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, white, house, conference, civil and/or rights:
“Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in civil-rights bills. Not to be confused with human rights, which are the dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth.”
—Dick Gregory (b. 1932)
“During my administration the most unpleasant and perhaps most dramatic negotiations in which we participated were with the various leaders of Iran after the seizure of American hostages in November 1979. The Algerians were finally chosen as the only intermediaries who were considered trustworthy both by me and the Ayatollah Khomeini. After many aborted efforts, final success was achieved during my last few hours in the White House.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“... white people, like black ones, are victims of a racist society. They are products of their time and place.”
—Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)
“Wearing overalls on weekdays, painting somebody else’s house to earn money? You’re working class. Wearing overalls at weekends, painting your own house to save money? You’re middle class.”
—Lawrence Sutton, British prizewinner in competition in Sunday Correspondent (London)
“The peace conference must not adjourn without the establishment of some ordered system of international government, backed by power enough to give authority to its decrees. ... Unless a league something like this results at our peace conference, we shall merely drop back into armed hostility and international anarchy. The war will have been fought in vain ...”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)
“Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“The importance of a lost romantic vision should not be underestimated. In such a vision is power as well as joy. In it is meaning. Life is flat, barren, zestless, if one can find one’s lost vision nowhere.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)