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The Civil Rights Act of 1960 aimed to close loopholes in its 1957 predecessor that had allowed continued voter disenfranchisement for African Americans and for Mexicans in Texas.

In early 1959, the newly seated eighty-sixth Congress had four major civil rights bills under consideration, and their eventual consolidation into the 1960 Civil Rights Act was to have corrected the weaknesses in the 1957 law. From 1959 to 1960, Mitchell's papers show the extent to which the resistance in Congress to the passage of meaningful civil rights laws contributed to the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and subsequent demonstrations. They show the repercussions on the NAACP's work in Washington and how, despite their dislike of demonstrations, NAACP officials made use of them to them to intensify the civil rights struggle.

Among the acts seven titles were provisions enabling federal inspection of local voter registration rolls and penalties for anyone attempting to interfere with voters according to race or color. The powers of the US Commission on Civil Rights were extended under the law, and the legal definition of the verb to vote was broadened to specify all elements of the process: registration, casting a ballot, and the proper counting of that ballot.

Ultimately, Mitchell considered the 1960 act to have been unsuccessful because Congress failed to include the amendments that would have strengthened the 1957 act. In the House, representatives used parliamentary tactics to stall employment protections, school desegregation, poll-tax elimination, and other meaningful civil rights protections. The fight would continue.

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. series is a detailed, multi-volume record of the NAACP leader's success in bringing the legislative branch together with the judicial and executive branches to provide civil rights protections during the twentieth century.