When the Senate Was Civil and Bipartisan
The upper chamber passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by a 73–27 margin, with 27 Republican votes.
In the bitter winter of 1964, when the landmark Civil Rights Act was struggling to be born in the House of Representatives, a crucial young woman was at the center of the fight. Jane O’Grady, a 24-year-old graduate student fresh from Berkeley, had signed up to work for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, to lobby for the bill.
Her task was complex.
The pro-civil-rights forces knew that segregationists could weaken the bill—proposed by the martyred John F. Kennedy and now being pressed by Lyndon B. Johnson—by loading it up with hostile amendments. And the segregationists could
