How Voting Rights Fared in the Midterms

(The New Yorker) One of the unsung heroes of the civil-rights legislation of the nineteen-sixties is a Republican congressman from Ohio named Bill McCulloch. Representing a nearly all-white district north of Dayton McCulloch reflected the values of what was then still justifiably called the party of Lincoln. McCulloch preferred the term equal rights" to civil rights" because as he put it the Constitution doesnt say that whites alone shall have our most basic rights but that we all shall have them." In that spirit and in partnership with Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois a fellow-Republican McCulloch did as much as anyoneapart from President Lyndon Johnson and those involved in the movement itselfto create and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As Todd Purdum notes in his book An Idea Whose Time Has Come" when McCulloch announced his retirement in 1971 Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sent him a handwritten note saying I know that you more than anyone were responsible for the civil rights legislation of the 1960s." Read More