Palatine students get first-hand look at civil rights era

Teacher Drew Shilhanek's biggest hope Monday was that his sixth-grade students would one day be as impressed as he was that they'd met one of the drafters of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But based on the sophisticated questions they asked semi-retired attorney David Filvaroff, it seemed they already understood his contribution to history.

Filvaroff worked in the Attorney General's office during the tenure of Robert Kennedy, while the Act was written and passed.

He visited Shilhanek's classroom at Quest Academy in Palatine, where his granddaughter is a student, as part of its study unit on the civil rights movement.

During a grandparents' day Friday, while most were answering general questions about living through the civil rights era, the girl happened to mention her own grandfather in Buffalo, N.Y., had helped write the Civil Rights Act.

He was quickly invited for a personal question-and-answer session on Monday.

Filvaroff downplayed the role he played in helping write the Act in comparison with the bravery of black citizens who risked physical harm to draw attention to the immorality of segregation and discrimination.

Still, his insight on the evolution of a law that allowed the country to take its next steps toward a higher standard of morality fascinated even students whose parents were barely kids themselves at the time.

"The 1964 Act, when it passed, was aimed specifically at the southern part of the United States," Filvaroff said. "But its language was broad enough to include other groups like Latinos as well. The bill had other impact beyond what people had thought."

It was a Congressional opponent of the bill, in fact, who added non-discrimination of gender, thinking it would either increase opposition or at least overwhelm efforts to enforce the new law.

"Happily, he was wrong on both counts," Filvaroff said.

The sixth-graders, who've been studying the civil rights era, asked about the economic impact of the bus boycott inspired by Rosa Parks and the immediate effect of the desegregation of the armed forces in 1948.

Filvaroff said it was these things as well as the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 and the brutal crackdown on black marches that raised national awareness of conditions in the South and ultimately led to passage of the Act.

Even within the Department of Justice, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Robert Kennedy didn't see eye to eye on civil rights, Filvaroff said. But he believed most attorneys like himself who worked on the Civil Rights Act felt a personal conviction that it was the right thing to do.

Shilhanek told his students that opening their eyes to present and future injustices was the whole point of their unit on black civil rights.

"This Act had to be passed for them to secure their right to vote," he said. "They already had it, but this was the monumental change."