The Civil Rights Act of 1964 grew out of the civil rights movement and its demands for legal protections at the federal level around practices of racial discrimination. Jan Haaken discusses with Jennifer Ruth how Title VI of the Civil Rights Act has become the primary legal instrument for repressing student protests and free speech on college campuses in the name of combating antisemitism. They discuss the Trump administration's rollout of an Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Education constituted by his loyalists and the intensifying pressures for university administrations to comply. Jennifer Ruth is co-author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and coeditor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. She is the co-director, with Jan Haaken, of the film The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests? She recently published "Impending federal overhaul means Trump will soon have de facto political army to attack Palestine activism" in Mondoweiss.
Image: Missouri Commission on Human Rights brochure about the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Missouri Historical Society, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons. It shows an abstract human figure filled with text and holding a flag that says "1964 Civil Rights Act" and, below, text: for ALL of us, of every Race, Religion, and National Origin, this means. . . . " Overlain on Palestinian flag, via Daynarama, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
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