Introduction Summary

The Introduction sketches the techniques used by white officials in 1957 in Eufaula, AL, to prevent black citizens from voting. No matter how determined they were to exercise the basic right given to them in 1870 by the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, blacks had no legal remedy; hundreds of bills had been introduced in Congress to give teeth to the amendment, but only one had passed, only to be declared unconstitutional. The "Southern Bloc" of senators from the eleven states of the former Confederacy had crushed every attempt to pass legislation that would allow the federal government to intervene. The most recent attempt had been in 1956. In the summer of 1957, liberals were poised to try again, knowing they would almost certainly lose, but Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader, was recommending practicality: they had to give the blacks something. He...