Mary Frances Berry

This book is the first history in forty years of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. The author, who has been member of the commission for more than twenty years and chairperson for more than a decade, describes its founding in 1957 by President Eisenhower in response to the burgeoning civil rights protest. She makes clear that, from the outset, the commission was designed to be an independent bipartisan federal agency, beholden to no government body,...