon as possible in order to show the nation that its leaders were acting on civil rights issues championed by King. After a turbulent weekend of violence in Washington and other cities, the Rules Committee met on April 9. Rather than sending it to the floor for a vote, Colmer hoped to delay the bill by sending it to a conference committee for additional changes. Representative John B. Anderson of Illinois—who had initially been against moving the bill to the floor, but changed his mind—was the decisive vote as the Rules Committee rejected Colmer’s plan. The committee then turned its attention to H. Res. 1100, the special rule for the housing bill proposed by Representative Ray Madden of Illinois. If passed by the House, the resolution would end debate on the Senate’s amended version of H.R. 2516 and send the bill directly to the White House without changes. The committee voted 9-6 in favor of sending H. Res. 1100 to the House Floor for debate. On April 10, the House engaged in one hour of heated debate. Opponents decried the intervention of the federal government in what they viewed as a state-level concern. Representative Joseph D. Waggonner of Louisiana claimed that rioters had “blackmailed” the House into considering the bill. Representative Anderson, however, saw the violence as the product of “conditions that for all too long have been left untended in our society.” A final attempt to derail the bill by sending it to committee was rejected by a vote of 229 to 195. With cheers from the packed House Gallery, H. Res. 1100 swiftly passed by a vote of 250 to 172. President Johnson signed the bill into law on April 11, 1968.