Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

PSCI 180

Professor: Patrick Coaty

Civil Right and Civil Liberties

        “More Perfect union” chapter 4 shows an overview of the civil rights and liberties which is given to everyone through the Constitution. In this chapter, the civil rights are operational tasks of government to protect different groups – the African-Americans, the Natives, the females, the children and some other- by the law; while the civil liberties are a government list which come from the Bill of Rights in the Constitution.

        We should note that there are differences between the concepts of civil rights and civil liberties. Considering the mean of the civil rights, we can explain the terms as the rights to be freed from some kind of attitudes or treatments based on personality traits such as gender, race, ethnicity, disability, social status. For example, in 1789, Ratification of the federal constitution streamlined Indian issues by contributing central government with all settlements making power. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 made more than 200,000 indigenous people become American citizenship. In addition, Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka ended the discrimination in education based on race difference, and the first Civil Rights Bill ensured that all African-Americans can practice their rights to vote.

        The Civil Liberties is an attempt to meet the needs of individuals who often are in the minority, besides that they are founded on the basics of democracy, and they relevant to particular rights and freedoms provided by the Bill of Rights of the Constitution, such as freedom of speech, assembly, and press. First of them is the Emancipation Act in 1862, which freed the slave. And then the principles of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1883 founded separate schools based on racial differences. In 1920, the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment granted the women right to vote in the United States.