Aidan Rozema
Research Mentor(s): Terri Friedline
Mentor Department: School of Social Work
Authors:
Session: Session 6 (3:00pm – 3:50pm)
Presentation Type: Poster 65
Abstract
Over the past year, I’ve been working with Dr. Terri Friedline on preparatory research for a book on the exclusion of banks—and financial institutions more broadly—from the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Records indicate that activists, commissioners on the Civil Rights Commission, and even elected officials wanted to and were recommended to include at least some regulation of financial institutions in the final draft, but any recommendations swiftly disappeared after 1959. This project aims to discover why this occurred, in part to better understand the inner-workings of the American government during this period. Key documents have included the 1959 Civil Rights Commission Report, the 1959 States Civil Rights Committee Advisory Report, and the testimonies of expert witnesses during the proceedings that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1969’s creation. Dr. Terri Friedline’s project aims to reveal the mechanisms by which financial institutions were excluded from civil rights legislation in the 1960s, and, ideally, identify one of these mechanisms as the most plausible. Because of the project’s historical nature, our methodology took the form of an investigation. First, we established a basic timeline of events from 1950 to 1970. Key information was drawn from the biographies of prominent figures, historical documents, as well as from academic histories of the era, establishing the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the foundation of the Civil Rights Commission in 1958, the States Advisory Committees’ foundation in 1959, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as key events in the legislative history of our subject. To better understand the prominent figures involved, I created a series of “character profiles†on specific people, beginning with the original members of the Civil Rights Commission. Because of their role drafting recommendations, the individual personalities of J. Ernest Wilkins, Doyle E. Carlton, Robert G. Storey, and especially Theodore M. Hesburgh, John S. Battle, and John A. Hannah shaped the ultimate form of civil rights legislation. The character of John de. B. Pemberton, national director of the ACLU, proved especially interesting. Creating the character profiles involved synthesizing information from a variety of historical sources, some of which raised interesting questions. The next few months were spent following those leads, and ultimately generating 8 potential theories. As we conduct interviews with important figures—or more aptly, their surviving relatives and colleagues—we hope to narrow down this list into a smaller number of plausible theories, at which point we will re-examine our historical evidence.
