Lyndon B. Johnson: Kennedy's legacy and the price of Civil Rights

Lyndon B. Johnson's time as the President of the USA is primarily known for two reasons; the shocking assassination of President Kennedy that led to him being inaugurated; and the Civil Rights Bill that he was able to pass, which prohibited discrimination in public places as well as ending the segregation of schools and toilet facilities.  For the Black population of the United States this was the most important achievement of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.  However, one fact that is often glossed over is the immense difficulties that both Kennedy and Johnson had had in getting the Bill passed, and the unfortunate political consequences that this action had on the USA.

Almost as soon as Johnson was sworn in as president, Martin Luther King Jr suggested that the best way to pay tribute to the assassinated Kennedy was to continue trying to enact the progressive policies that he had championed.  Johnson wholeheartedly agreed to this, claiming he would not "give up an inch"¹.  In his first state of the union address, Johnson immediately made clear his intentions to see Kennedy's wish of a Civil Rights bill enacted.  A quote that is often repeated when discussing the events of 1963-1964 is of Johnson saying bitterly to a White House aide that "we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come".  Though this does describe what Johnson saw of the future, it also shows his concerns in the present: the South was far more racist than the rest of the country, and the Ku Klux Klan were still a major political force.  In signing the Bill and campaigning so determinedly for it to pass, Johnson had essentially made the Democratic Party lose almost all of its voters in the Southern states.

The act of actually getting the Bill passed required much strong-arming by Johnson: the recordings of phone calls made by the President during 1964 show how he used his skill as an orator to persuade every member of his own party that he could about the necessity for Civil Rights in America, even attempting to persuade moderate Republicans to defect to the Democrats.  The Bill famously struggled to make its way through the US senate, where Southern and Border State Democrats- many of whom opposed Johnson's policies- staged a 75-day filibuster, the longest in Senate history².

The sacrifices that Johnson was forced to make to pass the Bill; losing the support of the Southern Democrats and destroying his party's standing in the South; persuading the director of the FBI, the attorney general Robert Kennedy and much of the Democratic Party to accept the Bill, even at the risk of potential political suicide; these all paint a portrayal of an extremely risky and difficult journey to getting the Bill passed.  Although today we know Johnson won the following election by a landslide, getting America to accept an end to segregation laws would influence American politics well into the future.

1 Kent B.Germany, "Lyndon B. Johnson and Civil Rights", published 1/7/2014, retrieved from http://prde.upress.virginia.edu/content/CivilRights^↩ 2 Alicia W. Stewart and Tricia Escobedo, "What you might not know about the 1964 Civil Rights Act", published 10/4/2014, retrieved from http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/10/politics/civil-rights-act-interesting-facts/index.html^↩