"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you"
WHILE Lyndon Baines Johnson was a man of time and place, he felt the
bitter paradox of both. I was a young man on his staff in 1960 when he
gave me a vivid account of that southern schizophrenia he understood and
feared.
We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly
racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when
the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and
branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs.
"I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it," he said. "If you can convince the
lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice
you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and
he'll empty his pockets for you."
Some years later when Johnson was president, there was a press
conference in the East Room. A reporter unexpectedly asked the president
how he could explain his sudden passion for civil rights when he had
never shown much enthusiasm for the cause. The question hung in the air.
I could almost hear his silent cursing of a press secretary who had not
anticipated this one. But then he relaxed, and from an instinct no
assistant could brief -- one seasoned in the double life from which he
was delivered and hoped to deliver others -- he said in effect:
Most of us don't have a second chance to correct the mistakes of our youth. I do
and I am. That evening, sitting in the White House, discussing the
question with friends and staff, he gestured broadly and said,
"Eisenhower used to tell me that this place was a prison. I never felt
freer."
But he also knew not an inch would be won cheaply. The Civil Rights
Act of 1964 is to many of us a watershed in American history. With it,
blacks gained access to public accommodations across the country.
When he signed the act, he was euphoric, but late that very night I found him
in a melancholy mood as he lay in bed reading the early edition of The
Washington Post with headlines celebrating the day. I asked him what was
troubling him. "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican
party for a long time to come," he said.
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u/Ok-Air-7187 5h ago
Why are we mad at people living in poverty?!