The nation had tried to address civil rights as far back as 1875, and and at its founding a century earlier leaders had pondered what to do about slavery.

But most now think of the Civil Rights Era as the 1960s, beginning in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy called for a bill that would allow all people to be served in restaurants, stores, hotels, theaters and other businesses regardless of race, color or creed.

Kennedy also wanted legislation that would protect the right to vote; in some places, only those who had paid a poll tax were allowed to cast ballots. And he wanted the U.S. attorney general to have the power to sue governments that operated segregated public schools.

Kennedy wouldn’t live to see the law enacted. He was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963, leaving the work to his successor.

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Benicia’s own African-American population primarily arrived when Henry Kaiser brought in black employees from the southern United States, most of them arriving by rail, said resident Karen Burns, who was a school child here during much of the nation’s civil rights activities.

Now 73, Burns said compared to other places in the country, Benicia’s integration was accomplished calmly.

Most of Kaiser’s African-American employees went to Oakland and Vallejo to work in shipyards, but some were employed at the Benicia Arsenal, she said.

She was still in kindergarten when she saw her first black classmate. But Benicia had had people of other races, such as those who owned Chinese restaurants and a laundry on First Street.

She recalled seeing Chinese men sitting in front of the laundry, openly smoking opium pipes.

“There weren’t many Mexicans here,” she said.

When African-American children began attending Benicia’s schools, “we didn’t think anything about it,” Burns said. In fact, she said, two black students became Benicia High School star football players.

Some Benicia adults weren’t quite so welcoming, she said. A few white families on Carolina Drive promptly put their houses up for sale when a black familiy bought there.

“People were concerned the neighborhood would go to hell in a handbasket,” Burns said.

Some of the “characters” who later moved to that part of Benicia bore watching, she said; a few were troublemakers.

But the children were another matter entirely, she said. “We all played together,” she said.

She said Benicia wasn’t progressive enough at the time to encourage interracial dating. In fact, while students of various races would chat during dances, “there was an understanding,” Burns said: Whites danced with whites, blacks danced with blacks.

But nobody worried if students of various skin colors sat at the soda fountain in Wolf’s Drug Store, she added. Youth who behaved themselves were welcome at restaurants and the local bakery, too.

In 1962, Burns left Benicia to attend California Western College in San Diego. There, she met fellow students of all colors and ethnicities.

At the same time, she heard of riots in Selma, Ala., which mystified a young woman whose experience with racial discrimination was quite mild.

“I was amazed. Why were they fighting? Why?” Burns recalled. “I was absolutely dumbfounded they had riots. I didn’t think about the South, and they’re still very different.”

Two years ago, Burns visited Montgomery, Ala.

That’s where, in 1955, Rosa Parks decided she wouldn’t vacate her bus seat to a white person, leading to a bus boycott lasting a year and a Supreme Court decision that ended segregated busing forever.

Parks’s action and the boycott were supported by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, leaders in the Civil Rights movement. Later, protesters supporting civil rights would march between Selma and Montgomery.

That’s not the Montgomery that Burns encountered two years ago when she visited relatives and stopped by both the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Social Security offices. “I was in the minority!” she said. “But it was something I hadn’t thought about.”

Burns taught elementary school and special education in Benicia, and the only time she saw any trouble in classes was when Angela Davis, Huey Newton and the Black Panthers began raising fists in the air. A few local students began quoting Davis and Newton and raising their fists, too, she said.

All races were welcome at the Benicia Five and Dime, a store Burns’s mother, Gladys Wold, founded at 801 First St., she said.

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City Attorney Heather McLaughlin said Mayor Elizabeth Patterson will read a proclamation later this month in recognition of Law Day, which incorporates the Civil Rights Act.

“You’ll see from the proclamation that law day focuses on voting this year,” McLaughlin said.

“After the voting fiascos last go-round in Florida, it seems to me an important topic.”

Likewise, Benicia has changed its election year to even-numbered ones, a move that is expected to encourage more participation at the polls, she said.

Though both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were passed decades ago, “there is still work to be done to make sure that citizens can exercise their right to vote,” McLaughlin said, calling voting “really a cornerstone of democracy.”

And she has personal stories about civil rights, too.

“From my perspective, growing up, it always interested me that there still existed whites only/blacks only signs in the South,” she said. She would travel from California to visit her grandmother in North Carolina, and she saw the signs there.

But growing up, Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t as important an influence “as my mother,” she said. “She was Chinese. So, we kids got some of the discrimination due to being mixed.”

California’s record in dealing with the Chinese isn’t steller, according to Assemblymember Paul Fong of Cupertino, who said Chinese people at one time had to pay special taxes and couldn’t attend public schools. They weren’t allowed to own property until the 1950s, he said.

According to the U.S. Office of the Historian, Chinese people came to the United States initially to work in gold mines, then took agricultural and factory jobs. They’re also known for helping build America’s western railroads.

Chinese laborers sent their money back to China to support their families, which upset some Americans and the men were seen as opium-using gamblers who frequented prostitutes.

Congress passed a federal Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 to suspend immigration, and later forbade Chinese from re-entering the United States after leaving.

That law would be expanded, and wouldn’t be repealed until 1943 to appease China, then an American ally in World War II.

McLaughlin said some of the discrimination she experienced “might have been more of a Vietnam War thing. Who knows?”

She said the civil rights leader who influenced her most was Cesar Chavez.

Chavez, who died in 1993, was an American farm worker who became a labor leader and civil rights activist, co-founding the National Farm Workers Association that later became the United Farm Workers Union.

At its height in the late 1970s, his organization had grown to 50,000 members, forcing growers to recognize the union as their bargaining agent.

“My sister and I used to do mailers for the United Farm Workers and work fundraising parties,” McLaughlin said.

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In 2012, Benicia Historical Museum opened an exhibit, “Freedom is a Hard Bought Thing,” that traced the history of African Americans in Benicia and Solano County.

“Our timeline traced a general historical context … essentially tracing the military workforce in Benicia and Mare Island and the local community,” Executive Director Elizabeth d’Huart said.

Dr. James Lessenger worked on that exhibit and drafted a history outline, tailoring the African American experience and Benicia’s own history.

“Benicia has a hidden history that included slavery, freed slaves, the Underground Railroad, the segregation of the swimming pool, segregation in housing with sales covenants except for Carolina Street, and — finally — equal rights,” he said. “California achieved most of these rights through litigation and legislation before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the Act cemented the rights for everyone, especially in the area of employment.”

Benicia’s swimming pool, now the James Lemos Memorial Pool, was segregated from 1947 to 1954 while under a swim club’s management, Lessenger said. It was during that time that Carolina Street became “the defacto ‘Negro’ section of the town.”

California’s own civil rights act, passed in 1959, declared “All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are free and equal, and no matter what their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, marital status, or sexual orientation are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.”

Seeking swift passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, President Johnson told members of Congress that “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory.”

Originally introduced in June 1963, the bill cleared the House Feb. 10, 1964, the Senate June 19, and conference committee July 2. Johnson signed it that same day.