A top Washington journalist recounts the dramatic political
battle to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the law that created
modern America, on the fiftieth anniversary of its passage
It was a turbulent time in America--a time of sit-ins, freedom
rides, a March on Washington and a governor standing in the
schoolhouse door--when John F. Kennedy sent Congress a bill to bar
racial discrimination in employment, education, and public
accommodations. Countless civil rights measures had died on Capitol
Hill in the past. But this one was different because, as one
influential senator put it, it was "an idea whose time has
come."
In a powerful narrative layered with revealing detail, Todd S.
Purdum tells the story of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, recreating
the legislative maneuvering and the larger-than-life characters who
made its passage possible. From the Kennedy brothers to Lyndon
Johnson, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Hubert Humphrey and Everett
Dirksen, Purdum shows how these all-too-human figures managed, in
just over a year, to create a bill that prompted the longest
filibuster in the history of the U.S. Senate yet was ultimately
adopted with overwhelming bipartisan support. He evokes the high
purpose and low dealings that marked the creation of this
monumental law, drawing on extensive archival research and dozens
of new interviews that bring to life this signal achievement in
American history.
Often hailed as the most important law of the past century, the
Civil Rights Act stands as a lesson for our own troubled times
about what is possible when patience, bipartisanship, and decency
rule the day.
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