Civil Rights

Civil Rights

Cry Wolf Quotes

This bill would renounce the safe, proper, and acceptable role for Government as a referee of disputes between the governed. It would interpose the Government as a biased protagonist, armed with the awesome authority of the Federal Government, in addition to rulemaking and umpire powers. The broad grants of power to the Attorney General to initiate and intervene in civil actions would go far toward transforming him into George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ of ‘1984,’ in the year 1964.

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Strom Thurmond (D-SC)
06/18/1964 | Full Details | Law(s): Civil Rights Act of 1964

The Civil Rights Commission should never have been brought into existence. It has been most prejudiced in its viewpoint, and has fomented trouble and racial disturbance since its inception. It should be abolished, not extended.

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John Sparkman (D-AL)
06/18/1964 | Full Details | Law(s): Civil Rights Act of 1964

These reports, of course, deal only with the surface exposure of Communist influence in the Negro movement. The actual extent and degree, while obviously substantial, remain unknown, for Congress has chosen to pretend that there is no such problem, even while methodically and relentlessly seeking to satisfy the demands of the very militant groups in which the Communist influence exists. Mr. President, the Nation, and even the Congress, once its hypnotic trance has passed, will find that in this bill are the seeds of destruction of a political system which has served its people better than has any other ever devised.

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Strom Thurmond (D-SC)
06/18/1964 | Full Details | Law(s): Civil Rights Act of 1964

This bill, by vesting the power to withhold or terminate Federal funds, creates a concentration of power of economic coercion unequaled in the history of governments—a power concentration which defies the experience of mankind with the temptation of power to corrupt.

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Strom Thurmond (D-SC)
06/18/1964 | Full Details | Law(s): Civil Rights Act of 1964