Triumph or Trepidation: Is the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Celebrating Its Last Anniversary?

By Regi Taylor, Baltimore Times

As much as July 2, 2024, the 60^th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is an occasion of triumph, it is also a perilous time, a time of trepidation. Contemporary Americans of African heritage are experiencing liberties and freedoms our ancestors who arrived in 1619 could never have dreamed, but our liberation may be tentative.

In the six decades since President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a former Texas racist for whom ‘nigger’ was once everyday parlance, signed landmark legislation nullifying Jim Crow as the law, the powers that had imposed 100 years of apartheid and 250 years of enslavement upon kidnapped Africans and their offspring, continued exacting systemic oppressive policies toward Black folk while working towards reconstituting a 21^st century version of slavery.

This scenario is neither paranoia nor hyperbole. A reading of the tea leaves and an analysis of the data makes clear that there is a powerful, concerted movement afoot in America to “take our country back,” espoused by the MAGA movement, by whom I mean the institutional intergenerational power structure, not the three-teeth, red hat, cult masses.

So, what is steeping institutionally in America that portends an imminent existential threat to the liberation, still in its infancy, of African Americans considering less than 15% of our 400 years, only the last sixty, have we experienced any semblance of humanity?

During the Watergate conspiracy drama, Deepthroat reportedly advised Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein to “follow the money.” In the weeks after the January 6^th insurrection, there was cable news buzz that a fundraising operative, at the behest of the Oval Office, was bankrolling politically activist nonprofits in collaboration with well-heeled dark money interests and a supermarket magnate, to finance the coup plot from the Willard Hotel on Capitol Hill. No further reporting on this angle has ever emerged.

It was scarcely two weeks before the MAGA attack of the Capitol that Donald Trump’s 234^th lifetime federal judicial appointment was being confirmed, and exactly ten weeks before his last of three SCOTUS picks were installed, setting up the 6 to 3 judiciary infrastructure allowing MAGA to dictate laws by fiat.

According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Trump’s federal judges were “nearly 90 percent white, nearly 80 percent male, and about two-thirds white men.” On one day in February 2019, he appointed 44 nominees to the court. By 2020, almost 1 in 4 federal appeals court judges nationally were appointed by the former president. Less than 1 in 20 were African American, and more than twenty refused to endorse Brown v Board as a correct legal decision.

Which brings us full circle to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and why it is vulnerable. Consider that before Jim Crow became illegal 60 years ago it was legal for the century between then and the 1865 Emancipation Proclamation; and from 1619 to 1865, slavery was legal; a brutal, debauched slavery, but still ‘legal.’ In the interests of the power elite whatever is required to be made legal or illegal will be so done. 

Under the former senate majority leader in the last administration, a nefarious judicial infrastructure to achieve the MAGA agenda has been assembled. Project 2025 assures the initiative will be doggedly pursued regardless of who occupies the White House in January.

The assertion of SCOTUS nominees before the U.S. Senate for confirmation that black letter law is sacrosanct was a con. Right now, many civil rights laws are imperiled. Consider the fate of affirmative action, abortion, and contraception, and the verbalized threat from a Justice against same sex marriage. 

On the other hand, there’s Citizens United. The majority of SCOTUS are following the dictates of their billionaire paymasters administered through the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society and have lost all modesty in their blatant, naked attempt to reinstall Trump in the White House this fall.

For most African Americans, is our active concern and our preparedness to resist being legally re-subjugated commensurate with the intense assault surely coming our way? What’s worse, woke is a joke, on us. Coming from people hostile to Black folks’ best interests, “woke” is an insult and a pejorative.

The final nail in the coffin may be the Supreme Court’s decision to grant the president, in other words, Donald Trump, full immunity from acknowledged illegal activities, divorcing all that is Democratic about America. Why wouldn’t the Civil Rights Act of 1964 be on the chopping block as well?

We are being trolled by antagonists who surmise that were we truly woke we would recognize what they have in store for us and be far more proactive and vigilant in the 18 weeks between Tuesday, July 2, and Tuesday, November 5, 2024.