I’m a staunch critic of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 solely because i don’t think it does enough. Part of the reason it doesn’t do enough is because it is just an Act, it can be rescinded at any point. Need proof? Take a look at the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (the Ku Klux Klan Act) and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In the case of United States v. Harris (1883), a mob had grabbed several African Americans from a Tennessee jail, killed one of them, and beat the others severely. The Supreme Court ruled that this was not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause because that amendment asserted that no state could deprive a persyn of equal protection under the laws, and did not specifically claim that no individual behavior was a state matter, the Court argued, and if the state did not deem the rights of Black people important enough to protect, that was not the federal government’s business. This decision struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1871 by holding that congressional action against private actions was not permitted by the Fourteenth Amendment.

This was also a part of the Supreme Court’s decision to nullify the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on the grounds that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give Congress the ability to pass legislation against racial discrimination in public accommodations because “that amendment proscribed only deprivation of rights by state action.” This decision reinterpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to mean that only discrimination by states, not individuals or private organizations, was prohibited under the law.

Precedent stands that not only are Acts passed by the federal government retractable, but Civil Rights Acts in particular can be thrown by the wayside. For that reason, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is also nothing more than a temporary protection of individual rights.