Clarence Mitchell, Jr. is unique in the pantheon of civil rights history. Born in Baltimore on March 18, 1911, he led the struggle in Washington for passage of the civil rights laws and promulgation of constructive national policies to protect the constitutional rights of African Americans and all other citizens suffering discrimination because of race, national origin, religion, sex, age, or sexual orientation. Lion in the Lobby chronicles Mitchell's life story and mission of get...

Volume V of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. 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, the NAACP had faced an impenetrable wall of opposition from southerners in Congress. Basing their assertions on the court’s 1896 “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, legisl...

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 aimed to close loopholes in its 1957 predecessor that had allowed continued voter disenfranchisement for African Americans and for Mexicans in Texas.In early 1959, the newly seated Eighty-Sixth Congress had four major civil rights bills under consideration. Eventually consolidated into the 1960 Civil Rights Act, their purpose was to correct the weaknesses in the 1957 law. Mitchell’s papers from 1959 to 1960 show the extent to which cong...