"In this book, Jonathan Rosenberg and Zachary Karabell present the story of desegregation at Ole Miss; the effort by Martin Luther King, Jr. to dismantle Jim Crow in Birmingham, Alabama; the March on Washington; the aftermath of the church bombing that killed four young girls in September 1963; and numerous other key moments in the history of the civil rights movement, but from an altogether new perspective, that of the White House." "As part of the Presidential Recordings Project at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, this book includes actual transcripts of the secret recordings - most never before published - that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson made of their meetings and telephone conversations between the fall of 1962 and the groundbreaking passage of the Civil Rights Act in the summer of 1964. By setting these transcripts in an historical narrative, Rosenberg and Karabell present a seamless account of two tumultuous years in America's struggle for racial justice and highlight the pivotal role played by Kennedy and Johnson in ending legal segregation."--Jacket.