6.1: Introduction

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

“We The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, situated south of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., has honored the civil rights leader since 2011. 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’s initial draft of the Declaration called them sacred and un-deniable, but Benjamin Franklin suggested self-evident instead. The implication was a bold one: not only was the equality of men a truth, it was obvious and indisputable. No further explanation or justification was needed to prove it.

Today, it’s clear that this ambitious claim was aspirational at best and hollow at worst. The Constitution ensured that America would recognize no royal blood or noble titles, but it also allowed slavery to persist for almost a century 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 interprets men in the classical sense as referring to both sexes, the Constitution did little to protect the rights of women. Most states barred women from voting at the time of ratification, and they were treated as inferior to men in many other ways.

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

Though the terms liberties and rights are synonyms, 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.”

Over time, America has changed its perspective on the meaning of equality, both as a government (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. In turn, those protections have normalized equalities between groups that were far less “self-evident” before. How far we have yet to go in the pursuit of equality, and how best to go about getting there, continue to provoke heated debate.