Civil Rights Act of 1957
The Civil Rights Act of 1957, , a federal voting rights bill, was the first federal civil rights legislation passed by the United States Congress since the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Its purpose was to show the federal government's support for racial equality after the US Supreme Court's 1954 decision in "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka".
Thomas B. Curtis
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 originated in Curtis' office in 1962, and it was mainly Republican pressure from Curtis and his fellow Republican Judiciary Committee member William McCulloch of Ohio that forced John F. Kennedy to make his first, hesitant message on civil rights in April 1963. Curtis' defense of civil rights was rooted partly in the Lincoln tradition of the GOP, but more simply in the belief that civil rights were at the base of the American philosophy of government and Judeo-Christian morality and that their defense was "the most fundamental issue that confronts any government at any time," as he wrote in 1952.