In 1957 Lyndon Baines Johnson, Majority Leader of the United States Senate, felt the time was finally right. The moment had at last arrived when Americans were once again ready to tackle the question of race. He threw his support and his considerable power as leader of the majority party in the upper chamber to a proposed civil rights measure authorizing the Justice Department to initiate cases regarding voting rights violations on the basis of race. His support was crucial. Though the legislation was watered down in the act of legislative enactment, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was the first such legislation to emerge from Congress since 1875 in the waning days of the Reconstruction experience.

This was a remarkable act for a senator from a state of the old Confederacy and not a particularly popular one judging from the letters he received from his constituents in the Lone Star state. Ninety percent of those letters decried his action and charged that he had reversed himself and sold out his section of the nation.

Some critical of Johnson have charged that he reversed himself in 1957 after two decades of opposition to civil rights solely because he was after the presidency and the power of the Oval Office. According to this interpretation, Johnson knew he could never be nominated for, much less win, the presidency as long as he was perceived as just another southern Senator Cornpone adamantly opposed to any prospect of racial change. Therefore, such critics maintain, he did a 180 degree turn to become president.

An examination of Johnsonís attitudes and actions with respect to race and civil rights reveals a far more complicated picture. It is the story of an elected figure committed to change and reform but operating within the real world - the political world as it existed, not as he necessarily wished it to be.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, two marked behaviors are apparent in LBJís handling of the issues of race and civil rights.

On the one hand, Johnson appeared indifferent to the quest for equality. As state director of the National Youth Administration from 1935-1937, he refused pressure from Washington, D. C., to appoint a black Texan to his statewide advisory committee. He threatened resignation is pushed too far by his superiors and defended his creation of a "separate but equal" black advisory committee.

As congressman between 1937 and 1948, he consistently voted against legislative proposals to outlaw the poll tax, make lynching a federal crime, and make permanent the Fair Employment Practices Commission (designed to attack racism in the workplace). While voicing his belief that the poll tax should be abolished, he maintained this should be done at the state not the national level. Lynching was already a crime - a state crime called murder - and should be vigorously enforced. A federal law which intruded upon states rights was not necessary. With respect to the FEPC, Johnson warned that if the government were empowered to tell you who you as an employer had to hire, private enterprise was doomed in the United States.

Once President Harry S. Truman bit the bullet and proposed sweeping civil rights change in 1948, congressman and senatorial candidate Johnson voiced opposition to the proposals. He nonetheless supported Truman in that yearís presidential election over States Rights/Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

Elected to the Senate in 1948, Johnson immediately aligned himself with the powerful southern bloc led by Richard Russell of Georgia, continued his opposition to the Truman civil rights agenda, and voted with other southerners against changes in the filibuster rules by which the South had blocked civil rights proposals since 1875. While not a race-baiter, like a Eugene Talmadge or a Senator Bilbo, Johnson appeared an unlikely candidate to remake race relations in the United States.

There is, however, a quite different strand. While still a student at Southwest Texas State Teachers College, Johnson had taken off a year from his studies to serve as teacher and principal in Cotulla, Texas. There he had witnessed racism against Mexican American children firsthand and had done everything in his power to provide those students with the best education possible. As state director of the National Youth Administration for two years, Lyndon Johnson dealt equitably, even to the point of political risk, with minority communities - black and brown, African- and Latin American. But it was done quietly and behind the scenes because revelation could well have doomed the future elective career he so wanted. Moneys funneled to minority communities - effectively disfranchised by a variety of means - exceeded their proportion of the population. Johnson solicited donations from businessmen which were spent on Anglo youth and the savings in government moneys was channeled to minorities.

At the same time he repeatedly voted as congressman against civil rights proposals in the House of Representatives, he showed absolutely no difference in constituent service on the basis of skin color. Every letter was answered the same day. He lobbied the federal bureaucracy to obtain agricultural support payments, iron out problems with veterans benefits, and chased delayed social security benefits without regard to color and whether or not the petitioner could vote or not.

As the newly-elected representative of Texasí 10th Congressional District in 1938, Johnson - over the howls of many in the community - had pursued federal moneys to provide public housing for the needy in the state capital. Many opposed the action because much of the money would be spent on black and Hispanic Austinites. He triumphed after a very public battle. While there would be "separate but equal" complexes for minorities, public housing was provided.

When Three Rivers, Texas morticians- citing race- refused to provide funeral services for Felix Longoria, a casualty of war, an outraged Senator Johnson pulled strings in Washington, D. C. and arranged for burial with honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

While decrying federal efforts to "mandate" desegregation on an unwilling American public, Senator Johnson, by this time majority leader of the United States Senate and a national Democratic leader, refused to sign the "Southern Manifesto" petition lambasting the Supreme Court for its decision in the case of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education.

All of these were actions that were not only aggressive and pointed to the future but actions which challenged the racial status quo of Austin, Texas, and the South.

I related to you yesterday afternoon that Iíve found Johnson to be one of the most complex and contradictory figures in Texas and American political history. This certainly applies in the field of civil rights. How do we explain the seeming contradiction between these two Lyndon Johnsons?

The answer, in my opinion, is that Lyndon Johnson was a pragmatic politician - an elected public official sworn to represent all of his constituents (whether they voted or not). He knew he had to win reelection if he hoped to use his position to bring Texas and the Southwest into the mainstream of the country. Accordingly, he was determined not to get too far out in front of either his people or his times with a quixotic stand which would mean electoral defeat for a proposal that had no chance of passage whatsoever.

One of Johnsonís favorite sayings was : "Politics is the art of the possible." He lamented fiery liberal Maury Maverickís ouster from Congress in 1938 believing that Maverick lost his seat and his ability to produce real results because he got too far out in front of his voters, the times, and the realm of the politically possible. Johnson was determined not to make the same mistake.

LBJ was convinced - and I think correctly - that circumstances were not yet ripe in the Thirties or Forties for the civil rights revolution which he believed was inevitable at some point in the future. Therefore, he tread a fine line: trying to do the best he could for all of his constituents while retaining his position and the ability to move decisively when the time was right.

This was a complicated task given the nature of Texas politics. Neither conservatives nor liberals - Democrats all - trusted LBJ. Conservatives such as W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits Pappy" OíDaniel, Coke Stevenson, and Alan Shivers though Johnson was a socialist if not a communist, a "nigger lover", and was intent on destroying the southern way of life. Liberals felt Johnson was an unconscionable temporizer, who had sold out to the reactionary racists to further his career. They only grudgingly supported him at election time. Take for instance the comment of leading Austin liberal Creekmore Fath. "I had to vote for the sonofabitch every time he was on the ballot because his opposition was always so goddamn much worse than Lyndon was." What a supporter! Navigating a path between two camps locked in internecine warfare was a superhuman task but somehow Johnson managed it.

Nor was the task any easier in the United States Senate. There the Democrats were equally torn and divided. Liberals such as Hubert Humphrey from Minnesota demanded racial progress - the political consequences be dammed. Southern conservatives such as Richard Russell of Georgia were just as adamant in their opposition to any change. Johnson, as majority leader, had to find a way to placate if not satisfy both camps and prevent the issue of civil rights from tearing apart his party.

The time was finally right in 1957. President Dwight Eisenhower had proposed a minimal voting rights bill to Congress in the election year of 1956 confident that southern Democrats in the Senate would block passage and Republicans could make inroads into the black electorate. Exactly that happened - black support for Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee in both 1952 and 1956, fell by almost twenty percent. Civil rights was killing the party.

In the aftermath of Supreme Court decisions outlawing the Texas Democratic white primary, ordering the desegregation of the University of Texas Law School, and Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, Johnson moved. As majority leader, he negotiated a deal when the Eisenhower measure was resubmitted. The Majority Leader convinced northern liberals that they had to be willing to accept compromise in order to get any measure through the Senate. At the same time, he convinced southern senators that the liberals and the Republicans had the votes to invoke cloture and kill a filibuster. This was simply not true. Nonetheless, Johnson's tactics worked. Southerners forswore a filibuster in return for watering down changes in the process of legislative enactment.

The 1957 Civil Rights Act had little immediate impact. That was the cost of avoiding a southern filibuster which would almost certainly have been successful. Nonetheless, an important milestone had been passed. This was the first piece of civil rights legislation to pass Congress since Reconstruction, eighty-two years before. The precedent had been established and oh what the future held.

Why did Johnson finally take the step that his liberal and minority supporters had been waiting for for so long? Like everything else about Johnsonís career, complications abound as do explanations about motivations.

• Johnson was a national leader not just the senior senator from the Lone Star state. As majority leader, he had to represent the nation as a whole and the entire Democratic party including the North where the black community was critical to Democratic electoral success.
• Certainly Johnson calculated the impact upon his political future in reaching his decision to act. Support for civil rights would, he reasoned, increase his viability as a candidate for the vice presidency or the presidency. LBJ didnít really believe a native of a Confederate state could ever be elected president but he couldnít quite give up the dream.
• Johnson was convinced that despite all the efforts he had made the South would never become an equal part of the country until it changed racially and joined the mainstream of American life. The ë57 act was only the beginning.
• LBJ, the pragmatic politician who could count votes better than any of his contemporaries, felt civil rights had now entered the realm of the politically possible. The votes to pass the legislation could be engineered if a southern filibuster could be averted.

Speaking to White House aide Dick Goodwin in early 1964, it became apparent Johnson had made up his mind. "I'm not going to bend an inch, this year or next. Those civil righters are going to have to wear sneakers to keep up with meÖThose Harvards think that a politician from Texas doesn't care about Negroes. In the Senate I did the best I could. But I had to be careful. I couldn't get too far ahead of my voters. Now I represented the whole country, and I have the power. I always vowed that if I ever had the power I'd make sure every Negro had the same chance as every white man. Now I have it. And I'm going to use it."

America was fundamentally transformed by Johnsonís actions. He pulled out all the stops to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing Jim Crow segregation in public places and prohibiting the expenditure of federal funds on segregated or discriminatory projects. And it required all of Johnsonís unquestioned skills. Southerners filibustered the proposal for over three months before LBJ engineered a cloture vote ending debate and forcing a vote. This was the first time in history that a filibuster of a civil rights measure had been overcome. Then came the Voting Rights Act of 1965, designed to give racial minorities full political rights as citizens of the United States. Once again, a determined southern filibuster had to be overcome by a two-thirds vote. Johnson delivered.

It has been said that only Richard Nixon, the biggest commie hater of his political generation, could have opened the door to the Peoples Republic of China. Perhaps it can be said with equal validity that only Lyndon Johnson - with his incredible skills of persuasion, vote counting ability, willingness to wheel and deal, and a son of the old Confederacy - could have brought off the revolutionary changes in race law in the 1960s.

And Johnson, always the politician with an eye towards the future, knew exactly the costs of what he was doing. Revolutionary change never occurs without a pricetag. Celebrating enactment of the landmark ë64 Civil Rights Act with aides in the Oval Office, President Johnson grasped more clearly than they the cost of this victory for which he had fought so hard. "I think," he lamented to Bill Moyers, "weíve delivered the South to the Republican party for your lifetime and mine." It was a cost he was willing to pay because the time was right.

© L. Patrick Hughes, 1999