LBJ's Legacy: Unlikely President To Civil Rights Champion

Interviewing candidates for teaching posts is always fraught with difficulties. One never knows how much of an act is being put on and what is genuine. One curveball question I ask without fail is: “You are throwing a dinner party for three people who are either dead or alive. Who are you inviting, and why?” An instant rejection is anyone who mentions the dreaded trio of Gandhi, MLK, and Nelson Mandela. While all three have historical merit, the banality of such an answer belies unoriginal thought and has been the deciding factor in turning candidates down.

What should we be looking for? Firstly, originality—show an off-the-wall answer. Be original; be bold. In this vein of thinking, the next two blog posts will honour two men who wouldn’t naturally top anyone’s list of ‘favourite people.’ However, that’s exactly why they are on mine. The flawed anti-hero is, for me, the most interesting topic of conversation. With that in mind, today will be in honour of Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th President of the United States and the man most associated with introducing the U.S. to the horrors of warfare in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam. “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” was a popular song sung by war protestors in the mid to late 1960s. Yet, that is not going to be the mainstay of this post. It will get a mention, but this essay is here to argue that without LBJ, there would have been no Civil Rights Act in 1964, which ended 99 years of pseudo-slavery and Jim Crow laws in the Southern states of America.

We need to start with a brief history lesson. The USA wrote its Constitution in 1787 - a fine document, but one with some serious flaws, including the statement that a Black man was three-fifths of a white man. From independence in 1776, slavery was an accepted feature of American life. In 1861, the nation tore itself apart over the ‘original sin’ and saw the 11 Southern states secede from the Union and wage a four-year Civil War, which cost more American lives than every war (all together) America has fought since. In 1865, Abraham Lincoln and the Union won the war, and before he was assassinated by a frustrated Southern slave owner named John Wilkes Booth, he passed what has become known as the 13th Amendment. In simple terms, this outlawed the practice of slavery. Soon, the 14th and 15th Amendments would be passed, which respectively gave equality to all men under the law and finally the right to vote.

Now, this is where things get messy. As part of what is called ‘Reconstruction,’ the Southern states didn’t take too kindly to these amendments being imposed on them by the ‘Yankee’ government in Washington, D.C. With the backing of the Supreme Court, the South was able to effectively overrule these amendments and introduce what can be termed slavery by another name. The Jim Crow laws (named after a minstrel actor in the 19th century) saw the implementation of the infamous ‘separate but equal’ doctrine, which, in the eyes of the law, legalized segregation based on racial terms. For those familiar with South Africa, it was essentially America’s apartheid. These laws lasted from circa 1883 to 1964.

The main reason these laws were able to persist for so long is due to the vagaries of the U.S. Constitution. Allow me a paragraph to explain. While the USA is indeed one country made up of 50 states, these states are almost mini countries in themselves, where certain rules and regulations are not decided by Washington and the federal government but left to the states themselves. Issues such as education, healthcare, abortion, and voting regulations are among those left for the states to decide. Added to this is the makeup of the U.S. political system. Every state, no matter how big or small, sends two senators to Washington. Wyoming, with a population of 584,000 people, and California, with 39.1 million people, have the same political representation. The Senate acts as the senior house in D.C., while the junior house is called the House of Representatives. This divvies up its members according to population. Wyoming sends one person to the House, while California sends 53. Collectively, both houses are called ‘Congress’ and altogether make up 535 politicians, known as the ‘Federal’ government. This is where the real power lies in America. It is a myth that the U.S. President is the most powerful man in the world. He (and I will say he, because until November 4th, only men have held the post) is constrained by what Congress allows him to do. In the modern era, Presidents such as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have seen many bills die on the floor of Congress due to partisan opposition from the Republicans.

After 843 words, let’s get to why LBJ is about to get some good press. Firstly, Johnson should never have been President. The bullet from Lee Harvey Oswald’s gun on November 22, 1963, catapulted the man who had been born into abject poverty in Stonewall in the hill country of Texas into the White House—a position coined as ‘one heartbeat away from the presidency’ but more commonly derided by the line attributed to John Nance Garner as ‘not worth a bucket of warm piss.’ Johnson, who didn’t like JFK (and vice versa), was only appointed because he was a Southern Democrat and, in the makeup of American electoral politics, a very useful tool to help the liberal Catholic Kennedy from Northeast Massachusetts win the 1960 election.

Kennedy had wanted to pass Civil Rights legislation before his unfortunate assassination. However, it is this author’s view that there was no way the electoral math was ever going to be in his favour. The stalwarts of the Democratic Party in the South, such as Strom Thurmond and Richard Russell, who knew how to and did filibuster bills to death, were never going to give an idealistic liberal from New England the votes he would need to get the bill passed in the South. LBJ, however, was different. He was one of them - a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner who was Senate Majority Leader from 1955 to 1961. He had personal and political relationships with the key decision-makers in the South. An unashamed bully, LBJ would stoop to any tactic to cajole and coerce fellow politicians to vote for what he wanted. Now, as President, with the aura of the White House on his side, he set out to fulfil Kennedy’s wish for Civil Rights legislation and add to his own ‘Great Society’ vision of America. One story (and one featured in the excellent film about his life starring Bryan Cranston, ‘All the Way’) depicts Johnson on the toilet, quite openly defecating in front of an undecided senator to persuade him to vote in favour of the bill.

In some circles, it is uncouth and unpopular to reduce history to “Great Man Theory.” Some say it is reductionist and ignores the various PRESC factors that contribute to historical events. When it comes to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I disagree wholeheartedly. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are (rightly) considered important figures of the era. But the hard truth is that change in America is invariably political first and foremost, and the way the system works regarding the Constitution, the amendment process, and the separation of powers means it takes a special person to navigate the built-in obstacles the founding fathers deliberately included.

Was Johnson flawed? Definitely. By all accounts, he could at times be downright crude, obnoxious, and toxic. The Vietnam War took such a toll on him and the nation. He declined his party’s nomination for President in 1968 and died a pariah five years later. But as I stated earlier in the piece, that makes it even more interesting and, dare I say, the reason he was able to negotiate the minefield that was the Southern Democratic Party in the 1960s.