What are civil rights? What are natural rights? How are both sets ...

[lunatika]

What are civil rights? What are natural rights? How are both sets of rights protected by the Constitution, either explicitly or implicitly?
 
  Answer:

Question 2

What two important acts did the federal government pass in the 1960s to force the South to abolish Jim Crow laws and abide by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution?
 
  Do you think it is possible that further intervention by the federal government will be needed in the future to enforce the civil rights of African Americans? Why or why not?

[Briannahope]

Answer to Question 1

An ideal response will:
1. Define civil rights as the rights of all people to be free from irrational discrimination such as that based on race, religion, sex, or ethnic origin.
2. Identify natural rights, also called human rights, as the rights of all people to dignity and worth.
3. Explain that the Constitution protects civil rights by protecting people from abuse by the government, and by granting national and state governments the power to ensure that people are not abused by their fellow citizens.
4. Discuss how the Framers of the Constitution believed that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and thus they created a system of government designed to protect these natural rights, which means that all people have an equal right to protection from arbitrary treatment and to the liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Answer to Question 2

An ideal response will:
1. Identify the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, which ended segregation in public accommodations, and the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, which declared illegal the various devices used in the South to keep African Americans from voting.
2. Evaluate whether the federal government might need to intervene in the future. Answers will vary, but an ideal response will recognize that because of de facto discrimination, problems for African Americans still exist in American society (e.g., because of segregation in housing, affluent African Americans tend to live in poorer neighborhoods than do poor whites), and so it is very likely that the federal government will continue to be involved in securing the rights of this minority.