Juan Williams’ latest dissection of the Civil Rights Movement, “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement,” is a masterful sequel to his 1987 best-seller — “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965.”

The first Civil Rights Movement addressed racial oppression where the choice between right and wrong was clear. Pervasive segregation. Wholesale disenfranchisement in violation of the 15th Amendment. The firehoses of Commissioner Bull Connor and the cattle prods of Sheriff Jim Clark. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four angelic girls. The cold-blooded murders of Emmett Till, Michael Schwerner, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Medgar Evers and others who gave that last full measure of devotion to a noble cause.

Equal justice under law was invincible. The electrifying words are enshrined over the entrance of the United States Supreme Court. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia expressed: “In the eyes of the government, we are just one race here. It is American.”

Success for the movement was simple to measure: treating individuals with colorblindness in all walks of life. Designating the race of candidates on ballots, for example, was verboten to discourage racial bloc voting. A post-racial society approached with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 1968 Fair Housing Act, the judicial revival of post-Civil War civil rights laws and Thurgood Marshall’s elevation to the Supreme Court. In such a society, when individuals look at one another, they see only two things: character and accomplishments. Race is ignored.

A post-racial society does not yield perfect justice. That benchmark is unattainable because mankind is made of crooked timber, and our station in life is influenced by happenstances beyond our control — our parents, siblings, relatives and place of birth. But a post-racial society is optimal. Free will makes us captains of our fate, masters of our souls. Skeptics who insist we are in bondage to our circumstances have no response to British sage Samuel Johnson’s apercu: “All theory is against free will; all experience is for it.”

Instead of running victory laps, however, the first Civil Rights Movement segued into the second Civil Rights Movement, which has sputtered. The focus shifted from individual rights to group quotas or entitlements divorced from individual merit. The two are in tension if not contradictory. Author Williams implicitly elides the distinction. He regularly summons statistics demonstrating the underrepresentation of Black Americans in professions, politics and elite educational institutions and overrepresentation in crime, drug abuse, prisons or homelessness as disproof of a post-racial society. Williams’ unstated assumption is that in a post-racial society, by every metric of success or failure, Black and white people would be represented in exact proportion to their representation in the total population.

That argument is unconvincing. Renowned Black scholar Thomas Sowell has written volumes discrediting the theory. Children born into the same family, for instance, show vastly different outcomes — even identical twins. The huge discrepancies are born of free will. Thomas Edison observed, “Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.” Michelangelo is said to have remarked, “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem like genius at all.”

Williams is preoccupied with recurring police misconduct symbolized by George Floyd’s murder, Black Lives Matter and political maneuverings seeking redress. This preoccupation misses the elephant in the room: the disintegration or collapse of the Black family, the prime engine for inculcating behavioral norms indispensable to success. The alarming phenomenon was highlighted in the 1965 Moynihan Report, named after scholar and later senator from New York Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

The government does not create human capital. It is created in the home with mothers and fathers as role models. The government acts with ulterior motives that diverge from the interests of professed beneficiaries.

Parents ordinarily act in the best interests of their children.

The author steers away from addressing self-help options for ameliorating the living conditions of Black Americans. The omission is odd because the political successes of the Black community, including twice-elected President Barack Obama and former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, have not edged the nation closer to a post-racial society as conceived by the second Civil Rights Movement.

The Supreme Court did the country a favor in holding racial preferences in college or university admissions unconstitutional in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023). An even playing field, admittedly, will not yield perfect justice because we are not born into the same circumstances. But experience teaches that government-ordained quotas or recognition of group rights is a cure vastly worse than the disease.

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.