The History of Civil Rights Policy In the United States

Mark Tushnet, Harvard Law School, has published Civil Rights Policy. Here is the abstract.

This essay offers an overview of US civil rights policy from the nineteenth century to the present. The expansion of the range of substantive interests covered by the term “civil rights” has been accompanied by an increasing emphasis on the connection between equality and civil rights. From the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth, the term referred to racial equality with respect to whatever fit into the category, whether property rights, the right to vote, or social rights. Starting roughly in the middle of the twentieth century, “civil rights” began to be connected to other categories, such as gender, religion, sexual orientation, and by the twenty-first century quite a bit more. After examining the history of the idea and its implementation, the essay concludes with a discussion of contemporary controversies over disparate impact versus disparate treatment, affirmative action, and accommodation. 

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.