ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the struggles undertaken by several groups to achieve equality. Civil rights are the rights of all citizens to legal, social, and economic equality. Slavery systematically denied civil rights to large numbers of African Americans for almost the entire first century of the republic’s history. The end of the Civil War brought with it a constitutional ban on slavery. The application of evolutionary and biological theories is a relatively recent and novel scientific approach to studying politics and policy. Social Darwinism and eugenics enthusiasts provided a scientific fig leaf to justify racial discrimination and segregation, anti-miscegenation laws banning interracial marriage, and more broadly to maintain existing social hierarchies that were headed by white males and consigned females and nonwhites to inferior positions. Americans generally agree that no one should be denied political equality or the rights of citizenship because of race.
