The civil rights movement was not precisely a movement of civil rights, in the sense of giving American blacks access to the ordinary rights of cives, or citizens. If it had been, the laws would not have required changing, only enforcing. Congress had thought in terms of citizenship when it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. So had the Supreme Court when it tried the Civil Rights cases of 1883. The term “civil rights” survived even as the approach failed. What was being fought over in the 1960s was something different from civil rights. It was a conception of human rights that had arisen in
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