Civil Rights Laws

The concept of civil rights refers to legal measures designed to protect citizens from arbitrary or discriminatory treatment by either a government or a private entity. Since the mid-19th century, the federal government has extended civil rights protections through executive orders, congressional legislation, constitutional amendments, and Supreme Court rulings. Together, such measures have established a legal framework for such protections. For most of U.S. history, they primarily aimed at protecting African Americans from discrimination but by the 1990s, the federal government had expanded ...