Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern pastor who became a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, attempted to deliver the entire country from racism, war, and greed. He was born on this day in 1929.
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.
“Parting the Waters” ended with King at the head of a civil-rights movement that had long been dominated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League, and faced with a pending civil-rights bill that Congress seemed unlikely to pass. But John F. Kennedy’s assassination assured its passage, and it became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Still, it was probably the right choice for history. Eight days after Pettus Bridge, Lyndon Johnson delivered his “We Shall Overcome” speech to Congress, an example of Presidential oratory arguably unsurpassed in idealism and emotional impact. The reworked phrases of the speechwriter Richard Goodwin fell upon a hushed chamber.
Both Vietnam and civil rights began to play poorly with much of the electorate as the midterm congressional elections approached. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Strom Thurmond, and other Republicans blamed Johnson for not conducting the war vigorously enough. At the polls, liberals signalled their lack of support for the war, and the congressional Democrats lost badly. In early March of 1967, Robert F. Kennedy suggested that the heavy bombing of Vietnam be suspended.
Late in January, 1966, King surprised America by taking up residency in a tenement apartment in Chicago—a city that was home to the world’s largest public-housing complex and to two of the poorest census tracts in the country.
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