Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice

Through actual transcripts - most never before published - from the secret recordings that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson made of White House meetings and telephone conversations, this book charts the civil rights movement between 1962 and 1964. Beginning with the violent crisis of 1962 when James Meredith attempted to enrol at the all-white University of Mississippi, it traces events through to the groundbreaking passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Setting these transcripts within an historical narrative, Jonathan Rosenberg and Zachary Karabell present the story of America's struggle for racial equality during two tumultuous years. As fly-on-the-wall history, this book gives us an unusual grasp of the way the White House affected civil rights history.