Martin Luther King, LBJ and Revisionist History

I couldn't quite believe the flap over what Hillary said the other day about LBJ and the Civil Rights Act. It all felt like some strange and lumbering dream. You know the kind: you're being chased by an ice cream truck filled with killer clowns brandishing deadly pistachio cones and you can only run away in slow motion.

You haven't had that dream? Maybe it's just me.

An in-depth picture of Martin Luther King, Jr., is here. An in-depth picture of LBJ is here.

What Hillary said was: "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act. It took a president to get it done." (See here.)

MLK was inspirational. He was a civil rights leader. He was an activist in the Mahatma Ghandi tradition. No question there. And, like Ghandi, he relied on the conscience of the oppressors to be pricked by his actions. MLK first really started to show up in the national news during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 which led to the Supreme Court upholding the lower court decision that Alabama's segregation laws for buses were unconstitutional.

LBJ was an old school politician from Texas. Who had, it turns out, been working within his party for civil rights legislation long before he became president. As majority leader, LBJ was responsible for the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. He brokered a compromise that weakened the bill but ended a filibuster. To say that LBJ came to civil rights de novo as president only after MLK's inspiration denigrates what LBJ did. It's possible the boycott had some influence but since Eisenhower proposed the bill Southern Senate Democrats opposed it, I'd say the MLK influence was minimal though the influence of the boycott might have been present. MLK just wasn't that big a blip on the national radar screen at that time.

The response to Hillary's statement clearly has nothing to do with historical accuracy and everything to do with code words and mythic perception.

I'm not a fan of Hillary for lots of different reasons. And I tend to like Obama but mistrust his judgment on a national stage.

But I do feel that when we engage in debate we discuss things honestly. The implication Hillary makes is that she's Johnson and Obama's King. Well, Hillary is no LBJ and Obama is no Martin Luther King. That should be obvious to anybody not blinded by rhetoric.

Did Hillary put down King's role? I don't think so but then I'm an aging white guy. I'm not going to be terribly sensitive to it if she did. Was it a terribly stupid statement? It sure was and is just another feather in a achingly heavy pile of items weighing against her.

But I think the problem is deeper and bespeaks a misunderstanding of the nature of power.

A few demographics. In 1965, the census document 10.8% of the USA was Black. While many of the deep south states had majority African American populations after the Civil War over the first part of the 20th century, much of the population moved north. In Mississippi, for example, the percentage that moved was enough to take the African American population from majority to minority.

My point here is the demographics did not favor African Americans in an oppressed country by the 1950's. First, they were a minority across the national stage. Second, they were a minority within state boundaries. Third, the money, weapons and political power were controlled by the white majority.

King knew this. He realized that there was no way of winning a war of power between whites and blacks: whites held all the cards. There was no way African Americans could win power from the white majority without the cooperation of the white majority. This was not South Africa where the whites were outnumbered 10 to 1 and held power by terror and force of arms. Whites here used terror and force of arms, too. But the biggest weapon they had-- and still have-- is numbers.

King also understood the odd idealism of the US. It's not sufficient to rule by majority. Both the demographic and power majority and the demographic and power minority must come under the same laws. He used Ghandi's technique to bring this hypocrisy to the white majority's attention. Both King and Ghandi realized that while force of arms could not prevail, conscience could provided the cause was just.

This, then, becomes the calculus of the civil rights era: King, triggering the conscience of the oppressors, who could not be dislodged without their cooperation. LBJ, acting from his own conscience and utilizing that triggered national conscience, enacting that change. Neither could have acted without the other.

LBJ was a southern politician all his life. He lived and breathed politics. I think it's probable there has been no other single individual that understood the American process any better. LBJ is rumored to have said when he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, "We [the democrats] have lost the south for a generation."

He was wrong. The democrats lost it for far longer.