Since the centerpiece of my third volume, a book about Lyndon Johnson as Senate Majority Leader, was going to be his monumental achievement in ramming through that body, in 1957, a bill to make it easier for black Americans to vote, the first civil rights bill to be passed in eighty-two years, I wanted to briefly show in the opening pages of the book—to make the reader understand and feel right at the beginning—how hard it had been for a black person to register to vote, let alone to actually cast a ballot, in the South before 1957: what were the obstacles facing African-Americans wanting to
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