William McCulloch, born in Holmes County and educated in a one-room schoolhouse before attending high school and the College of Wooster, rose to prominence as Ohio's Speaker of the House from 1939 to 1943 and as a House member from the Fourth Ohio Congressional District from 1948 to 1973. In Washington he became best known as a co-sponsor and staunch advocate of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and President Lyndon Johnson recognized him as the prime mover in its passage. As a conservative Republican in the House, he also helped champion other civil rights legislation, including fair housing and public accommodations, and in 1928 he was a founding partner of the Piqua law firm that bears his name. In Piqua, where twentieth century racial discrimination was common, a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People operated from 1921 to 1923 before local Ku Klux Klan violence shut it down. Local businessman Darrell Taylor reorganized the NAACP in 1943 and became its first president. By the end of World War Two, the group was actively fighting segregation in Piqua, including a sit-in at the whites-only bus station lunch counter with McCulloch's support and protests at Schine's Piqua Theater by sitting throughout the theater instead of in the three restricted rear rows. Though these protests did not immediately end segregation, they began a decades-long process that ended discrimination in public accommodations, housing, and veterans and community organization memberships.