The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

In the summer of 1963, well before Kennedy’s assassination, one anecdote from the Senate’s debates captured the imagination of the public. Senators skeptical of civil rights legislation hinted that “Mrs. Murphy”—a hypothetical old widow who rented out a room in her house in a northern city—might wind up bearing the brunt of federal surveillance and law enforcement if she got too picky about whom she accepted as a tenant. The legislation’s backers treated the question as ridiculous—of course a boarding house, unlike the hotels that would be covered in any civil rights legislation, was Mrs. Murphy’s “personal” property, with which she could do as she pleased. But the distinction was not as obvious as pro–civil rights legislators claimed, and the certitudes that rested on it proved complacent. In his opening remarks at the 1963 March on Washington, A. Philip Randolph, organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (and of the march itself), warned that “real freedom will require many changes in the nation’s political and social philosophies and institutions. For one thing we must destroy the notion that Mrs. Murphy’s property rights include the right to humiliate me because of the color of my skin. The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality.” And so it was after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Property simply would not enjoy the same constitutional protection that it had before.