About this item

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the single most important piece of legislation passed by Congress in American history. This one law so dramatically altered American society that, looking back, it seems preordained--as Everett Dirksen, the GOP leader in the Senate and a key supporter of the bill, said, "no force is more powerful than an idea whose time has come." But there was nothing predestined about the victory: a phalanx of powerful senators, pledging to "fight to the death" for segregation, launched the longest filibuster in American history to defeat it. The bill's passage has often been credited to the political leadership of President Lyndon Johnson, or the moral force of Martin Luther King. Yet as Clay Risen shows, the battle for the Civil Rights Act was a story much bigger than those two men.



About the Author

Clay Risen

Clay Risen is the deputy op-ed editor at The New York Times and the author of several works of American history, including "The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act," which was named a 2014 notable book of the year by The Washington Post, and "A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination." He oversaw two award-winning history series for The New York Times, Vietnam '67 and Disunion, and he was a co-editor of "The New York Times' Disunion: Modern Historians Revisit and Reconsider the Civil War from Lincoln's Election to the Emancipation Proclamation."Risen is also one of America's leading whiskey experts; he the author of "Single Malt: A Guide to the Whiskies of Scotland" and "American Whiskey, Bourbon and Rye: A Guide to the Nation's Favorite Spirit," which has sold over 100,000 copies across two editions. He has written extensively about whiskey and the liquor industry for The New York Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Fortune, Garden & Gun and other national publications.Risen previously worked as an assistant editor at The New Republic and the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.



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