The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume V
The Struggle to Pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act, 1955–1957

“Clarence Mitchell, Jr., for decades waged in the halls of Congress a stubborn, resourceful and historic campaign for social justice. The integrity of this ‘101st senator’ earned him the respect of friends and adversaries alike. His brilliant advocacy helped translate into law the protests and aspirations of millions consigned for too long to second-class citizenship. The hard-won fruits of his labors have made America a better and stronger nation.”

President Jimmy Carter, Citation for the Presidential Medal of Freedom

“The Papers of Clarence Mitchell, Jr. is a primary source and analytical goldmine for scholars of civil rights and labor struggles in the twentieth-century United States…. Well organized, engagingly written, and edited with cogent commentary, these two volumes (III & IV) take us inside Mitchell’s activist office and let us hear his own words.”

Journal of Southern History

This fifth volume in The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. series records the successful effort to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act: the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875.

Prior to the US Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, in which it declared that segregation was discrimination and thus unconstitutional, the NAACP had faced an impenetrable wall of opposition in Congress from southerners who maintained that there was no need for civil rights legislation because their Jim Crow system was constitutional and that they did not practice racial discrimination. When the Brown decision demolished their argument, Mitchell launched the definitive stage of the struggle for passage of the civil rights laws in the modern period.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was the first comprehensive implementation of a lobbying campaign by an organization dedicated to that purpose since Reconstruction. On the heels of the Brown decision, the 1957 law was a turning point in the struggle to accord Black citizens full equality under the Constitution.

The act’s passage was nearly derailed in the US Senate by southern opposition and Senator Strom Thurmond’s record-setting filibuster, which lasted over twenty-four hours. Congress later weakened several of the act’s provisions, but the act crucially broke a psychological barrier to the congressional passage of such measures.

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. series is a detailed, multivolume record of the NAACP leader’s success in bringing the legislative branch together with the judicial and executive branches to provide civil rights protections during the twentieth century.

Clarence Mitchell Jr. (1911–84) was a civil rights activist and, for nearly thirty years, a chief lobbyist for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Nicknamed the “101st Senator,” he was instrumental to the successful passage of the most consequential US civil rights legislative acts of the 1950s and 1960s.   More info →

Denton L. Watson, formerly director of public relations for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is an associate professor at SUNY College at Old Westbury. He is author of Lion in the Lobby, Clarence Mitchell, Jr.’s Struggle for the Passage of Civil Rights Laws and editor of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr.   More info →