The White House Conference on Civil Rights was held June 1 and 2, 1966. The aim of the conference was built on the momentum of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in addressing discrimination against African-Americans. The four areas of discussion were housing, economic security, education, and the administration of justice.
President Lyndon Johnson had promised this conference in his commencement address at Howard University the year before. Like that address, the conference was named "To Fulfill These Rights." The title was a play on "To Secure These Rights," a report issued by Truman's civil rights commission in 1947. There were over 2,400 participants, representing all the major civil rights groups except SNCC, which boycotted the conference. Out of the conference came a hundred-page report that called for "legislation to ban racial discrimination in housing and the administration of criminal justice, and...suggested increased federal spending to improve the quality of housing and education."
Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, white, house, conference, civil and/or rights:
“A man’s real and deep feelings are surely those which he acts upon when challenged, not those which, mellow-eyed and soft-voiced, he spouts in easy times.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 2, ch. 13 (1962)
“I never knowed how clothes could change a body before. Why, before, he looked like the orneriest old rip that ever was; but now, when he’d take off his new white beaver and make a bow and do a smile, he looked that grand and good and pious that you’d say he had walked right out of the ark, and maybe was old Leviticus himself.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Though the house is full of
candy bars the wasted ghost
of my parents is poking
the keyhole, rubbing the bedpost.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“... though mathematics may teach a man how to build a bridge, it is what the Scotch Universities call the humanities, that teach him to be civil and sweet-tempered.”
—Amelia E. Barr (1831–1919)
“A wife is property that one acquires by contract, she is transferable, because possession of her requires title; in fact, woman is, so to speak, only man’s appendage; consequently, slice, cut, clip her, you have all rights to her.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)