The framers of the Constitution were all white, wealthy landowners who had no problem with the idea of human slavery, or various other forms of oppression. Women and white men who owned no property were excluded from what were supposed to be our “inalienable rights.” Voting and equal protections provided in The Constitution were given short shrift in this country until the late 1950s and 60s. Until that time these guarantees were pretty much ignored for most citizens.

With the Emancipation Proclamation – which didn’t free the slaves so much as create two kinds of people: citizens and persons – and the passing of the Civil Rights Acts of 1865 and 1875, things actually became arguably worse for former slaves. Eventually the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was invalidated altogether, leading ultimately to the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine of Plessy vs. Ferguson. The Supreme Court’s utterly ridiculous finding paved the way for legal discrimination (Jim Crow laws) to exist unfettered until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

States – mostly in the south – were able to successfully bypass any Constitutional protections and deny these basic rights to whomever they wanted through the use of intimidation and race riots, as well as the courts.

Then came Brown vs. Board of Education Topeka in 1954 which opened the floodgates to a decade of racial strife. Brown vs. Board of Education only applied to public schools, though, so its effects were limited initially to busing students in from other schools, although in hindsight the forced busing of black kids into predominantly white schools only seems to have exacerbated the problem and hampered race relations in the long run. Clearly, forcing people who already hate each other to get along wasn’t the wisest solution to the problem, and eventually it was deemed to be a complete failure and discontinued.

The Rosa Parks incident and Dr.Martin Luther King Jr.’s boycott of the Memphis transit system were defining moments of the civil rights movement and rightfully so. Somewhat glossed over is the fact that the boycott was really only successful because it hurt the city financially. The city was forced to capitulate because it faced bankruptcy without the black ridership on the buses. Still, a victory is a victory, and it’s fair to say that indeed most civil rights legislation was enacted not from any moral obligation or sense of justice – but for the economic considerations of the elite classes.

With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the legal justification for racial discrimination was stripped away. Obviously discrimination didn’t end there, and unfortunately racism and sexism still play prominent roles in contemporary society.