On the occasion of Martin Luther King Day... From Texas Monthly... LBJ pressed Wallace on the issue of race. Careful not to let the governor play the martyr for states’ rights, he cajoled and flattered him. When the president asked him why he wouldn’t integrate the schools and let black residents register to vote, Wallace said that he didn’t have the power. Johnson thundered in response, “George, don’t you shit me as to who runs Alabama.” In the end Johnson questioned Wallace’s place in history: “George, you and I shouldn’t be thinking about 1965; we should be thinking about 1985… . Now, you got a lot of poor people down there in Alabama … a lot of people who need jobs, a lot of people who need a future. You could do a lot for them. Now, in 1985, George, what do you want left behind? Do you want a great big marble monument that says ‘George Wallace: He Built’? Or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine lying there along that harsh caliche soil that says ‘George Wallace: He Hated’?” Shortly after the meeting, Wallace agreed to ask the president to send in federal troops. The governor, who just two years before had declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” would later say, “Hell, if I’d stayed in there much longer, he’d have had me coming out for civil rights.” On March 15, Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to propose what would become the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was a bill he had always wanted, for reasons political and personal: Its passage would signify that a Southern president — this Southern president — had broken the longstanding traditions that had kept blacks from voting and the South from gaining equal moral and economic status with the rest of the nation. The Civil Rights bill was the first step after the 1964 election then this... Martin Luther King, Jr., gave him one. On the day after the presidential election, King told the New York Times that he was ready to organize marches across the South in an effort to secure black Americans the right to vote. In Mississippi only 6 percent of eligible blacks were registered. In Alabama only about 20 percent were registered, but in Selma, it was fewer than 1 percent; for that reason, the city would become a focal point. Starting in January, black protesters met with violence at the hands of white police officers, and they were arrested in great numbers. Newspapers tallied the results: “Dr. King and 770 Others Seized”; “520 More Seized.” One state trooper reportedly told a marcher, “Sing one more freedom song and you are under arrest.” On the day King was released from jail, an ad written in his voice appeared in the Times: “There are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.” By February King was urging Johnson to act, but the president moved cautiously. Johnson knew that back-to-back civil rights bills could cause an electoral backlash, not only in the South but across the rest of the country. And despite calls for federal troops to protect the protesters, he stood firm: sending soldiers in would cause the Democratic party to lose every white Southern vote. Johnson argued that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 needed time to work, but he said that Congress would receive a voting rights bill by year’s end. That timetable quickly changed. On February 26 a black protester died after being shot by a state trooper in Selma. March 7 brought Bloody Sunday, and two days later a white minister sympathetic to the civil rights movement was beaten by a white mob; he died the next day. Selma came to a boiling point, and Johnson was criticized for his slow reaction by the same activists he wanted to help. He knew he had to act; with Wallace in line, it was finally time. “Johnson was a great believer in timing,” says Valenti. “After Selma, he seized that moment like a trout going after a fly.” In his address to both houses of Congress on March 15, LBJ said, “What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” Appropriating the language of the civil rights movement itself, he added, “And we shall overcome.” Congress responded with a standing ovation.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 00:15:02 +0000