Voting Rights Act of 1965
In the 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement increased pressure on the federal government to protect the voting rights of racial minorities. In 1957, Congress passed the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction: the Civil Rights Act of 1957. This legislation authorized the Attorney General to sue for injunctive relief on behalf of persons whose Fifteenth Amendment rights were denied, created the Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice to enforce civil rights through litigation, and created the Commission on Civil Rights to investigate voting rights deprivations. Further protections were enacted in the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which allowed federal courts to appoint referees to conduct voter registration in jurisdictions that engaged in voting discrimination against racial minorities.
Civil Rights Act of 1990
The Civil Rights Act of 1990 was a bill that, had it been signed into law, would have made it easier for litigants in race or sex discrimination cases to win. It was introduced into the 101st United States Congress on February 7, 1990 by Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) in the United States Senate, and by Augustus Hawkins (D-CA) in the House of Representatives. While making its way through Congress, the bill was considered to be civil rights groups' #1 legislative priority. Soon before the bill made it to the desk of then-President of the United States George H. W. Bush, it was criticized by the Harvard Law School professor Charles Fried. In a "New York Times" op-ed, Fried wrote that descriptions of the bill as the most important civil rights legislation in a quarter-century were "...a public relations flimflam perpetrated by a cabal of overzealous civil rights plaintiffs' lawyers." He concluded by saying that Bush should "...veto this bill in its present form."