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Civil Rights Act of 1968

United States law

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 21, 2026
Entity authorityQ1094483 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 (Pub. L. 90–284, 82 Stat. 73, enacted April 11, 1968) is a landmark law in the United States signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the King assassination riots.

Titles II through VII comprise the Indian Civil Rights Act, which applies to the Native American tribes of the United States and makes many but not all of the guarantees of the U.S. Bill of Rights applicable within the tribes. (That Act appears today in Title 25, sections 1301 to 1303 of the United States Code).

Titles VIII and IX are commonly known as the Fair Housing Act, which was meant as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (This is different legislation than the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, which expanded housing funding programs.) While the Civil Rights Act of 1866 prohibited discrimination in housing, there were no federal enforcement provisions. The 1968 act expanded on previous acts and prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, and since 1974, sex. Since 1988, the act protects people with disabilities and families with children. Pregnant women are also protected from illegal discrimination because they have been given familial status with their unborn child being the other family member.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Civil Rights Act of 1968” as united States law. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1968, 1301, 1303, 1964—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Civil, Rights and United can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as united States law. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1094483. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1968, 1301, 1303 and 1964.

Critical limits

Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Civil Rights Act of 1968”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Civil Rights Act of 1968 primary sources, Civil Rights Act of 1968 archive and Civil research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Civil Rights Act of 1968”?
  2. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
  3. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Civil Rights Act of 1968” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.