From The Human Rights Book by Milton Meltzer,
(On the American Civil Rights Movement)
It is at a time of crisis that human rights are most commonly in. danger. In most societies, such rights are often sacrificed to what is perceived to be the desperate need to survive That perception, of course, may be mistaken or, what is worse, faked to give those in power the excuse to trample on their citizenry. The Nixon Administration's constant invocation of "national security" as justification for its flagrant violation of constitutional rights is but one example. 9tSecurity'1 has cloaked many a nefarious White House operation almost from the beginning of our democracy. The internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans in World War II was explained away on the ground of military danger. And the threat of Communism was used to sweep aside the Bill of Rights after both world wars. When a crisis is invoked to dispense with human rights, one must always be on guard. It is hard to conceive any crisis which could justify taking away those few minimal rights the phiosopher Charles Frankel has termed universal.
"(Charles Frankel) For all of our lapses, I think that ifs rare in human history to have a system of government that perseveres over any length of time in respect to such rights, and that has empowered citizens to defend those rights regardless of the governments convenience."
(In 1977) Andrew Young, the chief U.S. representative to the UN, once compared dissidents in the Soviet Union to civil rights campaigners in the United States. He said, "In our prisons too there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people whom I would call political prisoners" and added that he himself had been a political prisoner when arrested in a civil rights demonstration in Atlanta ten years before. Immediately criticized for his statement, Young denied he had meant to equate the status of political
freedom in America with that in the Soviet Union. "I know of no instance in the U.S. where persons have received penalties for monitoring our Government's position on civil or human rights," he said.
For black Americans like Andrew Young, the phrase "noble policy" may stick in the throat. Blacks cannot erase the memory of enslavement for two hundred years under the American demoncracy, and the discrimination and segregation which have been its aftermath. Nor can Native Americans forget that white settlers on their land sought to and almost succeeded in extinguishing the people they found here. The rights nobly proclaimed by the Founding Fathers have never been equally available to all Americans, especially those of color.
The government itself acknowledges how far it has yet to go to fulfill the promise of social and economic rights for all. in. a rep on issued in 1978, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights said that little progress has been made toward the nation’s goal of social and economic equality for women and members of ethnic minorities. Women and male members of minorities significantly trailed nonminority men in the fields of education, employment, income, and housing. Government statistics for the 1960-76 period showed some improvement for women and minorities, but there was "clear documentation of many continuing and serious problems of inequality."
Human rights as they apply to women in the United States have been the subject of both federal and state laws. Women gained the important political right of the franchise long ago. But the first civil rights legislation. to deal with discrimination against working women did not come until the Equal Pay Act of 1963. This act calls for equal pay for equal work, but it is till of technical loopholes and is unevenly enforced. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was the most comprehensive hill to outlaw sex discrimination. Several Executive Orders since then have enlarged the rights of women as well as to men. Many states have fair-employment laws, but most do not forbid discrimination based on sex.