The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed by Lyndon Johnson in the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s death, was meant to deliver the coup de grâce to Jim Crow, and to end the black marches and police crackdowns in Mississippi and Alabama that television viewers were seeing almost weekly. The act banned racial discrimination in voting booths (Title I); hotels, restaurants, and theaters (Title II); public facilities, from libraries to swimming pools to bathrooms (Title III); and public schools (Title IV). But that was not all it did. It also empowered the federal government to reform and abolish certain institutions that stood in the way of racial equality and to establish new ones. By expanding the federal Civil Rights Commission (Title V); by subjecting to bureaucratic scrutiny any company or institution that received government money (Title VI); by laying out hiring practices for all companies with more than 15 employees; by creating a new presidential agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), with the power to file lawsuits, conduct investigations, and order redress—by doing all these things, the act emboldened and incentivized bureaucrats, lawyers, intellectuals, and political agitators to become the “eyes and ears,” and even the foot soldiers, of civil rights enforcement.