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6: Civil Rights

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    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal....” So begins the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson included a version of this statement in his initial draft of the Declaration, but it was Benjamin Franklin’s idea to add the term self-evident. The implication was a bold one: not only was the equality of men a truth, it was a truth so obvious and indisputable that no further explanation or justification was needed to prove it.

    Photograph of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C.
    The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, situated south of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., has honored the civil rights leader since 2011.

    Nearly two-and-a-half centuries hence, it’s clear that this ambitious claim was aspirational at best and hollow at worst. The Constitution ensured that America’s government would recognize no royal blood or noble titles, but it also allowed slavery to persist for almost a hundred years after independence and racial discrimination even longer. Declaring equality for all men rather than for all persons also grates on modern ears. Even if one charitably interprets men in the classical sense as referring to both sexes, the Constitution provided no practical protection for the rights of women, who were barred from voting in most states at the time of ratification and treated as inferior to men in many other legal domains.

    America’s struggle to live up to its egalitarian promise is represented in its civil rights history. A civil right is a protection from discrimination or unequal treatment. Civil rights limit the abilities of both public and private institutions to treat persons differently on the basis of demographic traits. The nature and extent of these limitations vary depending on the traits and contexts in question.

    Though the terms liberties and rights are interchangeable, civil liberties and civil rights are distinct categories of rights. To oversimplify: when you see or hear civil liberties, think “freedom,” and when you see or hear civil rights, think “equality.”

    Throughout its history, America has changed its perspective on the meaning of equality, both as a governmental structure (with legal reforms) and as a people (with shifts in public opinion). These two types of change have mutually reinforced one another: societal pressures have played a key role in securing new civil rights protections, which in turn have normalized equalities between groups that were far less “self-evident” before they were enshrined in law. How far we have yet to go in the pursuit of equality, and how best to go about getting there, continue to be matters of heated debate in the United States.

    This page titled 6: Civil Rights is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Benjamin R. Kantack (Tekakwitha Press) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.

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