Civil Rights Act of 1964 - Subsequent History

Subsequent History

The Constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was, at the time, in some dispute as it applied to the private sector. In the landmark Civil Rights Cases the United States Supreme Court had ruled that Congress did not have the power to prohibit discrimination in the private sector, thus stripping the Civil Rights Act of 1875 of much of its ability to protect civil rights . Even today, the Supreme Court has struck down parts of civil rights laws on the grounds that the Fourteenth Amendment does not give Congress the power to prohibit private sector discrimination.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the legal justification for voiding the Civil Rights Act of 1875, was part of a larger trend by members of the United States Supreme Court to invalidate most government regulations of the private sector, except when dealing with laws designed to protect traditional public morality.

In the 1930s, during the New Deal, the majority of the Supreme Court justices gradually shifted their legal theory to allow for greater government regulation of the private sector under the commerce clause, thus paving the way for the Federal government to enact civil rights laws prohibiting both public and private sector discrimination on the basis of the commerce clause.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, the Supreme Court upheld the law's application to the private sector, on the grounds that Congress has the power to regulate commerce between the States. The landmark case, Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, established the Constitutionality of the law, but it did not settle all of the legal questions surrounding the law.

In a 1971 Supreme Court case regarding the gender provisions of the Act, the Court ruled that a company could not discriminate against a potential female employee because she had a preschool-age child unless they did the same with potential male employees. A federal court overruled an Ohio state law that barred women from obtaining jobs which required the ability to lift 25 pounds and required women to take lunch breaks when men were not required to. In Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations, the United States Supreme Court decided that printing separate job listings for men and women was illegal, which ended that practice among the country's newspapers. The United States Civil Service Commission ended the practice among federal jobs which designated them "women only" or "men only."

In 1974, the Supreme Court also ruled that the San Francisco school district was violating non-English speaking students' rights under the 1964 act by placing them in regular classes rather than providing some sort of accommodation for them.

In 1975, a federal civil rights agency warned a Phoenix, Arizona school that its end-of-year father-son and mother-daughter baseball games were illegal according to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. President Gerald Ford intervened, and the games were allowed to continue.

In 1977, the Supreme Court struck down state minimum height requirements for police officers as violating the Act; women usually could not meet these requirements.