The signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a major accomplishment for the civil rights movement and President Lyndon Johnson deserves great credit for marshalling that complex and reviled bill through the United States Congress. The "Dixiecrats," those racist white Southerners who have all become Republicans in the decades since, bitterly opposed the Civil Rights Act, as did Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater who was the G.O.P.'s 1964 presidential nominee. So it seems a bit ironic that today fulsome praise for the Civil Rights Act unites everyone from George Will and William Kristol to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
In 1964, Hillary Clinton was a "Goldwater Girl," but she now claims that Martin Luther King Jr.'s example changed her. That's wonderful.
All of this media-fueled hand wringing about Ms. Clinton's recent remark about Dr. King and Lyndon Johnson is a tempest in a teapot. LBJ played his vital role in that chapter of American history, as did King. But don't forget it was President John F. Kennedy who initiated the original bill and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was the only person in his cabinet who insisted that he send it to Capitol Hill. Right after the Kennedy administration racially integrated the University of Alabama, (when RFK's deputy Nicholas Katzenbach forced Alabama Governor George Wallace to step aside from the "schoolhouse door"), President Kennedy announced in a nationally televised speech that he was sending the civil rights bill to Congress. That evening the Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP Medgar Evers was assassinated outside his home in Jackson. The Kennedys braced themselves for a bloody fight in Congress.
But the situation was far more complex than the wags on TV are currently letting on. After JFK was assassinated in Dallas, Johnson became the Democratic Party's standard-bearer. Johnson jacked up the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention. The alternate African-American Democratic delegation, including its stalwart leader Fannie Lou Hamer, was sent to the proverbial "back of the bus" in Atlantic City that year. So the civil rights struggle in 1964 shouldn't be reduced to a comic book story.
Johnson went on to trounce Goldwater, the young Hillary Clinton's favored candidate, who opposed not only the Civil Rights Act but also Medicare and Medicaid and all of the other social programs that were being fought over during the Kennedy-Johnson era.
In 2008, a far more important question to ask presidential candidates concerning race relations than the trivial ones the pundits are currently tossing about might be: How did President Bill Clinton's welfare "reform," "free trade" pacts, and "deregulation" (including the odious Telecommunications Act) help African Americans? And what would a President Hillary Clinton do differently?