The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act by Clay Risen.

• Author: Roper, John Herbert, Sr.
• Position: Book review

Risen, Clay. The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014. xv + 296 pages. Hardcover, $60.00.

It has been fifty years since the Civil Rights Act became law. Although many of its provisions--that there is an inherent equality amongst and between all peoples, that the might of the federal government can and must protect those rights, that people have the right to basic services as they travel interstate commerce, that those rights extend beyond color and caste to gender and sexuality, and finally that the federal government stands as ultimate guarantor of natural rights even and especially where local voting majorities might deny those rights--are no longer controversial, this fine study reminds us how bold such assertions were in the period from 1961 to 1964. Even more important is the painstaking effort that author Clay Risen makes to show the parliamentary and political processes by which the bill of the century became law for the ages. Risen reminds us forcefully that nothing was a given during the Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations, even as he reminds us that such complex legislation becomes law by dint of parliamentary brilliance, effective pressure from changing public opinion, the actions and words of great people, the contingencies of timing and economic forces, and as much luck as Machiavelli ever assigned to Fortuna.

Risen, staff writer for The New York Times editorial page and longtime journalist with The New Republic and with Democracy, brings to his task the journalist's sense for the quotable and passion for the newsworthy. He also brings superb training in historical research from the University of Chicago. Already conversant with the broad themes of historical interpretation and with the concrete particularities of detail from daily newspaper coverage, Risen adds primary search work in newly opened presidential, media network, congressional committee, and FBI files, the latter of which had to be infamously forced open by lawsuit. He also includes party documents and interviews with principals (and with smalltime players in propinquity if not prominence).

Although he narrates weekly, sometimes daily, events in a tightly focused period of time, Risen remembers historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's important phrase, that the civil rights movement is a "Long Movement" whose genesis stretches back to slavery and whose teleological end lies on a distant, albeit widening...