
Photograph by Stephanie Eley
This essay is part of a series—we asked 17 Atlantans to tell us how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has impacted their lives in honor of its 60th anniversary. Read all of the essays here.
I was born almost a decade beyond the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and although some things had changed, many were still stuck in the past. My small town in rural Arkansas was isolated in many ways, including lacking much diversity of any kind. A visit from my eldest brother’s college friend, who was African American, opened my eyes to the racism and fear that resided in my little town. The Civil Rights Act hadn’t yet changed the attitudes that had driven segregation.
I first met the Reverend C.T. Vivian in the early days of developing the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. I was in awe of him, and after the meeting, he turned to me and said, “I want to tell you something.” My heart skipped a beat, fearing what was coming next. “If anyone gives you any grief because you’re young and White and leading the effort to build the center, you send them to me. We weren’t just working for the liberation of Black people, we were working to free everyone from the evil of segregation.”
In that moment, I understood more deeply the meaning of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Just like the center, the Act was meant to show how everyone suffers when anyone’s rights are denied, and that liberation for some means the liberation of all from discrimination. The 1964 Act has been extended to many others, including LGBTQ+ individuals, women, and various ethnic groups. The provisions of the Act helped my wife’s Indian parents successfully build their life and family upon immigrating to the U.S., so my father-in-law could spend a lifetime helping Lockheed Martin build airplanes to defend our country.
It is imperative that we embrace not only the letter but the spirit of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When then Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen Jr. testified for its passage in 1963, he said, “The elimination of segregation, which is slavery’s stepchild, is a challenge to all of us to make every American free in fact as well as in theory—and again to establish our nation as the true champion of the free world.” The “freedom to discriminate” was deemed unworthy of our country in 1964. We must once again reassert in law and in fact that discrimination lies outside of our values and must remain outside of our stores, our transactions, and our voting booths. There are many American Dreams waiting to be lived.
Doug Shipman is the president of the Atlanta City Council, founding CEO of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, and former CEO of the Woodruff Arts Center.
This article appears in our June 2024 issue.