Judgment Days

A Pulitzer Prize winner’s up-close account of how a white president and a black minister ultimately came together to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

They were the unlikeliest of partners: a white Texan politician and an African American minister who led a revolution. But together, President Lyndon Johnson and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. managed to achieve a common goal.
 
In Judgment Days, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nick Kotz provides a behind-the-scenes look at the complicated working relationship that yielded the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—some of the most substantial civil rights legislation in American history.
 
Drawing on previously unavailable sources, including telephone conversations, FBI wiretaps, and communications between Johnson and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Kotz examines the events that brought the two influential men together—and the forces that ultimately drove them apart.
 
“[A] finely honed portrait of the civil rights partnership President Johnson and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. forged. . . . A fresh and vivid account.” —The**Washington Post Book World