On September 10th, a gunman killed Charlie Kirk in Utah. The event reminds us that no one should die over speech, and that we must wrestle with big questions calmly. You don’t have to love him or hate him. At times, his message resonated with many across America. At times, it divided us. If we say we disagree with his points, we should be able to make the case. If we can’t, his spears carry weight.
One of his sharpest questions was this: Does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution?
Let’s sit with that for a moment. If your first thought is, “That law ended Jim Crow. How could it be wrong?” you’re not alone. We wrote the law to strike down a national disgrace. To end segregation. To stop the humiliation of being turned away from a lunch counter, of being told you couldn’t buy a home in a certain neighborhood, of being trapped in second-class status.
We intended the Civil Rights Act to end those humiliations. To tear down the walls of segregation. To give every American a fair shot.
In that moment, justice demanded action.
But justice isn’t just a word. It’s a goal that shapes real lives. It’s the chance for a kid who grows up in a leaky trailer or in project housing to work, to save, and to buy a house in a neighborhood where their children have a good school and a fair shot. From a word on a page to life on the ground.
According to the Constitution’s chief authors, justice may be the most important of the six national goals that bind our Republic.
But justice isn’t a handout program. Justice is the chance to earn your place. It’s not a promise of results. Because the goals in our preamble, meaning union, liberty, welfare, defence, order, and justice, sometimes compete or clash, we must hold them in balance.
In the end, our goal isn’t to win an argument. It’s to get better, together, at pursuing the ideals that bind us.
So here’s the question: in the balance between Union, Liberty, and Justice, does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution?
Act One. A Plate of Segregation
In the mid-1960s, Maurice Bessinger’s Piggie Park barbecue ran popular drive-ins and a sit-down sandwich shop around Columbia, South Carolina. The chain routinely denied Black customers full and equal service. Those who were served had to take food at kitchen windows and were not allowed to eat on the premises.
After Congress approved the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title II barred restaurants and other public accommodations from excluding people by race. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it on July 2, 1964, in a nationally televised ceremony attended by lawmakers and civil-rights leaders, among them Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Had equality arrived?
Not everywhere. Piggie Park didn’t change. On July 3, Anne Newman, a mother and minister’s wife, wanted a sandwich. Instead, she got a full plate of rejection. She and her friends went to Piggie Park for lunch. The waitress came out, saw she and her friends were Black, and turned back inside without taking the order.
They went back a month later and were again refused service.
The moment sparked a fight for justice. Newman, Sharon Neal, and John Mungin filed a class action suit seeking an injunction to stop the discrimination at the restaurants.
This wasn’t a casual “we can agree to disagree” dispute. Bessinger stocked his restaurants with booklets defending racial separation. You could pick up this reading with your barbecue. It drew on the Genesis 11 story of the Tower of Babel to argue that God scattered the nations and meant them to remain separate. Integration, he preached, defied divine order. Some pamphlets even claimed biblical warrant for slavery.
At first, the courts split. They wrestled with how far the law reached. The district court agreed that there had been discrimination. They also ruled that drive-ins, where most food was takeout, didn’t have to follow the law. The Fourth Circuit disagreed, saying all Piggie Park locations were public accommodations.
Newman v. Piggie Park went to the Supreme Court in 1968. The high court sided with Newman and made it plain: religion is no excuse for segregation in a public restaurant. The justices called Piggie Park’s claim “patently frivolous.”
Piggie Park wasn’t about handouts or special favors. It was about human dignity. The right to walk into a public restaurant and be served like anyone else. Believe what you want. But if you open your doors to the public, you serve the public.
So…did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution in Columbia, South Carolina?
Did the decision rob Maurice Bessinger of his religious liberty? He was still free to believe, worship, preach, and pass out booklets. What he couldn’t do after choosing to run a public restaurant was use those beliefs to keep people out.
And he didn’t stop speaking his mind. Before he died, he deeded a tiny patch of ground under the flagpole to the Sons of Confederate Veterans for five dollars so that future owners couldn’t take the Confederate flag down.
But the issue isn’t cut and dry. The stories don’t stop in South Carolina.
Act Two. A Seat With Conditions
In the late 1960s, the University of California, Davis School of Medicine faced a stark reality: its classes had almost no Black, Latino, or Native American students. Justice is the opportunity to earn a place, but what does opportunity mean when the doorway to a profession has been locked for decades?
UC Davis tried a fix: Out of 100 seats each year, they reserved 16 for “disadvantaged” applicants. UC Davis judged those applications by a separate committee, with different standards, and the underrepresented minority applicants competed only for those 16 seats.
Enter Allan Bakke. A Marine Corps veteran and engineer in his early 30s, Bakke had set his sights on medicine. He’d spent years preparing, earning strong grades and MCAT scores. He applied to UC Davis in 1973 and 1974, along with a dozen other medical schools, and he was rejected by all of them. Later, he discovered that some minority applicants admitted through the special program had lower scores.
He believed the school had shut him out because he was white. In reality, records later showed that competition was stiff; as many as 67 applicants had higher scores than his.
Nonetheless, Bakke sued. He argued that a publicly-funded state school couldn’t deny him a seat and still honor the commitment to prohibit race discrimination in federally funded programs.
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke reached the Supreme Court in 1978. The ruling was messy. Quotas, like the 16 reserved seats, were unconstitutional. They could not exclude Bakke based on race. The court ordered him admitted.
But the Court, led by Justice Lewis Powell, also said diversity in education is a compelling goal. Race could be one factor in a holistic review, as long as every applicant competes in the same pool, with no guaranteed quotas.
So…Did the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act violate the Constitution? Did it violate Bakke’s right to justice?
UC Davis had its opinion of justice. It argued that set-aside wasn’t favoritism. It was a correction for a pipeline bent by decades of exclusion. A diverse medical class would better serve California’s diverse communities.
If you were Bakke, would you see justice denied?
If you were a minority applicant, would you see the set-aside necessary to level a field tilted by history?
The Court decided justice meant the opportunity to compete equally, but not a scripted outcome. There could be no reserved seats, no separate tracks. But a school could consider race as one thread in a larger fabric, if every candidate competed equally.
Bakke went on to have a successful career as a doctor in Minnesota.
But the issue still isn’t settled. Let’s move on to Louisiana.
Act Three. From the Classroom to the Shop Floor
In 1965, President Johnson signed Executive Order 11246. In it, Johnson outlined that if a business wanted to compete for federal contracts, it had to follow the rules. If you wanted to do business with the federal government, you had to take “affirmative action” to ensure equal opportunity. This meant companies had to create goals and timetables to hire underrepresented groups. The government insisted these were not quotas. They were temporary tools, intended to pry open doors rusted shut for generations.
At the time, Kaiser Aluminum in Gramercy, Louisiana, filled skilled jobs almost entirely with white workers, and it intended to change. They made a goal that their workforce would represent the local labor force. The company and the union built a training pipeline and reserved half of the slots for Black workers to correct the imbalance.
A white worker named Brian Weber was passed over for promotion in favor of workers with less seniority. He saw a new door being closed in the name of opening another, so he sued. The local court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed that Weber was a target of discrimination, but the matter was not settled. Kaiser appealed.
In 1979, the Supreme Court decided United Steelworkers v. Weber. Kaiser Aluminum’s plan survived. The high court said a business could give preferential treatment to minority groups, as long as the company intended the effort to be a temporary fix to balance workforce diversity.
In 1987, Johnson v. Transportation Agency approved a similar approach for gender. A business could choose to hire a woman in a male-dominated job if she and a man were comparably qualified for a promotion, if the plan was modest and temporary.
The tension between the classroom and the shop floor became plain. The high court killed fixed quotas in college. But numbers could steer workplace decisions if businesses called them goals, kept them temporary, and technically kept the door to all applicants open.
On the ground, these goals felt like quotas. If a business chose a woman or minority applicant for a job or a promotion, some believed they were a token hire, not the top choice. If even the rules were fair, the optics were not.
Ricci v. DeStefano drew a bright line in 2009. New Haven, Connecticut, gave firefighters a vetted, job-related promotion exam. One of them, Frank Ricci, was dyslexic. He paid to have the textbooks read onto audiotape. He studied eight to thirteen hours a day. He earned his spot at the top of the list. In total, nineteen of the top candidates were eligible for immediate promotion. 17 were White, two Hispanic. No Black candidates scored well enough for promotion. Fearing a lawsuit, the city threw out the test results.
Ricci sued. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court found that a city couldn’t discard a valid, job-related test because it didn’t like the racial outcome. Merit, tied to the job, had to matter.
Fast-forward to January 21, 2025. President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14173, revoking President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246. The new executive order barred workforce balancing and preferential hiring. It outlined that federal agencies would enforce civil rights laws without identity-based preferences.
Some call Trump’s executive order a return to racism. Others point out that official policy and case law framed federal goals as non-quota, remedial tools. Temporary in purpose and bounded by merit and non-discrimination.
So…Did the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act violate the Constitution? Did it violate Brian Weber’s right to justice? What about the firefighters in Connecticut?
Some would rightly point out that we have not achieved equal representation in the workforce. Others would ask: If the federal government intended numerical goals as temporary, who would decide to eliminate them, and when?
Act Four. The Permanent Question
But hold on. The play on our stage so far today moves from clear, undeniable injustice to increasingly problematic bureaucratic overreach. One endpoint whispers this bureaucratic mission creep has become a cure worse than the disease. That government enforcement created to stop obvious discrimination became a mechanism for institutionalized reverse discrimination.
Before we close the book on this constitutional drama, we need to wrestle with the hardest question of all: What if we didn’t open the door?
Take Cheryl Hopwood, a white mother from San Antonio who sued the University of Texas Law School in 1992. Like Allan Bakke, she argued that racial preferences had cost her a seat. The Fifth Circuit agreed in Hopwood v. Texas and struck down the school’s affirmative action program. Texas celebrated a return to “pure merit.”
But how did Texas measure merit? The LSAT is the test students take to get into law school. The scores correlate with first-year law school grades. But the scores also correlate with family wealth, parents’ education, and zip code quality. When Texas stopped considering race, Black and Latino enrollment plummeted. In 1996, exactly five Black students enrolled in a class of 500.
Was that justice?
Texas panicked.
Rather than accept that merit-based admissions had produced an unwanted outcome, the university created a workaround. UT quietly began weighing “socioeconomic factors.” Were they first-generation college students? Did they come from underrepresented communities? Had they overcome economic hardship?
Admissions officers still tracked racial numbers. They still worried when minority enrollment dropped. They just found new ways to achieve the same results without using the forbidden language of race.
Was the new approach race-neutral? Or was it just more sophisticated racial engineering?
The constitutional question gets thornier when we think more about what “temporary” means. In 1978, Justice Powell allowed race as one factor in holistic admissions. 25 years later, in 2003, Justice O’Connor warned we would be ready to stop considering race in no more than 25 more years.
Here we are, on the cusp of the expiration of those 25 years.
And we have many unanswered questions. What conditions must we achieve to reach equality? How will we know we achieved those conditions? How long is too long? How much preference is too much? If the goal is a level playing field, who decides when we’ve reached it?
Act Five. Dignity and the Doorway
So, where does this play in five acts leave us?
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened doors that should never have been closed. For Anne Newman, it was the glass door of a sandwich shop in the South Carolina heat. For Allan Bakke and Cheryl Hopwood, the door to an admissions office.
The law didn’t give them a sandwich or a degree. It gave them the dignity to participate. The right to compete. The right to be judged on their own terms.
But what began as a tool to unlock a door became, for some, a bureaucratic machine rearranging the room.
On the one hand, the foundation of the Civil Rights Act is that all people are equal in dignity and rights. If that is true, no disadvantaged group needs permanent quotas. Promoting a system of quotas only strips the dignity from minority groups. It ensures that every magnificently qualified woman or Black man is seen as promoted because of the need to fill a quota and not based on their merit.
Think of a female pilot in the cockpit of a 747. She is there because of her immense skill, courage, and dedication. But a system of preferences allows a passenger to whisper, “She’s probably only there to fill a quota.”
We can call that passenger a bigot. And he is. But the system feeds his bigotry.
On the other hand, dignity cuts both ways. A female pilot hears whispers about quotas, whether affirmative action exists or not. But if she did receive preferential treatment because of her gender, the injustice becomes undeniable.
The system validates the prejudice it claims to fight.
We cannot reject our commitment to civil rights. We must always celebrate the moral courage of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He spent Easter Sunday, 1963, in a Birmingham, Alabama jail cell, after urging for equality and peaceful protest. He denounced us for being “more devoted to order than to justice … (preferring) a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
We passed the Civil Rights Act so people wouldn’t have to throw their dignity under the train to join public life. But we must also remember Dr. King’s central vision: a nation in which his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Merit and character are not the enemies of equality; they are its ultimate destination.
In the balance of our six national goals, justice is the bedrock. It is our most important national goal. But justice is not a guaranteed outcome. It is not a handout. It is the fierce, unwavering protection of opportunity. It’s the promise made to the boy I was, stacking hay in stuffy Missouri barn lofts: that a kid from a leaky trailer or project housing can, through grit and talent, earn a place at any table in the country.
This leaves us with the sharpest question of all.
Does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution?
May God bless the United States of America.
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