Before Black History Month ends, let’s celebrate one of its great heroes, Clarence Mitchell Jr., the Washington lobbyist for the NAACP during the 1960s.

That was when Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the legislative fruit of the civil rights movement. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led the demonstrations and protests that got the movement rolling, but it was Mitchell who, as a skilled lobbyist, turned that momentum into workable and durable civil rights legislation.

Mitchell, a resident of nearby Baltimore, was an old Washington hand.

In the early 1940s, he worked for labor union reform under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Middle-aged by the 1960s, he was a familiar figure on Capitol Hill, lobbying strenuously for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He spent so much time with U.S. senators and representatives that he was nicknamed “the 101st senator.”

In the summer of 1963, after the pivotal civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Ala., President John F. Kennedy sent a strong civil rights bill to Congress. In the House, pro-segregation and anti-civil rights Southern Democrats worked hard to weaken it with crippling amendments.

Mitchell sensed a problem. The Democratic whip system in the House was controlled by Southerners, who were not about to let fellow Democrats vote down amendments supporting segregation.

So Mitchell developed a “gallery watchers-office visitors” system. Activist NAACP volunteers were called to Washington, where half would sit in the House gallery to ensure that supportive representatives would be there to vote down crippling amendments. The gallery watchers had to work by memory, because note-taking or any other form of writing was not allowed in the gallery.

If one of the representatives to whom that watcher was assigned wasn’t on the House floor, the watcher would call Mitchell’s office visitors. They would immediately find the “truant” representative and urge a return to the House chamber to support civil rights.

Suddenly the Southerners began to notice that the galleries were full of people, many of them African-American, and that all the pro-civil rights representatives were on the House floor when needed. A Southern Democratic representative from Florida later remarked that the bill never would have passed the House without all those “watchers.”

Kennedy was assassinated while the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was before the House. His successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, called on Congress to pass the act in Kennedy’s memory. Johnson well knew about Mitchell’s efforts. And the day the bill passed the House, Johnson called Mitchell and told him, “We’ve got it through the House, and now we’ve got the big job of getting it through the Senate.”

Via filibuster, a few U.S. senators talking endlessly about proposed legislation could “talk it to death.” Earlier civil rights bills had been killed in the Senate by a filibuster by the Southern Democrats.

The filibuster began in March 1964. The Southerners droned and drawled until it was almost June. The only way to stop a filibuster was to get a cloture vote of 67, two-thirds of the 100 senators. A large coalition of Republicans and Democrats from the North and West would have to be assembled to gain such a large vote.

As chief lobbyist for the bill, Mitchell had to get those votes without making any deals that weakened the legislation. His lobbying is illustrated in his conversation with Hubert Humphrey, then the Democratic floor leader for the bill in the Senate:

Mitchell: There has been an incredible reversal. Is our side caving in? It is unfair to cave in.

Humphrey: We are going to talk about cloture. We have to plan to pass the bill. We don’t have 67 votes for cloture.

Mitchell: You are shooting your friends if you trade (provisions of the bill for cloture votes).

In the end, Mitchell prevailed. The needed votes were secured for cloture, the Senate debate ended, and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.

The new law ended racial segregation in all places of public access, such as restaurants, hotels, motels, swimming pools and hospitals. It provided for the cut-off of public funds for those businesses or governments that continued to discriminate, and it provided for equal employment opportunity without regard to race, religion or national origin.

One year later, in the spring and summer of 1965, Mitchell went through the same process with voting rights. After King led demonstrations in Selma, Ala., Mitchell guided the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which also had to be gotten past a Senate filibuster with a cloture vote.

Here’s to Clarence Mitchell Jr. His life personified some of the best of black history in the United States.

Colorado College political scientist Bob Loevy was a Senate aide in 1964-65. He attended a number of meetings with Clarence Mitchell Jr. to make civil rights strategy.