We know Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy for the black community. African Americans have made amazing progress since the 1960s: More blacks than ever graduate from high school, attend college, and join the middle class. The president of the United States is a black man, and the share of African American politicians is steadily growing. The picture isn't perfect -- there are still broad racial disparities in everything from health-care access to employment -- but progress is real.
But his legacy for other minority groups is less obvious. In public policy, we group racial and ethnic minorities together, even when their situations are very different. African Americans, with their legacy of slavery, apartheid, and institutionalized discrimination, face a vastly different set of circumstances than Latinos (who, until relatively recently, were classified as "white" in large parts of the country), Asians, Native Americans, and women.
That the federal government views these constituencies as a single group is a direct consequence of the civil-rights movement and King's successful push to fundamentally alter the federal government's relationship to African Americans. In the years following King's assassination, other movements -- for women's rights, for Latino rights, for Native American rights, for gay rights -- took advantage of these pathways in their struggle for rights and redress from the federal government.
Consider Hispanics' struggle for recognition under federal anti-discrimination laws. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce laws against workplace discrimination. Despite the inclusion of sex, religion, and national origin in federal prohibitions against employment discrimination, the public -- and most political elite -- saw the Civil Rights Act as being for African Americans.
Mexican Americans faced widespread economic discrimination and political disenfranchisement in the 1960s. But the EEOC largely ignored discrimination against Hispanics in its early years. Hispanics played a minor role in the pre-1964 struggle for equal employment. Indeed, from 1940 to 1972 only a handful of Mexican American leaders were witnesses at congressional hearings for employment civil rights.
While some federal officials recognized the need to expand the EEOC's scope, communities such as Hispanics questioned the wisdom of embracing minority status. At the start of the 1960s, Mexican American leaders were skeptical of any analogy to African Americans. As sociologist John D. Skrentny writes in Minority Rights Revolution, "To many leaders interviewed in 1964 ... the labeling of them as a 'national minority' 'seemed threatening,'" since it "implied unsettling comparisons with Negroes and their new militant tactics."
This began to change with implementation of anti-discrimination laws. In order to know which firms and government agencies were discriminating against minorities, Congress allowed the EEOC to issue race-reporting forms to all federal agencies and firms with more than 100 employees. EEOC officials copied from an earlier race reporting form, which included Latinos on the list of designated minorities.
Through the data collected, Mexican and other Hispanic leaders discovered that Hispanics were not filing discrimination complaints in any significant number. Unlike with African Americans, there were few activist groups helping people file complaints at the local and state level. In 1966, only 2 percent of complaints came from Hispanics as a group, and of the nearly 4,000 marked for investigation, only 25 were from Mexican Americans.
The Hispanic community took notice. The Mexican American Political Association, organized in 1959, sharpened its focus on the federal government, pressuring the EEOC to take language barriers seriously. Later that year, a collection of Mexican American groups confronted the EEOC commissioner on the organization's failure to address disparities in the Mexican American community. Drawing explicit parallels to the status of blacks, Mexican American leaders emphasized the high rates of unemployment, abysmal housing, and poor educational opportunities that harmed their communities.
Following their meeting with the EEOC, Mexican American leaders offered a list of demands, including representation on the EEOC, a greater focus on problems facing the Mexican American community, and a request for immediate action against 800 major national companies in the Pacific Southwest that employed more than 600,000 people but hired no Mexican Americans.
Over the next few years, organizations representing Hispanics agitated the federal government for greater assistance. Continuing to draw explicit parallels with African Americans, they pressed the White House to acknowledge their plight, "In spite of our number we are America's invisible minority," declared Alfred J. Hernandez, leader of the League of United Latin American Citizens in 1966. "Because we have not demonstrated, because we have not cried out when we have been abused and exploited, we have been ignored."
This strategy eventually paid off. By 1970, Mexican Americans had obtained representation on the EEOC, and the commission's mandate expanded to include Hispanics. Likewise, similar efforts by women, Asian Americans, and American Indians yielded inclusion in the EEOC's mandate. By embracing the analogy to black Americans and using activism to pressure federal officials, these groups were able to win the designation of "minority" and begin their efforts to redress years of unfair treatment.
On this holiday, as we reflect on the gains we've made and the challenges we face, we should remember this legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil-rights movement. By fundamentally altering the government's relationship to blacks, they managed to pave the way forward for millions of others.
