The Long Game: Inside the Campaign for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

More than two decades before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, activists were already laying the groundwork for its passage. Douglas Flamming’s The Long Game traces that largely overlooked history, which culminated in the landmark legislation that prohibited Jim Crow segregation in public places and outlawed racial discrimination in employment. Beginning with the fair-employment campaigns of the early 1940s, Flamming charts the growth of a nationwide, biracial coalition that lobbied for an expanding array of legislative goals. When the southern civil rights movement blossomed in the early 1960s, this coalition—which had built upon its foundations in the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights —skillfully bridged the wide gap separating the halls of Congress from the grassroots movement.

At the center of the book are Clarence Mitchell, head of the Washington bureau of the NAACP and the nation’s leading African American lobbyist, and Jewish labor lawyer Joseph Rauh, Washington counsel for the powerful United Auto Workers union. As lobbyists for the Leadership Conference, they fought for meaningful civil rights legislation year after year. But their efforts repeatedly crashed against the Conservative Coalition, a powerful congressional alliance between Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans, whose skillful manipulations of congressional rules sank liberal initiatives. For more than two decades, Mitchell, Rauh, and their allies organized, negotiated, lobbied, lost, and tried again. Their long campaign reveals how the Civil Rights Act was won not only through extraordinary activism of the early 1960s but through years of painstaking coalition-building and political strategy that ultimately helped transform federal civil rights law.