Martin Luther King’s heyday was still a decade away, but  President Dwight Eisenhower did not need Martin Luther King to see the obvious problems with black enfranchisement. Despite a Civil War and three Constitutional amendments respectively freeing, allowing votes for, and disallowing discrimination against African-Americans, all sorts of underhanded methods were used in the Southern states to keep them away from the polls. It was a huge problem to tackle, President Dwight D. Eisenhower must have understood, but nearing the end of his second term, with nothing left to lose, he chose to chip away at it.

On this day, April 10, 1960, President Eisenhower signed into law his introduced Civil Rights Act. Not to be confused with the 1964 and ’65 acts, this one was fairly limited in scope. Eisenhower established federal oversight of voter registration and introduced penalties for the (already illegal) tampering with or preventing of a person from voting.

The 1958 act was little of an improvement over the 1957 Civil Rights act, which was met with bombings of schools and churches in the South. Some critics charged him with pandering. But the president’s signing was an important re-affirmation of the rights of African-Americans.