Friarspam posted:
Groucho48 posted:
There is no denying that the Democratic Party, in the South, was the home to racists and Jim Crow. Right up until LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act and almost all those Democrats became Republicans.
Yes, LBJ the "great civil rights" advocate. Who was it that FOUGHT against the Civil Rights Act when Eisenhower's administration was trying to push it? Why good old LBJ! Then when it was the politically expedient thing to do HE acts like it's "champion".
What a crock acting like LBJ was some kind of saint. He was a jerk and a racist.
The Civil Rights Act was the political thing to do???
As LBJ, himself, put it at the time... We've (Democrats) have lost the South for a generation.
Was he a saint? No. There are no saints in politics. Even Ron Paul isn't a saint. Did he have a massive influence on the passage of one of the most important bills of the 20th century? You betcha.
I recommend Robert Caro's biography of LBJ. It's another massive effort. It certainly doesn't paint over all his faults, but, one of it's threads is LBJ's slow movement from a typical Texas redneck to a more nuanced person who believed that civil rights for everyone was good for everyone and good for the country.
From one of the all time greatest political speeches...
Quote:
My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican-American school. Few of them could speak English, and I couldn't speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry. And they knew, even in their youth, the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their eyes. I often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished, wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew, hoping that it might help them against the hardships that lay ahead.
And somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child. I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country.
But now I do have that chance -- and I'll let you in on a secret -- I mean to use it.
And I hope that you will use it with me.
This is the richest and the most powerful country which ever occupied this globe. The might of past empires is little compared to ours. But I do not want to be the President who built empires, or sought grandeur, or extended dominion.
I want to be the President who educated young children to the wonders of their world.
I want to be the President who helped to feed the hungry and to prepare them to be tax-payers instead of tax-eaters.
I want to be the President who helped the poor to find their own way and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election.
I want to be the President who helped to end hatred among his fellow men, and who promoted love among the people of all races and all regions and all parties.
I want to be the President who helped to end war among the brothers of this earth.
And so, at the request of your beloved Speaker, and the Senator from Montana, the majority leader, the Senator from Illinois, the minority leader, Mr. McCulloch, and other Members of both parties, I came here tonight -- not as President Roosevelt came down one time, in person, to veto a bonus bill, not as President Truman came down one time to urge the passage of a railroad bill -- but I came down here to ask you to share this task with me, and to share it with the people that we both work for. I want this to be the Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, which did all these things for all these people.
Beyond this great chamber, out yonder in fifty States, are the people that we serve. Who can tell what deep and unspoken hopes are in their hearts tonight as they sit there and listen. We all can guess, from our own lives, how difficult they often find their own pursuit of happiness, how many problems each little family has. They look most of all to themselves for their futures. But I think that they also look to each of us.
Above the pyramid on the great seal of the United States it says in Latin: "God has favored our undertaking." God will not favor everything that we do. It is rather our duty to divine His will.
But I cannot help believing that He truly understands and that He really favors the undertaking that we begin here tonight.
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“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.†– Richard Feynman
