59 years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson, a great Texas Democrat, signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – a landmark piece of legislation that codified into law an American ideal that all people are created equal.
With the signing of the Civil Rights Act, the subsequent signing of President Johnson’s Voting Rights Act a year later, and later Supreme Court decisions upholding these newly-bestowed protections, Black and Brown Texans were suddenly given a slightly more equal footing in this country.
Texas Democrats are using this anniversary to mark two things.
- First: we can do big things. Up until 1964, it was thought that the Civil Rights Act could never pass because of racist senators from the South standing in its way for years.
- It took a whole lot of grit, hard work, creativity, and wisdom — from a determined majority of compassionate Americans and elected officials — to break through the gridlock and pass this monumental bill.
- It’s easy to lose hope in today’s political climate — with gerrymandering, attacks on voters’ rights, unfair institutional roadblocks and more constantly standing in the way of passing meaningful legislation that the majority of the people want and would clearly be in their best interest.
- But we cannot lose hope. We must reflect on 1964 and recall how refusing to give up hope can change the world around us.
- Secondly: this fight continues to this day. Black and Brown Texans, in this very moment in time, still must deal with the fact that, even in a majority-minority state, we are treated as second-class citizens:
- Our ability to vote is under attack.
- We live with police brutality in our day-to-day lives, at vastly disproportionate numbers from white Texans.
- We are convicted and jailed at disproportionate rates.
- Countless Black moms and other Texans are dying because of unfair healthcare disparities.
- Our communities continue to lack generational wealth because of Republicans’ refusal to even allow for common-sense racial equity programs to be established. The list goes on and on.
- And it’s not just Black and Brown Texans who Texas Republicans continue to suppress in order to maintain their grip on power: it’s disabled Texans. LGBTQ+ Texans. Young Texans. Senior Texans. Poor Texans. Texas teachers and students. Texas women.
- The fight looks slightly different from what it did in 1964, but the fight is substantively the same: we will continue pushing forward until that American ideal becomes a reality — that all people are created equal.