[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 100 (Wednesday, June 25, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H5730-H5731]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Illinois (Mr. Foster) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. FOSTER. Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize the 50th 
anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the greatest 
legislative achievements in the history of our country.
  There were so many men and women who were a part of the civil rights 
movement, but I would like to take this time to highlight one of them 
who has been especially important in my life, and that is my father, 
who was a civil rights lawyer and who wrote much of the enforcement 
language behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was one of the 
greatest achievements

[[Page H5731]]

in human rights in our Nation's history.
  Like me, my father was trained as a scientist. During World War II, 
he designed fire-control computers for the Navy. Most of the way 
through the war, he started getting reports about how many people had 
been killed this week by his team's equipment. Despite his 
understanding of the justice of that war, he became deeply unhappy with 
the idea of his technical skills being used to hurt other human beings.
  So when he came back from the war, he thought about it for a while 
and decided that he wanted to spend part of his life in service to his 
fellow man. This was the late 1940s and 1950s and the birth of the 
civil rights movement.
  My father grew up in the South, where he saw firsthand the struggles 
for equality and basic human rights. He saw civil rights as the great 
cause of his generation. So he left behind his career in science and 
became a civil rights lawyer.
  My father, among other things, wrote the Federal regulations for 
implementing school desegregation under title VI of the Civil Rights 
Act of 1964.
  There were 10 years between the famous Supreme Court decision in 
Brown v. Board of Education, which established the right of children to 
attend integrated schools, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During 
those 10 years, only the Federal courts attempted to desegregate the 
public school systems. My father spent much of those 10 years traveling 
around the South, interviewing and offering advice to school districts 
that were struggling with the implications of Brown v. Board of 
Education.
  My father served as sort of an informal advance man for the Civil 
Rights Division of the Justice Department. He would send back memos 
saying, for example, that in one southern county there was one guy who 
runs the place, that understands the tide of history, and if you could 
get Burke Marshall or Robert Kennedy or whoever was running the Justice 
Department to give him a call, then everything would be okay; but in 
another county, it was a lost cause, and you should just plan on 
bringing in troops and filing suit.
  It was while actually reading my father's papers after he passed away 
that I first started thinking about stepping away from my career in 
science and spending part of my life in service to my fellow man.
  It was as a result of this work that when the Civil Rights Act was 
passed, my father, who had become somewhat of an expert on the nuts and 
bolts of desegregating schools, was called upon to write what were 
referred to as the Federal guidelines for implementing title VI of the 
Civil Rights Act. These were the detailed rules that called out what 
Southern school systems had to do each year to desegregate their 
schools in order to qualify for Federal funds.
  With the carrot of Federal education funding and the stick provided 
by the Federal guidelines for title VI of the Civil Rights Act, more 
school desegregation was achieved in the year following the Civil 
Rights Act than had been achieved in the previous 10 years following 
Brown v. Board of Education.
  My father had the chance to work with some of the leaders of the 
civil rights movement. He described having dinner at the kitchen table 
of Myrlie and Medgar Evers and holding their infant child in his hands 
only weeks before Medgar was shot down in his driveway.
  My father was not an activist or a protester, but he saw a great 
injustice and he quietly devoted himself to changing it.
  Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said:

       The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards 
     justice.

  But the arc does not bend on its own.
  On July 2, 1964, when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act 
into law, the arc was bent towards justice, but only because of the 
tireless efforts of so many who fought so long to bend it in the right 
direction. I am proud to say that my father was among them.
  Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor all of those who played a part 
in advancing civil rights and making our country and our universe more 
just.

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