Civil rights then and now Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Civil rights then and now - Essay Example That victory of moral persuasion by Martin Luther King, Jr was translated into the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the law that prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex in employment, public accommodations, and federally funded programs. The ideals of a jaundiced Constitution have deep historic roots in the first principle of freedom the proposition, as Lincoln called it that all men are created equal, and that this equality forms the basis of inalienable individual rights. It was to vindicate this principle that Americans ratified the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing "the equal protection of the laws" to all citizens. And it was to vindicate this principle that, beginning in the 1930s, the lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund embarked upon a litigation strategy designed to end public school segregation. However, it is the principle of equal treatment under law without regard to race that for 125 years constituted the unvarying goal of antislavery crusaders and civil rights advocates. The most distinctive legal claim of the American civil rights tradition has been the principle of nondiscrimination, above all a claim for equal treatment by the government without regard to race. Despite the legal mandate of equal treatment, for the past several years many of Americas educational institutions have blatantly violated the law in the name of "affirmative action" and "diversity." In reality these terms are extremely misleading euphemisms for the practice of gross racial discrimination. In the undergraduate school, applicants for admission were simply sorted into different pools with lower admission standards if they identified themselves as African-American, Hispanic, or Native American, and higher standards if they identified themselves as white