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www.NewDemocracyWorld.org Why the Notorious Racist, LBJ, Made Sure the 1964 Civil Rights Act that Ended a Century of Jim Crow Segregation Laws Was Passed The purpose of this article--the reason I bothered to write it--is to help people know a key fact that the ruling class works very hard to make us not know. The key fact is this: Who we elect does not determine what the government does. No matter who is elected, the ruling class decides whether or not to have the government grant progressive reforms by considering what might happen if it does NOT do so, in particular judging whether failure to grant the reform might further spur the growth of the mass movement "in the streets" and lead it to become increasingly revolutionary in its aim. President Lyndon Baines Johnson's (LBJ) crucial role in ensuring the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act provides an excellent example of this key fact. How Racist Was LBJ? To start with, it is important to recall how extremely racist LBJ was. One source for this is the MSNBC article online here, titled "Lyndon Johnson was a Civil Rights here. But also a racist." The article begins with "Editor’s note: Readers may find some language included to be offensive." This is because the article, in order to tell its story about LBJ, uses the word "nig*er" spelled out in full. I will refrain from that below by inserting the asterist in quotations from the article. The next sentence in the article reads:
It then reports:
Here are some more important excerpts from the article that make it clear how truly racist JBJ was:
Why Did LBJ Smash Jim Crow? The reason LBJ smashed Jim Crow was because he (and the ruling class he was beholden to) feared what might happen if he (it) did not smash Jim Crow. What exactly was going on "in the streets" that produced this fear? What frightened the ruling class in 1964 was the growing size and militancy (and, in some cases, increasingly explicit revolutionary direction*) of the Civil Rights Movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) famously conducted militant sit-ins against Jim Crow segregation as described here and here. In 1961 black people in Monroe, North Carolina, had armed themselves to defend against the KKK's armed attacks on nonviolent blacks protesting the segregation of a public swimming pool, as described here. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. had a gun for self-defense, as described here in the book, This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed in which the author recounts how black people throughout the South at this time used their guns and rifles to defend the nonviolent SNCC youths from the KKK and how in many cases it was only this armed defense that made the SNCC nonviolent tactics possible. The most visible evidence of the growing size of the Civil Rights Movement was the 1963 March on Washington. For those too young to remember this dramatic event, an article about it worth reading is here:
When Martin Luther King, Jr. said, in his famous I Have a Dream speech, that:
he struck a chord of profound agreement from huge numbers of Americans of all races. According to this article (previously cited)
Note especially that UAW president Walter Reuther attended the march, reflecting the support it had from labor in general, not just black people! A 2013 Washington Post article about the 1963 march headlined, "In March on Washington, white activists were largely overlooked but strategically essential," reports the story of a young white man who joined the march:
That's a hell of a lot--a frighteningly lot!--of white people, if one is a member of a ruling class that can only remain in power by using divide-and-rule, and the main method of divide-and-rule for more than two centuries has been to turn the white and black races against each other. As this article points out, the Civil Rights Movement's leaders were explicitly aiming to create a movement of all races united against inequality and injustice:
Note: "At the time, nearly three-fourths of whites said in a national survey that “Negroes should have the right to use the same parks, restaurants and hotels as white people”. This meant that if the ruling class was seen by the American public as defending Jim Crow segregation, it would be seen as morally wrong--as the enemy!--by three fourths of the WHITE population! The Civil Rights Movement was clearly a growing danger to the rule of the American plutocracy that LBJ represented. The ruling class knew that if it continued to keep Jim Crow segregation laws on the books, then the Civil Rights Movement would grow larger and more and more people would conclude that ending Jim Crow would require removing the ruling class from power--revolution. The fact that some racist southern politicians such as senators Strom Thurmond and Herman Talmadge would oppose ditching Jim Crow could not alter the fact that the plutocracy's most astute advisors (and the ones who thus most influenced LBJ) knew that Jim Crow had to be ditched. This--the Civil Rights Movement "in the streets"--is why LBJ ditched it and forced a majority of the politicians in Congress (many no less racist than LBJ) to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It had nothing to do with any love of justice, never mind love of black people, on the part of LBJ (or the other racist politicians who voted for the Act). The person sitting in the Oval Office could have been Genghis Khan and STILL he would have ditched Jim Crow, for the same reason LBJ did. (Read here how the ruling class worked to reverse the "damage" [black-white solidarity against racial discrimination] created by the Civil Rights Movement by using Affirmative Action.) DON'T FALL FOR THE BIG LIE The ruling class wants us not to understand the actual cause-and-effect reality behind the occasional progressive reforms that we have won in the past, like the abolition of Jim Crow. It wants us to believe that the way to win such reforms is to elect "good" politicians who are in favor of the reform. It wants us to believe this because if we do then we will spend our time and energy trying to elect a "good" politician instead of building a revolutionary movement "in the streets." The ruling class knows that if we remain in the electoral "sand box" then we will never be a threat that will force it to grant substantive reforms. The ruling class, as I discuss here, uses the elections to control us, never to enable us to control the government. The ruling class no doubt smiles in great relief when they see us debating amongst ourselves which politician is best, which one to work for and win others to support, INSTEAD of building a revolutionary movement "in the streets" as I discuss in my articles "How We CAN Remove the Rich from Power" and "Revolutionary Community Organizing." ---------------------- * "At the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, SNCC chairman John Lewis was one of those scheduled to speak. He intended to criticize John F. Kennedy’s proposed civil rights bill as “too little, and too late,” and to refer to the movement as “a serious revolution” (Lewis, 28 August 1963). Lewis softened the tone of the delivered speech to appease A. Philip Randolph and other march organizers, but remained adamant that SNCC had “great reservations” regarding Kennedy’s proposed civil right legislation (Carson, 94). He warned his audience: “We want our freedom and we want it now” (Carson, 95)." [from this source]
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