What the Civil Rights Act Really Meant

Sixty years ago this week, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a monumental piece of legislation that forever changed the nature of race and gender in American society. In the decades since, legal scholars have offered hundreds of interpretations of the law, but none more powerful than the words of the young Black students who attended the Mississippi Freedom Schools that opened just days after Johnson signed the bill. Perhaps the law’s most important lesson for us today is rooted in the students’ efforts to explain how it would affect their future.

The Freedom School students imagined new dreams for their lives based on the messages conveyed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although the law did not immediately.”