Joel Finkelstein is an accidental witness to one of the seminal events of the civil rights movement, the signing in 1965 of the Voting Rights Act.
He was a year out of law school at Cornell when he received the call to head to the Capitol for the signing. Now 83, Finkelstein still isn’t sure how he ended up witnessing the signing — on his 25th birthday — but figured President Lyndon Johnson wanted people who had worked on the bill to be present.
