But it is clear from both these books that there would not have been a meaningful Civil Rights Act, much less the Voting Rights Act in 1965, without the efforts of Republicans, especially Representative Bill McCullough of Ohio, Rep. Clarence Brown of Ohio, and senators including Tom Kuchel of California, Jacob Javits of New York, and especially Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Republican leader in the Senate. McCullough, Brown, and Dirksen were strong conservatives, deep believers in a small government that should leave business and free enterprise alone. There were many features of the Civil Rights Act that challenged those tenets. They also knew that supporting civil rights was unlikely to provide much political benefit. But these men believed that segregation was fundamentally immoral and needed to be undone. Their actions represent one of the great profiles in courage in American history.

In the list of anniversaries above, one seems a bit out of place. Why did I include James Byrd Jr? Because of Jasper, Texas, a small timber town in East Texas with a long history of brutality and racial discrimination that remains a touchstone today—and that is trying, after Shelby County, to alter its boundaries to disadvantage black voters.

Six years after James Byrd's murder, two white teenagers knocked over his headstone and wrote racial slurs on it. White-supremacist groups advertised online to sell dirt from his grave and links from the chain that dragged him to his decapitation and death. The cemetery where he is buried used to have an iron fence separating the black and white graves; it was removed after Byrd's death, but there is still no mingling of races among the grave sites. A cemetery director explained to New York Times reporter Manny Fernandez in June 2012: "Put a black here? No, no, we wouldn't do that. That would be against our custom, against our way of doing things."

Jasper is fairly evenly divided between black and white populations. It has five City Council members, four elected in districts and one at large. In 2011, there were four African-American members of the Jasper City Council, and one white member. They voted unanimously to select Rodney Pearson to be the first African-American police chief, presumably trying to alleviate the tensions that had existed between the largely white police force and the black community.

A timeline developed by the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C. (I am on the board) tells the following story: The only radio station in Jasper, owned by the mayor, Mike Lout, began a campaign of vilification against Pearson, on air and on its website. A group of white citizens calling themselves the League of Concerned Citizens organized to recall only the black City Council members in order to fire Pearson. The radio station posted information about the league and how citizens could sign recall petitions. Only whites signed the petitions. Although the city precincts included a polling place at a black church, the city instead used Jasper County polling places, none of which were located in the black community. Leading up to the recall, KJAS broadcast warnings that citizens with outstanding fines or tickets could be subject to arrest if they showed up to vote.