2aguy
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2014
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Again...the democrats opposed every single Civil Rights act until the last one.....
LBJ’s Democratic Plantation › American Greatness
https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/02/lbjs-democratic-plantation/
there is a man who, according to a memo filed by FBI agent William Branigan, seems to have been in the Ku Klux Klan. This memo was only revealed in recent months, with the release of the JFK Files.
Lyndon Johnson opposed every civil rights proposal considered in his first 20 years as lawmaker
"He had been a congressman, beginning in 1937, for eleven years, and for eleven years he had voted against every civil rights bill –
against not only legislation aimed at ending the poll tax and segregation in the armed services but even against legislation aimed at ending lynching: a one hundred percent record," Caro wrote.
"Running for the Senate in 1948, he had assailed President" Harry "Truman’s entire civil rights program (‘an effort to set up a police state’)…Until 1957, in the Senate, as in the House, his record – by that time a twenty-year record – against civil rights had been consistent," Caro wrote.
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The Party of Civil Rights | National Review
The Party of Civil Rights
The depth of Johnson’s prior opposition to civil-rights reform must be digested in some detail to be properly appreciated.
In the House, he did not represent a particularly segregationist constituency (it “made up for being less intensely segregationist than the rest of the South by being more intensely anti-Communist,” as the New York Times put it), but Johnson was practically antebellum in his views.
Never mind civil rights or voting rights: In Congress, Johnson had consistently and repeatedly voted against legislation to protect black Americans from lynching.
As a leader in the Senate, Johnson did his best to cripple the Civil Rights Act of 1957; not having votes sufficient to stop it, he managed to reduce it to an act of mere symbolism by excising the enforcement provisions before sending it to the desk of President Eisenhower.
Johnson’s Democratic colleague Strom Thurmond nonetheless went to the trouble of staging the longest filibuster in history up to that point, speaking for 24 hours in a futile attempt to block the bill. The reformers came back in 1960 with an act to remedy the deficiencies of the 1957 act, and Johnson’s Senate Democrats again staged a record-setting filibuster.
In both cases, the “master of the Senate” petitioned the northeastern Kennedy liberals to credit him for having seen to the law’s passage while at the same time boasting to southern Democrats that he had taken the teeth out of the legislation.
Johnson would later explain his thinking thus: “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us, since they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this — we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”
Read more at: The Party of Civil Rights
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