Committed: Civil Rights and the Struggle for Justice

         Civil rights were first constitutionalized in the 13th Amendment. However, the fact of civil rights as a false category is immediately revealed by the caveat written into the amendment for the terms of continued enslavement. It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States” [emphasis added]. In the wake of the Civil War, the country failed to redress slavery as a crime against humanity; instead, it sought to preserve the union by issuing civil rights. And because slavery was both reprehensible and legal, the nation is clear on its moral culpability, hence it has willfully refused to construct a legal system that would require a cost it imagines as too painful to endure. But justice requires punishment. In fact, the language of punishment appears in the amendment. However, in a kind of legislative slight of hand, the 13th Amendment displaces punishment of those agents enacting the transgression of slavery onto those who would be convicted as outlaws. This transferal resists the constitutional gains of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as well as the 1965 Voter Registration Act, which some mark as the end of the Civil Rights Era, allowing for the continuing disenfranchisement of segments of the society well into the twenty first century.

         During the mid twentieth century, “Civil Rights Movement” began to circulate as an overarching term for the struggle for civil liberty; however, the aims at the grass roots of the movement were always broader than the limits of the law. Rather than reject the term “civil rights” as a misnomer, the literature produced during the 1960s reveals how the notion of civil rights complicates and to some degree frustrates those seeking human dignity. Rather than foregrounding the law, which is inherent in a term like “civil rights,” the literature focuses on the experiences of a people. And the effort to represent those experiences using a lexicon that has proven inadequate to achieve its larger aims has often been depicted as a maddening descent.