Associated
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| The Civil
Rights Documentation Project
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| The landmark civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s has attracted considerable scholarly attention, deservedly so. Much of the analysis of this legislation has centered on the social and cultural conditions that gave birth to such laws as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. "It can be said of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that, short of a declaration of war, no other act of Congress had a more violent background," according to political scientist Robert Loevy, "a background of confrontation, official violence, injury, and murder that has few parallels in American history." Activist James Baldwin put it bluntly at the time: "To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage all the time." | |||
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As valuable as the emphasis on the civil rights movement has been, an equally vital chapter has been neglected -- the story of the legislative process itself. The Civil Rights Documentation Project provides a fuller accounting of law-making based on the unique archival resources housed at The Dirksen Congressional Center, including the collection of then-Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen (R-IL), widely credited with securing the passage of the bills. | ||
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Intended to serve the needs of teachers and students, the Civil Rights Documentation Project demonstrates that Congress is capable of converting big ideas into powerful law, that citizen engagement is essential to that process, and that the public policies produced forty years ago continue to influence our lives. | ||
| The project takes the form of an interactive, Web-based presentation with links to digitized historical materials and other Internet-based resources about civil rights legislation created by museums, historical societies, and government agencies. We hope to provide resources teachers can use to create lesson plans and materials to supplement their teaching of the legislative process, of recent American history, and of the civil rights movement, among other social studies topics. | |||
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Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen meeting with civil rights leaders in 1964.
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