Passage
In the waning hours of the 1963 General Assembly session, Rep. Phil Godwin introduced the bill, then called for a suspension of the rules to expedite its passage through the state House of Representatives. There were no committee hearings and no advance notice that the bill would be introduced, and only a few of the bill's supporters had copies of the legislation. The bill passed three readings in four minutes.
Having been passed in the House, the bill was immediately taken across the Legislative Building to the North Carolina Senate chamber, where Clarance Stone was presiding. When one senator spoke briefly against the bill, Stone responded by saying "No, it sounds like a real good one to me, I think we ought to get this one through." When several other members of the Senate began to rise to speak against the bill, Stone took off his glasses and said he saw no more people wanting to speak. He then called for the voice vote and declared that the bill had passed.
Governor Terry Sanford was against the bill, but at that time the governor of North Carolina could not veto legislation.
Read more about this topic: North Carolina Speaker Ban
Famous quotes containing the word passage:
“Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)