he Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion is the climax of a long crusade by reactionaries to vilify antidiscrimination practices designed to compensate for the systematic disadvantages that Black Americans have suffered historically. In its zeal to tear down six decades of civil rights protections and affirmative action policies, the Trump regime has turned reality on its head, claiming that white people, men, and Christians are the true victims of discrimination in the U.S.

There has been less public protest over this than other aspects of Trump’s accelerating fascist program — perhaps because the right named as its enemy DEI policies, which racial justice activists 

 as heavily watered-down versions of civil rights and affirmative action programs that were once robust.

Nevertheless, the wider implications of the assault on DEI are obvious. Though there is very little new in what MAGA is saying and seeking, the reactionaries have now amassed vast powers to dismantle hard-won policies designed to ensure dignity, fair treatment, and equitable access to good jobs for all people.

To succeed, they are counting on public amnesia about why these transformative policies were needed in the first place and how they were won. So there is no more important memory to revive today than the story of the fight over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — especially

its contentious Title VII section outlawing employment discrimination on grounds of race, color, sex, national origin, and religion.

hy was stopping employment discrimination so important to the movement that fought for the Civil Rights Act — and so appalling to those who resisted it?

The ruling ideology of the Jim Crow era treated policies that advantaged whites and excluded Blacks as simply the natural order of things. The all-pervasive, habitual employer preference for whites was invisible to those who benefited from it. Employers simply assumed white superiority over unqualified Black people. In 1963, the 

, an Atlanta-based interracial reform group, released a survey detailing corporations’ attitudes about discrimination in hiring practices. Many of those interviewed could not imagine hiring African Americans in sales or service, let alone technical work. A manager for Kaiser Aluminum said it would be “rather ridiculous” to hire a Black salesperson for a company serving mostly white customers.

Because of such biases, it was nearly impossible for African Americans to get better jobs. Across the South in 1960, Black people had “almost all of the household jobs and nearly half the laborers jobs,” human rights activist and economist 

 Breaking into any other kind of work was nearly impossible.

In Atlanta, ministers learned from their parishioners that “it is often necessary for Negro girls with one or more years of college training to work as maids. Negro men must take their college diplomas to the Post Office to work sorting mail.”

As a North Carolina Black woman told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1961, no matter “how much education you might have they won’t give you a chance at a job. It makes you feel awful.” And these experiences weren’t confined to the South. Black Americans had voting rights and access to public accommodations in the North, but not access to good jobs and promotions, outside the few and often struggling Black businesses.

This system of white preference and Black exclusion depended on property rights trumping human rights.

The unquestioned prerogative of employers to do as they wished with their businesses was backed up by a legal system that upheld the so-called freedom of contract — based on the fiction that both parties to a contract were equal under the law, when in fact capital had all the power and hence the true freedom. Workers’ only freedom was to accept or reject what they were offered, a pattern made worse in a region whose rulers crushed union organizing as ruthlessly as Black people’s attempts to vote.

The courts and most of the country’s white citizens believed that employers had “a right to discriminate.”

Black workers had always understood their worth, but their anger grew more acute in the years after World War II, particularly among those who had risked their lives in the war. They had believed they were waging a 

 for victory over fascism in Europe and America, but veterans came home to a country that still failed to honor its founding declaration that “all men are created equal.”

By the mid-1950s, the hypocrisy of a nation that fought fascism overseas but allowed racial terrorism and legal segregation at home set off an explosive contest between the Black freedom struggle on one side and reactionaries, North and South, on the other.

The version of history that most of us were taught about the civil rights movement fails to recognize that economic justice was core to the struggle. The sheer drama of the climactic showdowns to end Jim Crow in public accommodations (most famously lunch counters and buses) and for the right to vote (the Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign of 1964 and Selma in 1965) drew attention away from the centrality of the fight to secure access to good jobs.

 who became the first Black woman hired at a local textile mill, which paid much better than the poultry processing plan job she left: “The best thing that has ever happened to black women in the South in my lifetime is a chance to be full-fledged citizens. And that comes from their work. You can’t even pretend to be free without money.”

Demands for jobs were part of even the most iconic movement struggles. The 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott included a now-forgotten demand for, as one participant put it in 

, “a handful of jobs for Negro [bus] drivers.”

Throughout the country, activists inspired by the struggle in the South began calling for access to jobs on a fair basis with whites.

Also in 1955, however, conservatives throughout the U.S. joined forces to rally opposition to civil rights. William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review magazine became their mouthpiece.

It may have been based in midtown Manhattan, but its editorial team sided with the

Mississippi-born White Citizens’ Councils, elevated the arguments of militant segregationists, and argued relentlessly against civil rights. So avid was conservative hostility to equal citizenship for Black Americans that the National Review denounced the unanimous Supreme Court ruling against racial discrimination in public schools as a “rape of the Constitution.”

The right saw no contradiction between claiming to stand for liberty and opposing the Black freedom movement, because its leaders identified with a conservative tradition that silenced and subordinated Black Americans, based on a definition of liberty crafted by slaveholders who cared about property rights first and foremost. They were unable to imagine African Americans as legitimate members of the electorate, much less qualified for positions of authority. Again and again, conservatives argued that the government should not ensure that African Americans had the same life chances as whites, because Blacks lacked either the ability or the will to succeed.

he conflict reached a new level with the civil rights movement’s Birmingham campaign of spring 1963, in which the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., joined with local activists in a vast direct action campaign.

Most people learn that Birmingham was a fight to gain access to public accommodations and be treated with dignity, one that was answered by beatings by racist mobs,

bombings, and the public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, setting police dogs on nonviolent activists. It was those things, of course. But the campaign vividly fused antidiscrimination demands with calls for economic justice.

Many people know about King’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” but fewer remember his best-selling book,

, in which it was included. A key theme of that book was access to better jobs. King told America to notice “the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.” He had already been insisting to allies that “we must get better jobs in order to help our children to better education and housing, and in order to enjoy some of the entertainment and eating facilities that are now open to us.” King said that “the Negro today is not struggling for some abstract, vague rights, but for concrete and prompt improvement in his way of life.”

In the settlement negotiated in Birmingham, local business leaders pledged not only to desegregate Jim Crow lunch counters, restrooms, fitting rooms, and water fountains but to hire “Negroes on a nondiscriminatory basis throughout the industrial community” of the city, including in downtown retail jobs that had been a white monopoly.

Inspired, activists elsewhere took up the fight, including for better jobs, in what the scholar Harvard Sitkoff called “a brushfire of ‘little Birminghams’” — more than 2,000 demonstrations across the nation in 1963. James Farmer, co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, told Congress in 1963 that “unless we establish the right of individuals to gain full employment in keeping with their ability and their qualifications, I think that the other victories which we are winning in places of public accommodations and housing will be hollow victories. It is all right to fight for and win the right to spend money, but it is more vital to win the right to earn it.”

 had put it in 1960, the civil rights protesters were “concerned with something much bigger than a hamburger.”

Big public construction projects paid for with tax dollars but practicing Jim Crow became highly visible targets for protest in the North. NAACP and CORE branches in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Newark, New York, and Pittsburgh organized campaigns for the hiring of Blacks and Puerto Ricans.

Sometimes activists practiced civil disobedience with sit-ins and “lay-ins.”

In the summer of 1963, thousands of demonstrators joined a 

 for jobs for Black New Yorkers in building the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, blocking deliveries and singing freedom songs. In Deep South communities 

, activists organized Black citizens to boycott stores and firms that refused to hire them.

The young Jesse Jackson brought this tactic to Chicago as part of an SCLC initiative called 

, which eventually became a national campaign.

The business press recognized the newly confident struggle: Birmingham had radicalized working-class Blacks across America. “With a forcefulness few businessmen ever expected,” wrote the editors of Business Week, “Negroes nationwide are pressing, individually and in well-organized groups, for more jobs and better jobs. In its drama and impact, the campaign is comparable to the American worker’s drive to unionize at the turn of the century.”

King was always clear about the reasoning behind the campaign for economic justice.

 — a speech from which conservatives love to quote 

 to claim King’s legacy as their own — he made the case for affirmative action before the concept was in common use. “It is impossible to create a formula for the future,” King wrote in 

, “which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special 

 the Negro for hundreds of years. How then can he be absorbed into the mainstream of American life if we do not do something 

 him now, in order to balance the equation and equip him to compete on a just and equal basis?”

The same question applied doubly for Black women, who experienced the 

intersectional exclusions of race and gender

, pushing them into still worse jobs at lower wages, even as many were heading households. The logic of the campaign for economic justice was that success must be measured not by empty verbiage but by action and results.

The leaders of all wings of the civil rights movement hoped to win a national law, with penalties for continued discrimination and pathways to inclusion. The need for federal intervention and proactive approaches was clear from the antidiscrimination laws that already existed in 28 Northern and Western states by 1964. None were very effective; some even lacked any enforcement mechanism. Their passage was an acknowledgment that discrimination was a problem only government action could solve. But without serious penalties for violations, they achieved only meager results. New York had passed the first employment discrimination law in 1945. But white employers and even union members, especially in construction, soon learned that they could avoid opening jobs to Black people by claiming the pressure to practice equal opportunity was “discrimination in reverse.”

That claim pointed to the second reason for national legislation with enforcement power. Whitney M. Young Jr., head of the National Urban League, confronted white citizens with a simple truth:

“Whites themselves have been the beneficiaries of a preferential system — and nobody really wants to admit this.”

To break down that habitual, unthinking preference, binding legislation with penalties for violating the right to equal employment was essential.

Conservatives would have none of it: They clung to white privilege and the belief in Black inferiority with which they justified it. The National Review made James Jackson Kilpatrick, the intellectual architect of the South’s “

” to Brown v. Board of Education, its primary spokesperson. The Civil Rights Act must not pass, Kilpatrick wrote in late 1963, because it “would undermine the most precious rights of property.”

If “the citizen’s right to discriminate” is destroyed, “the whole basis of individual liberty is destroyed.” Kilpatrick was channeling the century-old “economic liberty” argument against abolition advanced by militant enslavers. Indeed, Kilpatrick quipped that he was “only a little to the south of John C. Calhoun,” the antebellum slaveholding class’s leading antidemocratic theorist.

Conservatives were defending the indefensible.

And thanks to a decade of civil rights protests, lawsuits, books, articles, debates, powerful speeches, and private conversations, most other whites now recognized that. By the time the 1964 Civil Rights Act came before Congress, 85 percent of white Americans supported equal employment opportunity for Black Americans. That was an epic shift. The right had lost a huge battle for the hearts and minds of the voters, owing as much to the repulsiveness of its practices as to the moral power of the movement it fought.

But conservatives wielded outsize power in Congress, not least because of the continuing disenfranchisement of Black voters. Southern segregationists had allied with Northern business conservatives since the late 1930s to block economic and civil rights reform. Now these allies fought the Civil Rights Act.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce portrayed Title VII as the road to dictatorship.

In a style of red-baiting picked up by other opponents, North and South, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which Kilpatrick belonged to, squealed that it should be called the “Socialist Omnibus Bill.”

Had John F. Kennedy still been president, he might not have prevailed with a strong bill against fierce opposition from both Southern segregationists and Northern corporate interests. But his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, was a New Deal Democrat from Texas whose years as the Senate’s most effective leader had taught him how to get things done.

“I’m shoving in all my stack on this civil rights bill,” said the wily poker player as he worked the phones and twisted arms to get votes. “Politics,” Johnson wrote, in words that remain true today, “goes beyond the art of the possible. It is the art of making possible what seems impossible.”

Yet to win its passage, Johnson had to get the votes of enough pro-business conservatives to overcome the opposition of Southern segregationists. Congressional sponsors of the act had to accept amendments that limited its Title VII employment section outlawing employment discrimination. The enforcement powers of the newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were weakened, and businesses with fewer than 100 employees were exempt for a year after the law’s passage. Most damaging, the act as amended prohibited “preferential treatment,” or proportional hiring and quotas. Right-wing critics would use the amended language in the future to insist that nearly all antidiscrimination efforts were really illegal “quotas.”

Activists were left with a vital yet flawed tool to achieve what the act had promised.

Nevertheless, victims of discrimination and their allies achieved a transformation that would have been impossible without the Civil Rights Act and the affirmative action policies adopted in its wake that included benchmarks to judge progress.

 concluded as early as 1975 that “perhaps the most dramatic and largely unnoticed change brought about by the civil rights revolution was a massive transformation in the composition of the black work force.” Millions moved from poverty into the stable working class and middle class, and the numbers of African Americans surged in professions such as law and medicine.

That upgrading meant the ability to buy homes and cars and to send their children to college.

Other oppressed groups also benefited from these reforms. From assembly lines and union halls to college lecture podiums and corporate boardrooms, Latino and Asian American men, women of all groups, 

, and persons with disabilities used the Civil Rights Act to fight discrimination and win fair treatment. Work-related struggles for equality transformed not only individual lives but American culture. As the economic historian 

, by opening up a rigged market that was hurting most Southerners, civil rights reforms enabled the economic development of the South, with white men also gaining significantly. As Wright wrote, “this was a revolution in which almost all parties gained.”

his ongoing transformation toward a fairer, more inclusive America is what Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and their donors and allies want to abort and roll back.

They want to force us back to a time when white, male, and Christian preference was unquestioned.

They believe that property rights should be held sacred, as did James J. Kilpatrick and John C. Calhoun, and that corporations and schools should be denied the ability to practice even the watered-down version of affirmative action that goes under the heading of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Indeed, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s firing of highly qualified military officers who are not white men demonstrates, this regime actively discriminates against Blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, and women under the bogus rubric of “merit.”

(How dare Pete Hegseth, whose main “qualification” to run the Pentagon was being a pro-Trump blowhard on Fox News, even as he 

 for poor performance, talk about “merit” in hiring?) The right wing found it terrifying that so many whites also reacted to the shocking murder of George Floyd with a determination to root out institutional racism, so MAGA has made the 

war on critical race theory and DEI practices

But they can take us back to the past only if we allow them to erase its memory. If our silence enables them. If we forget how so many fought so long and so hard to open good jobs to all. If we lose sight of the life-changing transformations that came from the hard-won reforms of this multiracial struggle for economic justice.

As Toni Morrison observed in her brilliant 

, to authoritarians, “truth is trouble.”

In their fear lies a precious power for our side — if we put it to use.

Hammer&Hope

Nancy MacLean

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11

The Forgotten History of the Civil Rights Movement’s Fight for Economic Justice

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