David Levering Lewis: Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s final chapter
In one of his more bizarre Oval Office confidences, Lyndon Johnson said that he didn’t want to “follow Hitler” but that Hitler had the right idea: “Just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn’t true, why, people accept it.” Johnson was speaking by telephone to Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama, about how to convince Southern whites that Southern blacks deserved the franchise. The curious political-science tutorial came on the afternoon of January 15, 1965, King’s thirty-sixth birthday. Whatever he may have thought of Johnson’s inaccurate analogy, King had already begun repeating, on television, in the press, and from church pulpits, the moral necessity of a guaranteed vote for every American, regardless of color. Two weeks earlier, King had publicly announced that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the alliance of Baptist preachers he led, would launch voter-registration protests in Selma, where fourteen thousand four hundred whites had, by legal ruse and naked force, limited fifteen thousand blacks to one per cent of the registration rolls.
Johnson, as recorded by the secret Oval Office taping system, both commended and cautioned King on his Selma strategy. He was, he said, committed to getting federal voting legislation enacted, but he implied that King’s timing and his tactics were dangerously precipitate. Johnson’s Great Society programs for Medicare, Medicaid, education, and poverty were pending, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had already depleted congressional good will.
King was by then expert at telling Johnson what Johnson wanted to hear, and managed to interrupt the Presidential monologue long enough to tell Johnson what he felt Johnson needed to know. He pointed out that, in the five Southern states that Johnson lost to Goldwater in 1964, fewer than forty per cent of eligible African-Americans were registered to vote. A voting-rights act would produce a coalition of blacks and white moderates, changing the electoral map of the South. Johnson liked that. It could be his greatest achievement, he said—“It will do things that even that ’64 Act couldn’t do.”
“At Canaan’s Edge” (Simon & Schuster; $35), the third and final volume of Taylor Branch’s monumental chronicle, “America in the King Years,” covers the period from 1965 to 1968, and charts civil-rights history as the parallel biographies of two tragic titans—Martin Luther King, Jr., the modern Moses, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, the would-be Lincoln. The tape of Johnson’s phone call to King has inspired speculation about their collusion in the design and execution of the Selma-Montgomery campaign; one student of the period recently called it the Johnson-King voting-rights “pas de deux.”
Branch doesn’t go this far, but he briskly relates how Johnson moved from annoyed doubt about Selma to outright collaboration within a matter of weeks. He urged King to expose the worst of voting conditions in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, but he could hardly have had in mind the brutal reaction of Selma’s sheriff, Jim Clark. For King’s purposes, however, Clark and his deputies were ideal—studio-cast thugs guaranteed to provoke national outrage and instigate federal intervention....
Read entire article at New Yorker
Johnson, as recorded by the secret Oval Office taping system, both commended and cautioned King on his Selma strategy. He was, he said, committed to getting federal voting legislation enacted, but he implied that King’s timing and his tactics were dangerously precipitate. Johnson’s Great Society programs for Medicare, Medicaid, education, and poverty were pending, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had already depleted congressional good will.
King was by then expert at telling Johnson what Johnson wanted to hear, and managed to interrupt the Presidential monologue long enough to tell Johnson what he felt Johnson needed to know. He pointed out that, in the five Southern states that Johnson lost to Goldwater in 1964, fewer than forty per cent of eligible African-Americans were registered to vote. A voting-rights act would produce a coalition of blacks and white moderates, changing the electoral map of the South. Johnson liked that. It could be his greatest achievement, he said—“It will do things that even that ’64 Act couldn’t do.”
“At Canaan’s Edge” (Simon & Schuster; $35), the third and final volume of Taylor Branch’s monumental chronicle, “America in the King Years,” covers the period from 1965 to 1968, and charts civil-rights history as the parallel biographies of two tragic titans—Martin Luther King, Jr., the modern Moses, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, the would-be Lincoln. The tape of Johnson’s phone call to King has inspired speculation about their collusion in the design and execution of the Selma-Montgomery campaign; one student of the period recently called it the Johnson-King voting-rights “pas de deux.”
Branch doesn’t go this far, but he briskly relates how Johnson moved from annoyed doubt about Selma to outright collaboration within a matter of weeks. He urged King to expose the worst of voting conditions in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, but he could hardly have had in mind the brutal reaction of Selma’s sheriff, Jim Clark. For King’s purposes, however, Clark and his deputies were ideal—studio-cast thugs guaranteed to provoke national outrage and instigate federal intervention....