CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE WORKPLACE: IT'S TIME TO CUT OUT THE EXCESS AND GET TO THE TRUTH

The modern civil rights movement began more than a century ago in 1905, when W.E.B. Du Bois and other Black activists began organizing the "Niagara Movement" to call for political, social, and civil rights for African Americans.18 The group consisted of twenty-nine business owners, teachers, and clergy members.19 The deadly race riots of 1908, which began with an angry mob pursuing a Black man whom they believed had sexually assaulted a young White woman, led Du Bois, other African American activists, and White abolitionists, including Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard, to form the nation's premier civil rights organization known as the National Association for Advancement of Colored People ("NAACP").20 In line with its mission to secure rights guaranteed under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,21 the NAACP spent the next several decades successfully using the legal system to eliminate lynching, disenfranchisement and racial segregation.22 One of the NAACP's earliest legal successes included a 1913 case which challenged the so-called "grandfather clause" put in place in Oklahoma to effectively disqualify Black voters.23 Although the Fifteenth Amendment24 enabled Black men to vote, the Oklahoma clause provided that only residents whose grandfathers had voted in 1865 could vote.25 The Supreme Court agreed with the NAACP and found that the "grandfather clause" was in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment.26 On the heels of this success, the push for advancement of women's right to vote culminated in 1920 with the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment.27 Soon thereafter, debates over the rights of Asian Americans followed in the aftermath of a 1923 Supreme Court decision,28 finding that an Indian Sikh man, as a nonwhite, was ineligible for citizenship under the Immigration Act of 1917. Unfortunately, this decision also had negative consequences as several states began to deny Asian Americans the right to own land.29 By 1939, additional civil rights movements developed, including gay and lesbian rights, and the "Congress of Spanish Speaking People" was established.30 In 1954, NAACP secured a landmark victory under the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment when the Supreme Court dismantled the notion of "separate but equal" in Brown v. Board of Education3 That same day, under the Fifth Amendment, the Court ruled similarly with respect to racial segregation in District of Columbia publ