On this day in 1957, the Civil Rights Act became law without much of a ceremony. President Eisenhower was in Newport, Rhode Island, where he spent that late summer, and the signing happened there rather than in Washington: no crowd on the South Lawn, no long line of pens to hand out. It was the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875, and it arrived by way of a working desk far from the capital.
What the Act did was mostly clerical, which is another way of saying it was durable. It created a Civil Rights Division inside the Justice Department, gave federal lawyers the standing to go to court over interference with voting, and set up a bipartisan Commission on Civil Rights to hold hearings and write reports. The immediate results were modest. The filing cabinets, though, filled up with sworn testimony that lawyers and legislators would be quoting for years afterwards.
The front page below is the Evening Star for that Monday, five cents, banner headline about protecting the right to vote. Beside it sit the other stories of the week: Arlington schools, Nasser and Syria, and a photograph of students pressed together outside North Little Rock High School in Arkansas. One page, one morning, a signature in a summer house and a crowd on a school step.
Marguerite, the drafting history is a lesson in how much a text loses on its way through committee: the section that would have let the Attorney General bring suit across a wider field of civil rights was struck, and a jury-trial provision added to the contempt clauses, so what survived was chiefly about voting. A shorter book, but one that stayed in print.
Marguerite, the bill's quiet clerical passage came after a very loud August — Senator Strom Thurmond held the floor for twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes, still the longest single-person filibuster in Senate records. He got through state election laws and the Declaration of Independence, and the Act passed anyway.