Tag: civil rights act
Right-Wing Leader Who Pushed Gorsuch Is Furious Over His LGBTQ Rights Opinion

Right-Wing Leader Who Pushed Gorsuch Is Furious Over His LGBTQ Rights Opinion

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

The head of a far right wing activist group is furious that conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote Monday's majority Supreme Court opinion that finds discriminating against LGBTQ workers is illegal.

Judicial Crisis Network, a "powerful dark money group pushing [the] court to right," ran a $10 million campaign in 2017 to force Gorsuch onto the bench. He is President Donald Trump's first Supreme Court nominee. The group also spent $1 million to block President Barack Obama from putting Merrick Garland on the bench.

In a series of tweets Carrie Severino blasted Justice Gorsuch and the five others who sided with his opinion. She even claims they are merely trying to appeal to college students by finding that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects LGBTQ workers from discrimination.

Gorsuch, a textualist who replaced Justice Antonin Scalia on the bench, decided that as written, the actual words of the Civil Rights Act make clear that discriminating on the basis of sex is illegal.

Severino, who also happens to be married toRoger Severino, a far right wing religious activist who heads the Dept. of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights under Trump, is furious.





President Trump and his administration oppose rights for LGBTQ workers and actively lobbied to have the Court rule discrimination is legal.

On social media many – including some conservatives – are mocking her.











Donald Trump Serves Up The Latest Chapter Of Racial Backlash

Donald Trump Serves Up The Latest Chapter Of Racial Backlash

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

In the fall of 1831, an astute man of mixed-race heritage named Beverly Snow arrived in the city of Washington to seek his fortune. Snow and his wife Julia had recently purchased their freedom from a friendly master in Lynchburg, Virginia. Under Virginia law, emancipated slaves had to leave the state within a year or else be sold back into bondage. So the Snows came to the nation’s capital.

Audacious and hopeful, Snow sued in local court for the right to obtain a license to sell beer at the fall horse races. He won his lawsuit and went into business. Two years later, Snow opened Washington’s first restaurant on the corner of Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue (a location now occupied by the flagship steakhouse of the Capitol Grille chain).

Imbued with dreams of the Founding Fathers, Beverly Snow named his restaurant the Epicurean Eating House, which he extolled as a place to pursue happiness. Snow’s newspaper advertisements touted the salubrious virtues of his signature dish: a fine green turtle soup. Soon Snow’s place was the toast of Washington, frequented by senators, lobbyists and tourists.

But the very success of a free man of color was felt by many a white man as a threat. In 1833, antislavery activists brought their subversive message of human rights to the capital of the slave-holding republic for the first time. In 1834, the economy crashed, leading to widespread unemployment among white workers. In 1835, angry whites retaliated against African-American aspirations by rioting in two-dozen American cities, attacking free blacks and their white allies. In August 1835, a white mob trashed Snow’s restaurant and sought to lynch its proprietor. Snow barely escaped.

One hundred and eighty-two years later, Barack Obama, another astute man of mixed-race heritage who found success in Washington, is leaving his Pennsylvania Avenue address. Like Snow, Obama leaves with his head held high but his name excoriated by a claque of remaining white men who resent his success and popularity. The phenomenon of the American backlash has returned to Washington.

Those disheartened by the impending inauguration of President Trump can console themselves with the long view of the backlash: Snow left town ahead of the mob and was lucky to get to Toronto, Canada. Obama leaves the presidential residence as the most popular president in a generation. He will be lucky if he gets a good night’s sleep and quality time on the putting green before a desperate citizenry demands his service again.

But glacially slow progress is cold comfort for defenders of a democracy under siege. Obama famously said, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., that the moral arc of history is long but bends toward justice. On the holiday celebrating King’s birthday, a hard truth has to be faced: the arc of American history is long and it bends toward backlash.

President-elect Trump’s tirade against Rep. John Lewis is a pure expression of the backlash. When Lewis asserted he would not attend Trump’s inauguration because his election lacked legitimacy, Trump told him to leave Washington politics and go back to his district. The last living leader of the 1960s civil rights movement had no place in national politics.

New Yorker editor David Remnick is rightly amazed that Trump criticized Lewis. But it’s not very hard to imagine past American presidents such as Richard Nixon, Woodrow Wilson or Andrew Jackson making a similar comment to a black leader. Trump is part of a tradition that has renewed itself, not died out.

For the past two centuries, American backlash has occurred when white leaders and a substantial part of the white population mobilize to attack, deter and quell African-American political aspirations. Such impulses have persisted throughout the history of the American peoples. They regularly culminate in social turbulence and radical change. Welcome to the Trump backlash. We’ve seen this show before. In the 1830s, the emerging anti-slavery movement faced violent retaliation in the streets. Congress adopted the “gag rule” forbidding debate about slavery. The abolitionist movement spread, the resistance of the North stiffened and Lincoln led the Republic through the ordeal of the Civil War. The post-Civil War constitutional amendments inaugurated a new republic.

In the mid-1870s, southerners rebelled against the Reconstruction the North imposed on the defeated states of the Confederacy. In April 1873, a white riot in Colfax, Louisiana killed 150 black people and three whites. A historical marker of the event (standing today and unaffected by “political correctness”) approvingly notes that the massacre of the blacks “marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” That’s pretty much how Breitbart would cover the story today.

The post-Civil War backlash actually culminated in 1877 in a Washington hotel room when Democratic and Republican party bosses agreed to a deal to resolve the contested 1876 election. The Democrats accepted a Republican president in return for a GOP promise to drop Abraham Lincoln’s vision of a reconstructed post-slavery south. Backlash lead to reactionary success of white elites, starting with the disenfranchisement of black voters.

America suffered another white backlash in 1919. Once again, black ambitions were on the rise. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1914, and Booker T. Washington, the accomodationist titan, died in 1915. The great migration from the Jim Crow South to the freer cities of the North liberated millions. The participation of black soldiers in the Great War 1916-1918, fostered a new mood of pride and militancy among African Americans.

The white response was both bureaucratic and violent. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson segregated the previously integrated federal workforce. A young Justice Department official named J. Edgar Hoover began tracking civil rights leaders as a threat to public safety, and the lynching of black men spread. As a new study documents, black soldiers in uniform were a favorite target. This backlash reached a frenzied peak in the summer of 1919 when white mobs attacked blacks in dozens of American cities, for offenses real and imagined.

Another regular feature of the American backlash: resistance. When white mobs, instigated by racially inflammatory coverage in the Washington Post, started attacking black Washingtonians in July 1919, black war veterans rallied residents to take up arms and fight back. While scores of blacks had been killed in Omaha and Chicago that summer, only three blacks (and three whites) were killed in Washington.

Black resistance was the spirit of America itself, declared NAACP editor W.E.B. DuBois as armed black men rallied to defend the LeDroit park neighborhood near Howard University. “Make way for Democracy,” he wrote. “We saved it in France and by the Great Jehovah we will save it in the United States of America.”

America saw another white backlash in 1968, as the Second Reconstruction, wrought by King and President Lyndon Johnson, took hold. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 empowered re-enfranchised black voters across the South. The Black Power movement emerged, impatient with King’s mild-manner militance. The black nationalists advocated armed defense against police brutality, and the rioting of black mobs from Watts to Newark scared the bejesus out of the whole country.

White militance found expression in the frankly racist presidential bids of Alabama governor George Wallace in 1964 and 1968. Reporters discovered the so-called Silent Majority of white Americans who said they wanted to “take back their country.” Edgar Hoover stepped up his covert COINTELPRO program to destroy black leadership. Martin Luther King was assassinated by a white racist. Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated by Chicago police. In the 1968 election, Republican Richard Nixon co-opted the backlash with a “Southern Strategy” that offered a politics of resisting black demands without resorting to nakedly racial appeals. Nixon’s racially calibrated strategy won him a landslide in 1972.

The backlash of 2016 shares many features with its predecessors. Black political success, in the form of Obama’s presidency, provoked fear and resentment among many whites. Racist rhetoric proliferated. Black political organization was perceived as inherently violent. Like the American Antislavery Society in the 1830s and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1960s, the Black Lives Matter movement was accused (with equally scant evidence) of instigating violence against whites. The effort to disenfranchise black voters is now implicitly sanctioned by the Supreme Court. For Trump to now savage Lewis for questioning the legitimacy of the status quo leadership, well, that’s a been punishable offense in every American backlash.

Progress is undeniable. The impunity of mob violence has been curbed. Racial profiling and police violence remain, along with an appalling level of gun violence. The hard lesson of 2016 was that the dynamics of the American backlash have not changed. The strength of the backlash, while diminished, is not vanquished.

The fear that black aspirations are a threat to the well-being of white people seems embedded in American culture and history. Barack Obama’s election (and re-election) vindicated the widespread aspiration to transcend that history. Nonetheless, Trump proved that tapping into these fears remains an effective majoritarian strategy, at least among white voters outside of New York and California.

If there is any consolation on the King holiday of 2017, it is the assurance that the American backlash is sure to generate new forms of multiracial resistance in the spirit of America itself. The union of free Americans who ejected slavery, embraced voting rights, shook off Jim Crow, and elected a mixed-race president is nothing if not resilient. We’re not going anywhere. Beverly Snow had to move all the way to Canada. Barack Obama leaves Pennsylvania Avenue in a few days, but he’s only moving two miles away.

Jefferson Morley is AlterNet’s Washington correspondent.

IMAGE:  Donald Trump holds a rally with supporters in Anaheim. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Weekend Reader: ‘The Teacher Wars: A History Of America’s Most Embattled Profession’

Weekend Reader: ‘The Teacher Wars: A History Of America’s Most Embattled Profession’

As a new school year begins for students across the country, we remember the struggle for equality in public education that culminated in President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. In The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession, journalist Dana Goldstein outlines the complicated history of public education and the teaching profession. Goldstein praises teachers for the impact they have on young Americans and the role they take in shaping minds and giving students the tools they need to remedy the injustices they will see as they grow up. 

In the excerpt below, Goldstein details how President Johnson developed a progressive philosophy on education as a young teacher in southern Texas.

You can purchase the book here.

In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, desegregation was moving so slowly that no one could say for sure how Brown might ultimately affect the education of black children, or the employment of black teachers. A decade after the ruling, over 90 percent of southern black students still attended all-black schools. Of the 333,000 black children who had been integrated, 80 percent lived in border states, not in Deep South strongholds of massive resistance. In Mississippi, not a single black child had been allowed to enroll in a white school. Why? Except in a few high-profile cases, such as President Eisenhower’s use of federal troops to integrate Little Rock Central High School, neither the courts nor the executive branch stepped in when white schools turned away black students, when local banks denied credit to black parents who petitioned for their children to attend white schools, or when employers fired those black parents in retaliation.

All that changed in 1964. President Johnson’s enormous popularity in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, as well as his peerless legislative maneuvering, allowed him to establish an unprecedented role for the federal government in local public education. Previous efforts to expand Washington’s influence over local schools had brought limited results. The launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 prompted Congress to pass the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which provided several hundred million dollars to prepare high-achieving students for careers in the sciences, math, engineering, and foreign languages. The law did not address educational inequalities driven by race and class. John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960 promising to pass a comprehensive federal education aid package, a liberal dream dating back to Reconstruction. But Kennedy’s efforts were stymied when fights broke out on Capitol Hill between lobbyists representing Catholic bishops, who wanted funding for parochial schools, and those representing teachers unions, who opposed aid to religious schools and prioritized higher pay for teachers. Then, during the frustrated decade after Brown, desegregation was the law, but not the reality.

When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Department of Justice could finally sue schools that resisted or delayed integration. The following year, the Voting Rights Act allowed many southern black parents to register to vote for the first time. That meant black citizens could threaten to unseat politicians and school board members who opposed integration. By 1972, less than 10 percent of black students in the South attended an all-black school. Though true school integration would prove relatively fleeting in many neighborhoods, it had, at least temporarily, been achieved.

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The most lasting Great Society change for the nation’s schools came through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the precursor to the Bush-era No Child Left Behind. The 1965 law, initially funded at the massive level of $1.2 billion per year, united the Left and center around a new role for Washington as a standard setter for state education agencies and local schools. While the NDEA had targeted funding toward the best and brightest students, ESEA was all about “compensatory education” for the 19 percent of low-income public school students falling behind in poor, largely black and Hispanic schools. Federal aid would now be offered or withheld depending on whether local policy makers followed national directives, such as supplying low-income schools with up-to-date textbooks, establishing school libraries, and pulling at-risk students out of class for supplemental tutoring. States that offered their low-income students more state-level funding would be rewarded with more money from the federal government. Johnson portrayed this expansion of the federal bureaucracy in stirring, soaring rhetoric. He signed ESEA in his hometown of Johnson City, Texas, with his own elementary school teacher at his side. “By passing this bill, we bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than 5 million educationally deprived children,” he said. “And we rekindle the revolution—the revolution of the spirit against the tyranny of ignorance. As a son of a tenant farmer, I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty. As a former teacher—and, I hope, a future one—I have great expectations of what this law will mean for all of our young people.” Those sky-high expectations placed on educators—as revolutionary foot soldiers in the War on Poverty— are still with us today.

To illustrate the transformative power of education, the president wove a careful political mythology around his own nine months working as a teacher in a low-income public elementary school. As a twenty-year-old college dropout in 1928, Johnson followed a girlfriend to south Texas, where the couple planned to earn a little money by teaching school. Johnson found work in the dusty cattle village of Cotulla, home to three thousand residents. He had attended subpar schools in central Texas Hill Country, but he was appalled by the even worse conditions at the segregated Welhausen School, where he taught the children of Mexican American laborers. The school had no extracurricular activities, no lunchtime, and no athletic equipment. The students and their parents struggled with basic English and lived in homes without indoor plumbing or electricity. Johnson wrote to his mother to ask her to send 250 tubes of toothpaste. Because he was male, he was quickly appointed principal. He instituted an “English only” rule on school grounds, founded a debate team that competed against nearby schools, assigned classic poems for students to recite from memory, and required teachers to stay after school to tutor children who needed extra help. His students would remember him as a strict disciplinarian who spanked children who spoke Spanish or talked back to their teachers. But by most reports, Johnson was an inspiring educator nonetheless. He began each school day by telling the story of “the little baby in the cradle”—a poor Mexican American child who sometimes grew up to be a teacher, sometimes a doctor, and sometimes even the president of the United States.

Johnson has been accused, in the words of historian Irwin Unger, of viewing education as “a magic cure for social failure and economic inequality.” But Johnson’s political messages about the children he knew in Cotulla were in fact quite complex. Rather than paint schools and teachers as saviors who could overcome the challenges of poverty (to borrow the phrasing of so many contemporary school reformers), Johnson described his teaching years with considerable humility. He recalled students who came to school hungry and who wordlessly understood that they were despised by whites for their brown skin and foreignness. In a March 1965 speech to Congress on “the American promise,” he portrayed himself as a young teacher walking home from work exhausted and lost in thought, simply “wishing there was more I could do”:

But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew, hoping that it might help them against the hardships that lay ahead. Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child. I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country.

As a mere classroom teacher, Johnson implied, he could not fully address the social challenges his students faced. To do more for them he would need to advance not only an education program, but also a broad agenda to negate the disadvantages of poverty and racism. There would be expanded access to food stamps, affordable housing, and afterschool and summer programs. There would be a federally funded preschool program for the poorest children, called Head Start. Johnson framed this agenda in nearly religious terms. “I want to be the president who helped to end hatred among his fellow men and who promoted love among the people of all races and all regions and all parties,” he told Congress. “I want to be the president who helped to end war among the brothers of this earth.” While there remains a consensus that income and educational opportunity are deeply linked, never again would a national school reform agenda be accompanied by so aggressive an antipoverty push.

If you enjoyed this excerpt, purchase the full book here.

From the book The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein. Copyright © 2014 by Dana Goldstein. Published by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC

Weekend Reader: ‘Bill Of The Century: The Epic Battle For The Civil Rights Act’

Weekend Reader: ‘Bill Of The Century: The Epic Battle For The Civil Rights Act’

Today the Weekend Reader brings you Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act by Clay Risen, editor of The New York Times op-ed section. Bill of the Centurydetails the arduous mission of civil rights leaders to pass a bill that granted equal rights to millions of Americans regardless of race, sex, or religion. Risen explores the long list of other important contributors  who drafted the bill and pushed it through Congress, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy, and President Lyndon B. Johnson.

You can purchase the book here.

While in Birmingham, [Assistant Attorney General Burke] Marshall had spent some time talking with Dick Gregory, a black comedian and outspoken civil rights activist. Gregory said that part of the administration’s problem was that the Kennedys never actually talked with black people. Marshall relayed the suggestion to Robert Kennedy. The attorney general asked if Marshall could set up a meeting with the author James Baldwin, whose essay “Letter from a Region of My Mind” he had read in the New Yorker. Marshall got in touch with Baldwin, who agreed to come to Washington to meet Kennedy on May 23.

When the day arrived, though, Baldwin’s plane was delayed, and by the time he got to Kennedy’s northern Virginia home, the attorney general had only twenty minutes to talk. Kennedy began by admitting that the proposals under consideration were focused on issues facing Southern blacks and would do little to help those in the Northern cities. What, he asked Baldwin, should be done? Baldwin offered to assemble a group of black activists and intellectuals for Kennedy to meet with. By chance, Kennedy said, he was going to be in New York the next day—why not set up a get-together that afternoon?

The next morning, Kennedy, Marshall, and Oberdorfer flew to New York for a meeting with the heads of several major five and dimes, theaters, and department stores—Woolworth’s, Kress, J. C. Penney, McCrory, Sears—to discuss what they could do to desegregate their branches in the South. Kennedy came away with noncommittal responses, assurances that the chains would do the best they could but that they could not promise anything that would undermine their profits, which in the South, they insisted, meant acceding to customers’ demands that they remain segregated.

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Kennedy and his aides then headed to his father’s apartment at 24 Central Park West for the meeting with Baldwin’s hastily assembled focus group. If not a who’s who of the black community in New York, it was a good cross-section: Kenneth Clark, the eminent psychologist from the City College of New York; the singers Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne; the playwright Lorraine Hansberry; Jerome Smith, a twenty-four-year-old veteran of the Freedom Rides; Baldwin’s brother David and a friend of his, Thais Aubrey; Martin Luther King Jr.’s lawyer, Clarence Jones; and the Urban League activist Edwin C. Berry. (The white actor Rip Torn, who was active in civil rights, was also there.)

Clark and Berry were supposed to set an intellectual, measured tone for the meeting, but it derailed almost immediately. “In that moment, with the situation in Birmingham the way it was,” said Horne later, “none of us wanted to hear figures and percentages and all that stuff. Nobody even cared about expressions of goodwill.”

Smith, a passionate man with a pronounced stammer, began by saying, “Mr. Kennedy, I want you to understand I don’t care anything about you or your brother.” He said it was obvious that the Kennedys did not care about Southern protesters. In fact, he said, just being in the same room as the attorney general made him sick to his stomach.

Kennedy was visibly offended, but rather than engage with Smith, he tried to ignore him. He began addressing Baldwin, but Hansberry cut him off. “You’ve got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General. But the only man who should be listened to is that man over there,” she said, pointing at Smith. The young Freedom Rider began explaining what he had lived through in the South, emphasizing how little the federal government had done to help him.

Eventually Kennedy interrupted him. “Just let me say something,” he said.

“Okay,” said Smith, “but this time say something that means something. So far you haven’t said a thing!”

Kennedy tried to explain the bills, but Smith just scoffed. The situation was far too dire. He was a nonviolent man, he said, but he was unsure for how long. “When I pull the trigger, kiss it goodbye!”

Trying to inject some balance to the conversation, Baldwin asked Smith if he would ever fight for his country. “Never!” Smith said.

That drove Kennedy over the edge. He had been just a few years too young to fight in World War II, the war that had killed one of his brothers and made a hero of another. “How could you say that?” he demanded. “Bobby got redder and redder and redder, and in a sense accused Jerome of treason,” recalled Clark.

Kennedy asked for ideas. Baldwin said the president should personally escort students into the University of Alabama who were being blocked by Governor Wallace. He should get rid of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. The Department of Justice should be more aggressive in Birmingham. The attorney general insisted that he was working closely with King, which brought forth peals of cynical laughter.

Eventually Kennedy ran out of the energy to both respond to the attacks and keep his anger in check, and he just sat there quietly as Baldwin’s panel took turns berating him, his brother, and the federal government. “It became really one of the most violent, emotional, verbal assaults that I had ever witnessed before or since,” said Clark. Finally, after three hours, the meeting broke up.

The encounter had a profound effect on Kennedy. At first he was just angry. When Belafonte apologized afterward for the group’s hostility and said he agreed with Kennedy, the attorney general glared at him and said, “How could you just sit there and not say anything?” After returning to Washington, he sat down for a debriefing with Schlesinger. “They don’t know anything,” he said. “They don’t know what the laws are—they don’t know what the facts are. They don’t know what we’ve been doing or what we’re trying to do. You couldn’t talk to them as you can to Roy Wilkins or Martin Luther King. They didn’t want to talk that way. It was all emotion. Hysteria. They stood up and orated. They accused. Some of them wept and walked out of the room.”

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But over the next several days and weeks, Kennedy began to change. As his own anger faded, he found that the evident passion and stinging sense of injustice he has witnessed in Baldwin’s group had left an impression on him. “The more I saw him after this,” Belafonte recalled, “the more he no longer had questions that were just about the specifics of federal government intervention, or the civil rights strategy of the moment. He began to move to broader philosophical areas, began to know more about cause and effect and why.” Asked later to illustrate Kennedy’s education in civil rights, Marshall shot his hand straight up. Ed Guthman saw it, too. “After a day or two, Bob’s attitude about the meeting began to shift. He had never heard an American citizen say he would not defend the country and it troubled him. Instead of repeating, as he had, ‘Imagine anyone saying that,’ he said, ‘I guess if I were in his shoes, if I had gone through what he’s gone through, I might feel differently about this country.’”

On May 29, Robert Kennedy paid a surprise visit to Johnson’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. Kennedy sat quietly for a few minutes as NASA administrator James Webb gave a presentation of his agency’s progress. Then Kennedy began to cross-examine Webb, quickly establishing that NASA, which handled billions of dollars in contracts annually, had just two people—or one and a half, since one of them was Webb, who had other duties—making sure that the companies it did business with did not discriminate. “I don’t think this gentleman over here that spent a year and a half on this program—if he has, evidently, some other responsibilities, I don’t think he is going to get that job done,” Kennedy said. “He has got $3.9 billion worth of contracts.”

Webb meekly tried to defend himself. “I would like to have you take enough time to see precisely what we do.”

But Kennedy blew past him. “I am trying to ask some questions. I don’t think I am able to get the answers, to tell you the truth.”

At that point Johnson stepped in to defend Webb. “Do you have any other questions?” he asked Kennedy.

“That is all for me,” said the attorney general, and he stalked from the room.

Kennedy’s performance served many purposes, including venting steam from his encounter in New York as well as getting in some sucker punches against his nemesis, Lyndon Johnson. But it was also typical of the way Kennedy came to a new passion—intensely, with something to prove, enemies to make, and battles to be won. “Racial justice was no longer an issue in the middle distance,” wrote Schlesinger. “Robert Kennedy now saw it face to face, and he was on fire.”

If you enjoyed this excerpt, you can purchase the full book here.

From Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for The Civil Rights Act by Clay Risen, Copyright © 2014 by Clay Risen. Published by Bloomsbury Press. Reprinted with permission.