"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 - a background of confrontation, official violence, injury, and murder that has few parallels in American history."* In 1963, the nation teetered on the edge of a racial divide. Frustrated by decades of second-class treatment, blacks, having lost patience with their country's legal and political institutions, began turning in larger numbers to direct action to secure their rights.

Racial segregation prevented them from using public facilities -- city buses, park facilities, and restrooms, for instance -- on an equal basis with whites. Educational opportunities were limited sharply by the practice of separating blacks and whites and providing the former with inferior instructional equipment, often hand-me-downs from white schools. As late as 1963, only 12,000 of the 3,000,000 black students in the South attended integrated schools. Mississippi had no desegregated public schools until 1964.

"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious," James Baldwin asserted as the 1960s dawned, "is to be in a rage all the time."**

*Robert D. Loevy, ed., The Civil Rights Act of 1964: The Passage of the Law that Ended Racial Segregation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997) 40.

**Quoted in James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-74 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) 468.