The data on civil rights proceedings were derived from selected volumes of the Congressional Record. For each bill, my review of the Record began with the first reading of the bill and continued through to final passage. Starting with the 1965 bill, I relied heavily on the “History of Bills and Resolutions Index” of the Record as a guide for locating civil rights debate and procedures that preceded continuous consideration of the bills. This is because the period of time over which the later civil rights proceedings stretched was significantly greater than that attendant to earlier debates. This increased the burden of relying solely on a page-by-page reading of the Congressional Record volumes for information on the bills.
In compiling the civil rights proceedings data, I began by establishing what constituted civil rights “debate.” I then proceeded to select the remaining procedural factors (such as time, pages, quorum calls, etc.) on the basis of whether or not they appear in the context of civil rights debate. As used here, civil rights “debate” encompasses all official, active consideration of civil rights bills at the floor. It includes primarily the actual floor discussion of either the bills or procedures affecting the bills by two or more persons, but also that which follows the Record’s official civil rights headings, for example, “The Senate Resumes Consideration of the Civil Rights Bill…,” and the presiding officer’s laying of the bill before the Senate for consideration. In most instances, the headings are an accurate precursor of the debate that follows and, in those instances where they are not, seldomly was more than one or two pages counted. For the 1960 bill, included also was debate that followed the “Leasing of a Portion of Fort Crowder, MO” heading.
Excluded from “debate” are speeches included under the “Extension of Remarks” and “Additional Statements” sections of the Record; individual speeches delivered
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