The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a revival and renewal of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which was old and outdated. America was growing a as a country and there was great need for improvements in the way the people were treated throughout the country. All people were not being treated equally and there was no law to help protect this.
President John F. Kennedy proposed the Act and spent his years in term enforcing the Act that was originally created my President Grant, and in accordance with the Fourteenth Amendment. Kennedy announced his plans for a new Act that protected the people in a public speech on June 11, 1963. The civil rights of people in the south were being ignored and injustices were happening all over with no set laws to protect or enforce such behaviors.
Kennedy believed the federal government had a right to protect these people and also wanted to abolish the Jim Crow laws of the south which made it impossible for black people to vote, which should have been a basic right of a United States citizen.
Enacting such laws would not be easy as an earlier Supreme Court ruling won out on the issue saying that it was a private matter and that the federal government would not act on such cases that applied to private citizens. This Supreme Court ruling originally said that they could not force equality on private business owners.
Basically this meant that if you owned a business or public property and you did not want to allow people of a certain race or religion to enter the premises, you had the right under the law to prevent them. This meant blacks could not shop in certain stores, take certain public transportation or even enter certain churches. Signs that read “no blacks” abounded in the south and African Americans were hardly any more free than when they had been slaves.
So Kennedy had to propose his Act under what was called the Commerce Clause and intense debate surrounded because of it. While the legislation was being discusses in the House of Representatives, President Kennedy was assassinated and sadly, never got to see the Act become passed.
After the tragic assassination of President Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson took over and actively began pushing and promoting the act that was finally passed on July 2nd 1964. Since then, the Act has been added to and expanded to protect United States citizens from:
• Racism
• Prejudice in school
• Sexism
• Prejudice in employment
• Other prejudice in public areas
