Do We Still Believe in Civil Rights?

On March 15, 1965 a man from Giant Oaks California by the name of James J. Sloan wrote a letter the Congressman Harold T. “Bizz” Johnson urging support of the Civil Rights Bill. Which entailed for the most part the abolishment of the prerequisites required to vote, as well as the discrimination against minority groups when voting.

Mr. Sloan then progresses throughout his letter and continues to give support of federal troops in the south or “whatever means taken to guarantee the safety of individuals of whatever color.”  In bring this statement up he was referring to Bloody Sunday which had taken place in Selma, Alabama. Bloody Sunday is the name referred to the events that took place on March 7th where over six hundred SNCC and SCLC activist marched to support The Civil Rights Act. Where they were held to a stop by the Alabama State troopers a demanded to turn back. Once they had refused they policemen then open fired with teargas and beaten with billy clubs, leaving over fifty people were hospitalized.

The letter then precedes to urge the congressmen to pass the bill explaining it is the right thing to do and it would extend America. How simple this may all sound It is not the only thing I had stumbled upon. After going though simply one other folder I found a completely different radical view than what Mr. Sloan had expressed.

No more than three years later another letter was composed by Eugene P. Bayliss on the date of March 20th nearly exactly three years later from the first letter. The tone of everything changed, the two new big bills were the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and Title VIII.  Both the Civil Rights Act of 1968 also known as the Fair Housing Act and Title VIII were laws that prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing.

Bayliss throughout the letter is completely against the passage of both these act and actually  insults America and trashes African American remodels. She even questions exactly whose Civil Rights the government is fighting for stating “Whose Civil Rights…the phony civil rights of the Stokely Carmichaels, Rap Browns, and Martin ‘Lucifer’ Kings.” She urges the denial of this “un-American bill”

What is startling to me is that the general public of California in 1965 had been pro-civil rights and had wanted the African American citizens to be able to vote, but in a short time span the citizens would be totally against Title VIII. It leaves a total unanswered and real question of is discrimination an segregation really over even after fifty years or is it only others thinking on the behalf of their own good?