What Trump has done to the Justice Department's civil rights division is a disgrace

When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 63 years ago, legendary Harlem Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. called it "the second emancipation."

The law was the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction and helped build the foundational infrastructure for all future civil rights enforcement. Most importantly, it created the civil rights division within the Department of Justice — a division that quickly became a cornerstone for the entire civil rights movement (and the place where I started off my legal career).
In the division's earliest days,...