Fight For Civil Rights
As the ranking member of the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee, William McCulloch took a leading role in the civil rights movement. He introduced Civil Rights legislation months before Kennedy presented his act to congress. This was not only politically imprudent, but some considered it to be political suicide. Representative McCulloch had a small number of African-American constituents, and thus few votes to gain from introducing or supporting civil rights legislation. Regardless of the possible political ramifications, Representative McCulloch fought to repair an unjust system.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a path to justice for a nation that had allowed injustice for so long. It was his political and moral guidance that quelled anti-civil rights sentiments from members of the committee. McCulloch’s influence with the 1964 Civil Rights Act led President Kennedy to declare “Without him it can’t be done.”
Congressman William McCulloch never shirked from responsibility. In fact, he rose to become recognized by President Johnson as “…the most important and powerful political force” in passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Throughout his career, McCulloch was a conservative (demonstrated by low Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores) and a strong supporter of civil rights. As ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, he, with Democratic Chairman Emanuel Celler, pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the House of Representatives. During the Great Society Congress, although he supported Johnson's civil rights programs, he opposed most Great Society legislation. After the Great Society Congress (1965–1966), he began to adopt a few liberal positions, such as favoring strong gun control legislation in 1968 and support for busing. He was not a candidate for reelection in the 1972 election to the Ninety-third Congress. He resumed the practice of law in Piqua, Ohio, and died in Washington, D.C., on February 22, 1980. Interment in Arlington National Cemetery.
In early 2010, McCulloch was proposed by the Ohio Historical Society as a finalist in a statewide vote for inclusion in Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol.
Read more about this topic: William Moore Mc Culloch
Famous quotes containing the words fight for, fight, civil and/or rights:
“And oh, I knew, I knew,
And said out loud, I couldn’t bide the smother
And heat so close in; but the thought of all
The woods and town on fire by me, and all
The town turned out to fight for me that held me.”
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“This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world ... and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)