Civil rights legislation is a broad term that may be applied to any laws or legal rulings designed to protect the basic human rights of individuals anywhere in the world. These rights include any of a range of principles that ensure freedoms, liberties, and general happiness to which all humans are considered entitled from birth, such as free speech, religious freedom, participation in electoral processes, due legal processes in the court system, and so forth. The term civil rights legislation is most commonly used to refer to laws passed during the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the United States, but the term could be applied more broadly to describe legal action to protect human rights further back in history as well as ...

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