'Civil Rights,' Bush style

[Thom Little]

The summer after my last year as an undergraduate , I interned in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice in DC. I took a lot of ribbing from some friends about having John Ashcroft as my boss, but at the time I viewed the civil rights offices as a haven from the extreme right-wing politics of the rest of the Department.

This is not to say that the sections within civil rights were staffed by hordes of left-wing refugees biding their time until a change of administration—I didn’t talk politics with any of the attorneys I worked with, but there were plenty of signed portraits of George W. Bush up on office walls, and I definitely wasn’t working on any cases that would raise Ashcroft’s ire.

But neither was I working on the kind of systemic campaign against civil liberties that appeared to be the rest of the Department’s raison d’etre, so I thought of the Civil Rights Division as the one area that might at least be close to neutral in the culture wars being waged by the administration.

I have been thoroughly disabused of that notion this week. Attorneys from the Civil Rights Division recently threatened administrators at Southern Illinois University with lawsuits alleging violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That Act; the foundational statute that shapes the modern legal framework of the civil rights movement, was passed to combat horrific racism against African-Americans, and has become a sort of touchstone for progressives, in the sense that it represents so much that can be right with the law. In response to widespread societal discrimination, a grassroots movement drove through passage of a law that stands for racial tolerance and equality, that has served as a foundation for many legal victories in the fight for equal justice for all.



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