Remembering What LBJ Said
My wife +Sylvia Wormley is an economists born and raised in Texas. She has given me an interesting view of politics and this blog posting validates some of what she has told me over the years.
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| I got this image on a Google+ posting |
Lyndon B. Johnson Wiki quote
- 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."
- In those days, our faith was in integration. The separatist cries would come later, as white flight and black power ended the illusion that an atmosphere of genuine acceptance and respect across color lines would overcome in our time the pernicious effects of a racism so deeply imbedded in American life. But Lyndon Johnson championed that faith. He thought the opposite of integration was not just segregation but disintegration — a nation unraveling.
- Bill Moyers, in What a Real President Was Like; To Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society Meant Hope and Dignity," The Washington Post (13 November 1988).
How The Right Talks About Race, Even When They’re Not Talking About Race
Slave trade capitalism and the new Republican Party
Time is a funny thing, especially how the same things seem to happen again and again.
In the early nineteenth century, the young United States of America was heading toward civil war. The practice of slavery had been accepted, but restrained from spreading further, by the Founding Fathers and the new American constitution. However, with the annexing of the new territories in Kansas and Nebraska, slavery was becoming a major fissure in the cultural landscape of the new nation. During the 1850s one of the presidential hopefuls, Henry Seward made a speech addressing the growing disparity between the wealthy slave owners in the South, and the emerging industrialized society in the north; Read More ...
Former President Lyndon B Johnson was asked; Why Poor And Middle Class Republicans Vote Against Their Own Interest? President Johnson’s response;
However, I do believe that most people today do recognize that since Barack Obama became President, President Johnson’s statement remains alive and well. Look at the “Trolls” commenting on Fox News and on Remarks made my Republicans and it is self evident that Johnson’s statement is actual facts. The Trolls comment reads; Obama is dumb! Obama is stupid: Obama is the worst President ever, and things of that nature. Read More ...
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