Civil Rights Movement

choi

J Harvie Wilkinson III, The Third Founding; What Johnson, Dirksen and Humphrey recognized was that civil rights was a national cause, and it required a national response. Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2014
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052702304250204579433472568600710
(book review on Bruce Ackerman, The Civil Rights Revolution; We the People, Vol 3. Harvard University Press/Belknap, 2014)

Quote:

“Mr Ackerman applies his thesis to the civil-rights revolution of the 1950s and '60s * * * calls this period the ‘Second Reconstruction’ * * * Mr Ackerman recognizes that all three branches of government were crucial to the legal successes of the civil-rights movement, but he bestows the highest accolades on Congress. The professor is at his best in describing the twists and turns that led to the enactment of three landmark statutes: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968

“These laws owe their greatest political debt, Mr. Ackerman argues, to the combined efforts of President Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr, and Sens. Everett Dirksen and Hubert Humphrey, who compare to the ‘giants on the earth’ during the periods of the American Revolution and the Civil War [hence the title of the review: The Third Founding].

My comment:
(a) Appointed by President Ron Reagan in 1984, J Harvie Wilkinson III (born 1944) is a judge serving on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (based in Richmond, Virginia).

(b) I am clueless why “civil rights was” in the subtitle. All online dictionaries dictates “plural verb.”
(i) dictionary.reference.com/browse/civil%20rights
(Random House Dictionary + Collins English Dictionary 2009)
(ii) dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/american-english/civil-rights
(Cambridge)
(iii) books.google.com/books?id=qc7xYDKEbSIC&pg=PA171&lpg=PA171&dq=%22Civil+Rights%22+verb+plural&source=bl&ots=C1w2bqvkad&sig=e5by5Q3qqZ7fEGWc0DfP8rLLKX0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QYRuU-TGHcPjsATJioK4Dw&ved=0CEIQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=%22Civil%20Rights%22%20verb%20plural&f=false
(Heinemann English Dictionary 2001)
(iv) www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/civil-rights
(Macmillan)

(c) For “Fair Housing Act of 1968” in quotation 1, see Civil Rights Act of 1968
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968
(Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 is commonly known as the Fair Housing Act)

(d) “The professor's proposal also runs contrary to the spirit of the Second Reconstruction itself, which, as he points out, was both bold and cautious. It was bold in the sense that Congress restructured federal-state relations and attempted an almost unprecedented regulation of private commercial establishments and real-estate markets [housing]. Yet it was cautious in not conferring too much power on executive entities such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and in refusing to use a history of segregated schools as the basis for far-reaching changes in, for example, a locality's job market or registrar's office.’”
(i) The professor? Paragraph 1 of the review point out that Mr Ackerman is a Yale law professor.
(ii) “attempted an almost unprecedented regulation of private commercial establishments”

Civil Rights Act of 1964
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
(section 6.2 Title II)
(iii) Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) “was established on July 2, 1965; its mandate is specified under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”  Wikipedia
(iv) Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) “was established on September 9, 1965, when Lyndon B Johnson signed the Department of Housing and Urban Development Act into law."  Wikipedia

(e) There is no need to read the second half of the review, which upbraid the book. The assail may or may not be correct--I do not know because I am yet to read the book--but it (the scolding) is not instructive.