The range of social and political matters that people have proclaimed the “civil rights issue of our time” attests to the high value the label holds in contemporary discourse. In recent years, gay rights, immigration, mass incarceration, health care, campaign finance, mental health, access to the Internet, global warming, and abortion have all been designated the civil rights issue of our day. George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump each declared education the most important civil rights issue of their presidencies. Eradicating poverty, according to a writer for the New York Times, is “the most important civil rights battle of the past half century.” Americans invoke civil rights to elevate an issue, to transform a dispute over policy to a matter of right and wrong, of fundamental national commitments. Civil rights is a statement about the character of the American people.