Like Robert Kennedy, the US Attorney General at the time and brother of the assassinated president, Johnson had been pushing, as vice president, for broad anti-discrimination legislation that would include the professional sphere and not just public places and polling stations, as JFK had initially proposed.

The signing of the highly contested Civil Rights Act was met with strong opposition from employers, who denounced it as being unconstitutional before the country’s highest jurisdiction, the Supreme Court of the United States, which confirmed the constitutionality of the legislation.

Since that time, any member of the working population who believes he or she has been discriminated against at work or as a job applicant can file a complaint.

Last year, in the private sector alone, 93,727 charges were filed in this country of 316 million inhabitants. The majority were charges of discrimination based on race, national origin or skin colour (grounds which accounted for over half of the charges filed).

Fifty years after the signing of the anti-discrimination legislation, EEOC statistics show that Black or African-Americans are still overrepresented among service workers, labourers and clerical workers.

This trend is even pronounced amongst Hispanics, the largest minority group in the US with almost 17 per cent of the population identifying themselves as "Hispanic or Latino". Workers from this community account for almost a third of all day labourers, despite only representing just over 13 per cent of the labour force in the private sector and 10 per cent in the public.

The EEOC’s district director in Miami, Malcolm Medley, who presided the national ceremony celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, in Tampa, commented: “Our goal is not only to celebrate its passage, but to also encourage everyone to join us in working towards true and lasting equality.”

Beyond the commemoration of this anniversary, the EEOC’s special reports underline the inequalities that still exist in sectors such as finance, retail distribution, the media and the legal profession.

Silicon Valley

In a country where the rate of trade union membership barely reaches just over 11 per cent (and is below seven per cent in the private sector), much racial discrimination in the workplace goes unpunished.

In a bid to move things forward, associations fighting discrimination are calling on employers to publish their workforce composition figures.

But any progress in terms of equality and transparency generally depends on the goodwill of the company.

When Google revealed on 28 May that its workforce is 70 per cent male and 61 per cent white, it triggered a mini-tsunami among its fellow Silicon Valley internet giants.

Following a blog post by Google’s human resources vice president admitting that the company “is miles from where we want to be”, LinkedIn, Yahoo! and Facebook went on to publish their figures, also showing an excessive proportion of white male employees.

And yet none of these tech companies have yet firmly committed to promoting diversity.

“You can’t fix what you don’t know or what you don’t recognise,” underlined civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who triggered this transparency drive by addressing some of these companies’ annual general meetings, as president of the Rainbow/PushCoalition defending minority rights, in spring of this year.

Jackson’s campaign is driven by a single idea: “Silicon Valley can be a tremendously positive change agent for the world.”

On the fringes of the Rainbow/Push convention in Chicago, Google announced new measures to promote greater gender and ethnic diversity in the tech industry.

Enough to blow the dust off the fifty-year-old Civil Rights Act.