Civil Rights Act of 1957, Congress's first civil rights legislation since the end of Reconstruction, established the U.S. Justice Department as a guarantor of the right to vote. The act was a presidential response to the political divisions that followed the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ending official racial segregation in the public schools.
In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sought a centrist agenda for civil rights progress. Urged by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, in his 1956 State of the Union message Eisenhower adopted the 1947 recommendations of President Truman's Civil Rights Committee. Brownell introduced legislation on these lines on 11 March 1956, seeking an independent Civil Rights Commission, a Department of Justice civil rights division, and broader authority to enforce civil rights and voters' rights, especially the ability to enforce civil rights injunctions through contempt proceedings.
Congressional politics over the bill pitted southern senators against the administration. Owing to the efforts of House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, the bill passed, albeit with compromises including a jury trial requirement for contempt proceedings. The bill passed the House with a vote of 270 to 97 and the Senate 60 to 15. President Eisenhower signed it on 9 September 1957.
The act established the Commission on Civil Rights, a six-member bipartisan commission with the power to "investigate allegations … that certain citizens … are being deprived of their right to vote" as well as to study other denials of equal protection of the laws. The act forbade any person from interfering with any other person's right to vote, and it empowered the attorney general to prevent such interference through federal injunctions. The act also required appointment of a new assistant attorney general who would oversee a new division of the Justice Department devoted to civil rights enforcement.
The Civil Rights Division was slow to mature. In its first two years it brought only three enforcement proceedings, in Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, and none in Mississippi, where voter registration among blacks was only 5 percent. But the division greatly furthered voting rights during the Kennedy administration, under the leadership of Burke Marshall and John Doar. The commission likewise proved to be an effective watchdog, and its reports led not only to a strengthening of the division but also set the stage for further civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
Bibliography
Doar, John. "The Work of the Civil Rights Division in Enforcing Voting Rights Under the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960." Florida State University Law Review 25 (1997): 1–18.
Jackson, Donald W., and James W. Riddlesperger Jr. "The Eisenhower Administration and the 1957 Civil Rights Act." In Reexamining the Eisenhower Presidency. Edited by Shirley Anne Warshaw. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Lichtman, Allan. "The Federal Assault Against Voting Discrimination in the Deep South, 1957–1967." Journal of Negro History 54 (1969): 346.
—Steve Sheppard
Encyclopedia of American History Copyright © 2006 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
