Clair Engle and the brain tumor that almost derailed the civil rights act

Abstract

Senator Clare Engle was a United States senator from California who cast an important vote to end the filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, even as a brain tumor had left him with an expressive aphasia and would claim his life just a month later. This paper reviews the history of Senator Engle's illness in parallel with that of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.