Civil Rights Act of 1964 Revisited 'It's about freedom': Post-Civil War Reconstruction amendments linked to landmark legislation, today

Feb. 10—JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 60th anniversary of which will be marked this year, was rooted in three amendments to the U.S. Constitution that had become the law of the land a century earlier.

—The 13th Amendment abolished slavery.

—The 14th Amendment addressed citizenship and equal protection.

—The 15th Amendment prohibited states from denying citizens voting rights "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

All of them were enacted in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.

"Those amendments really transformed the country," said Samuel Black, director of the Senator John Heinz History Center's African American Program.

The U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision stated that "separate but equal" racial segregation did not violate the law.

That provided legal support for Jim Crow laws, mainly in the South. There were separate bathrooms, hotel rooms, water fountains and schools for white and Black people.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to undo those systemic prejudices.

"Civil rights has been all about the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments," Black said. "It's about freedom. It's about citizenship and voting rights. And '64 kind of encapsulated all of those into the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and of course the Voting Rights Act of '65 soon followed, just to give it strength and give it some teeth.

"And we're still dealing with that today. As we know, there's been sort of a drawback on those in one way or another in various states across the union."

'Right those wrongs'

Lancaster County resident Thaddeus Stevens, a member of the Radical Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, was one of the main proponents of the abolitionist movement and the Reconstruction amendments, adopted between 1865 and 1870, although he did not live to see the passage of the 15th Amendment.

Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology refers to the amendments as his "legislative legacy" that "serve as the basis for all civil rights legislation" on its website.

"If you look at those three amendments, (they were) just powerfully addressing the ills of the age," said former Acting Gov. Mark Singel, a Cambria County native and author of "The Life and Loves of Thaddeus Stevens."

"He had a keen sense of what was necessary," Singel said of Stevens, "but it's more than that. He had almost a visionary sense of what could go wrong in the future, and how do we prevent this from happening again?"

Stevens had passionately encouraged President Abraham Lincoln, a fellow Republican, to free the slaves during the war.

On Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared "all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free," although it technically only applied to slaves in the Confederacy.

Stevens' "thinking was, like Lincoln's, that it would be not just a moral obligation, but he was also persuasive in telling Lincoln that this is how you win the war," Singel said.

"If you free the slaves and we have that entire population who would be certainly willing to join the Northern army, that would cripple the South and it would give us an advantage just in sheer manpower, which was a part of the tactical reasons for the Emancipation Proclamation."

Singel thinks several political and personal reasons factored into Stevens' support of civil rights.

"(There is) more than a little evidence to demonstrate that he had a personal relationship with one and maybe two people who worked in his household, and the ultimate sin at that age was that they happened to be of a different race," Singel said.

But well before that time, Stevens, a Vermont native, grew up in poverty. He also had a clubfoot, which made him the target of ridicule.

"There was a good deal of discrimination that he felt and resented very deeply," Singel said, "so he took it very personally when he looked at other folks who were being discriminated or discarded, and he made it his life's calling to right those wrongs."

Singel and others, including Barbara Zaborowski, Pennsylvania Highlands Community College's dean for learning resources, see Stevens' abolitionist work and the amendments as playing important roles in the context of modern civil rights and politics.

Specifically, Singel pointed to how the 14th Amendment has recently been discussed, after supporters of then-President Donald Trump, a Republican, attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a bid to prevent certification of Democrat Joe Biden as president. Trump was impeached for incitement of insurrection and acquitted in a Senate trial, and he currently faces federal charges and Georgia state charges for allegedly attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The 14th Amendment prohibited people who had "previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States" from holding certain federal elected offices or positions if the person "engaged in insurrection or rebellion."

"It was meant specifically for people who rebelled against their own country, and it is today meant specifically to apply to people who hold positions of authority who engage in insurrection," said Singel, a Democrat. "My own opinion, the words of Thaddeus Stevens and the Constitution are absolutely clear when, let's say, oh, for example, an unruly mob decides to invade the Capitol to interrupt the awarding of the electoral votes to the president.

"When they are deliberately trying to overthrow the popular vote and to keep a guy in office who lost an election, that is the definition of an insurrection, and Thaddeus Stevens knew it back then."

Issues have also arisen in recent years regarding voting rights in the Black community, including gerrymandering.

"I think what it tells us more than anything else is the fact how not-far we've come," Zaborowski said. "When you look at when those were written and why they were written — post-Civil War; Thaddeus Stevens being involved, who was really an advocate for civil rights; and the fact that we're still talking about those today, that there's voter suppression — it's crazy. It's crazy to think that after all of that, we're still having to discuss these issues all this time later."