Following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, Congress began to enact legislation to protect the civil and voting rights of African Americans.

The first piece of such legislation to be enacted since Reconstruction was the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which made it a federal crime to interfere with a citizen’s right to vote. It also established the Civil Rights Commission to investigate any violations of the new law. In 1964 in the aftermath of the March on Washington and the assassination of President Kennedy, Johnson passed a more far-reaching civil-rights bill designed to end discrimination in employment “based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” “Sex” was added by Southern opponents of the bill in the hopes of killing it, but to their chagrin it was passed anyway The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established at this time to enforce the Act.

To bolster the 1957 law protecting voting rights the 24th Amendment was ratified in 1964, banning the levying of poll taxes in federal elections. Johnson followed this up with a Voting Rights Act in the next year, after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, which had dramatized the voting issue. Banning poll taxes and literacy tests, the Act authorized the Attorney-General to send federal examiners to register black voters whenever necessary. Within a year a quarter of a million new black voters had been registered. The Voting Rights Act was readopted and strengthened in 1970, 1975 and 1982.

In 1991, in the face of several reverses and a weakening of the civil-rights laws at the hands of Reagan and Bush Supreme Court appointees, Democrats deemed it essential to enact another civil-rights bill, which would make the language relating to discrimination more explicit. More recently, gays and lesbians have been advocating for extension of civil-rights law to include sexual preference, while in 2000 laws protecting against age discrimination have been under assault.