Posted on 01/17/2008 5:42:55 PM PST by Kaslin
"Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ... It took a president to get it done."
—Hillary Clinton, Jan. 7
So she said. And then a fight broke out. That remarkable eruption of racial sensitivities and racial charges lacked coherence, however, because the public argument was about history rather than what was truly offensive — the implied analogy to today.
The principal objection was that Clinton appeared to be disrespecting Martin Luther King Jr., relegating him to mere enabler for Lyndon Johnson.
But it is certainly true that Johnson was the great emancipator, second only to Abraham Lincoln in that respect.
This was a function of the times. King was fighting for black enfranchisement. Until that could be achieved, civil rights legislation could only be enacted by a white president (and a white Congress).
That does not denigrate King. It makes his achievement all the more miraculous — winning a permanent stake in the system for a previously disenfranchised people, having begun with no political cards to play.
In my view, the real problem with Clinton's statement was the implied historical analogy — that the subordinate position King held in relation to Johnson, a function of the discrimination and disenfranchisement of the time, somehow needs recapitulation today when none of those conditions apply.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
Charles has been kissing Hillary lately....WHY?
The Clintons are using a FIRE HOSE LAWSUIT on Obama’s voters in Las Vegas. When will blacks wake up to the Clintons??
Am I nuts or didn’t Johnson sign that with a gun to his head?
Wasn’t the Civil Rights Bill a Republican bill? Just how do the Dummycrats grab the mantle of civil rights when it was the Republican Party, going back to Lincoln, that fought so hard to pass civil right?
I mean, you got a party that has not thrown out Sheets Byrd, had a governor (George Wallace) block entrance to a school, and on and on.
What the hell am I missing?
“It makes his achievement all the more miraculous — winning a permanent stake in the system for a previously disenfranchised people, having begun with no political cards to play.”
“Miraculous”? I think not.
MLK was an eloquent and gifted speaker, serving more as a combustive agent for a societal process that was already well under way for generations. Those evolutionary changes were occuring at a deeper and more long lasting level than what could ever be manifested in such visible and celebrated single events as the “I have a dream” speech.
America was changing on its own and it didn’t take King, or the governmental intervention of the Civil Rights Act, to start Americans down the path we are now on......for better or worse.
LBJ (and a great majority of the GOP) may have supported the bill/act....while the (Racist) "Southern Democrats" fought "tooth and nail" against its passage....as to the 2nd Question....I guess general stupidity and /or the actions of the NEA/DNC/LMSM
But..but...but...Bill Clinton is our first black President. And Obama is really so pale.
From: National Review | Date: 7/15/2002 | Author: HERMAN, ARTHUR
It is not a pretty story. Johnson conspired with southern segregationists to kill the original Eisenhower-sponsored bill that passed the House. This was not going to be a Republican bill, or even a liberal Democratic bill; it was going to be a Lyndon Johnson bill, pure and simple. Caro shows how Johnson deceived Richard Russell into allowing it to proceed out of committee; how he sold political favors to liberal senators like Frank Church of Idaho in order to kill their support for portions of the bill that might trigger a southern filibuster; and how in the end Johnson sold out the bill's original supporters by passing legislation that was more symbol than substance. All of this shows Johnson at his most scheming and manipulative, but with one difference. Now, Caro says, he was "deceiving and betraying and cheating on behalf of something other than himself" -- in other words, for the cause of equality for blacks.
The *real* problem with Clinton's statement is that she was juxtaposing her own driving ambition to become president with what a past president accomplished previously, re: Civil Rights legislation. In the process of doing that, she offended and insulted a good core of civil libertarians on both sides of the asile.
Hillary's "Its all about *ME*, as *YOUR President* *I* will do everything to make *YOU* proud of *ME*", is beginning to wear thin with almost everyone. It's all about HILLARY as PRESIDENT.
Both MLK and LBJ must be turning in their graves right now with how this woman has vandalized their accomplishments. /sigh
No. It was clearly LBJ's bill. A carryover, in fact, from JFK -- who had not pushed the project nearly as hard as did LBJ.
Johnson thought he was "buying the n----- vote for a generation".
But it took the support of the minority party in the Congress -- the GOP -- to get it passed. At the time, the majority Democrat party did not support the bill, because of the presence of so many southern Democrats (J. William Fulbright, Albert Gore, Sr, etc).
The Civil Rights Bill passed -- with a majority of the GOP voting for it and a majority of the Democrats voting against it.
JFK was pretty weak on civil rights. He was afraid of southern democrats truning on him if he pushed too far.
It certainly was Eisenhower who sent the National Guard to integrate the schools in Little Rock, et cetera. Here's what Wikipedia says:
Eisenhower supported the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka U.S. Supreme Court decision, in which segregated ("separate but equal") schools were ruled to be unconstitutional. The very next day he told District of Columbia officials to make Washington a model for the rest of the country in integrating black and white public school children. He proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law. Although both Acts were weaker than subsequent civil rights legislation, they constituted the first significant civil rights acts since the 1870s. The "Little Rock Nine" incident of 1957 involved Arkansas state refusal to honor a Federal court order to integrate the schools. Under Executive Order 10730, Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent Army troops to escort nine black students into an all-white public school. The integration did not occur without violence. Eisenhower and Arkansas governor Orval Faubus engaged in tense arguments.
I respectfully disagree — I was there. His speech was morally convicting for many Christians who were on the fence about Civil Rights. Many lower- and middle-class whites had huge stakes, since it would be their neighborhoods, churches, graveyards and many of their traditional job venues that would be integrated or overtaken by a different group of people with, at the time, the social habits associated with their former poverty and oppression. Many of those inner-city neighborhoods have never actually integrated, which was supposed to be the goal. Now, when whites go to see the churches where their parents and grandparents were married, they are regarded as oddities. Black people on the street say, "Can I help you? Are you lost?"
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