Wilentz: To understand Hillary's "race problem," we must better understand history of Civil Rights

Karmadillo

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Sat Jan-12-08 03:43 PM
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Wilentz: To understand Hillary's "race problem," we must better understand history of Civil Rights

Edited on Sat Jan-12-08 03:44 PM by Karmadillo

Why try to understand history when it's so much easier to misuse it for political advantage?

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=a383df9e-9d33-4b57-b832-a75b7c4d0d0c

The New Republic

The Power and the Inspiration by Sean Wilentz
To understand Hillary Clinton's "race problem," we must better understand the history of civil rights.

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Her point was simple: Although great social changes require social movements that create hope and force crises, elected officials, presidents above all, are also required in order to turn those hopes into laws. It was, plainly, a rejoinder to the accusations by Obama that Clinton has sneered at "hope." Clinton was also rebutting Obama's simplistic assertions about "hope" and the American Revolution, the abolition of slavery, and the end of Jim Crow.

The historical record is crystal clear about this, and no responsible historian seriously contests it. Without Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists, black and white (not to mention restive slaves), there would have been no agitation to end slavery, even after the Civil War began. But without Douglass's ally in the White House, the sympathetic, deeply anti-slavery but highly pragmatic Abraham Lincoln, there could not have been an Emancipation Proclamation or a Thirteenth Amendment. Likewise, without King and his movement, there would have been no civil rights revolution. But without the Texas liberal and wheeler-dealer Lyndon Johnson, and his predecessor John F. Kennedy, there would have been no Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Hope, in other words, is necessary to bring about change--but it is never enough. Change also requires effective leadership inside government. It's not a matter of either/or (that is, either King or Johnson), but a matter of both/and.

Behind this argument over Clinton's comments lies a false, mythic view of the 1960s in which the civil rights movement supposedly pushed Johnson and the Democrats to support civil rights against their own will. In fact, the movement and the elected officials were distinct but complementary elements in the civil rights politics that changed America.

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In all of these instances, Johnson responded with political courage as well as sincere conviction about racial equality, but, like Kennedy (and, for that matter, Lincoln) before him, he also needed events to create a climate when his political skills could be applied. Johnson's relations with Martin Luther King were often tense, and the two men parted ways in 1967 over King's opposition to the Vietnam War. On the fundamental issues of civil rights reform, though, Johnson and King were in close contact and worked together as allies. And when Johnson, in his speech to Congress on voting rights in 1965, quoted and embraced the civil rights battle cry--"We Shall Overcome"--Dr. King openly wept. He called Johnson at the White House. "It is ironic, Mr. President," said King, "that after a century, a southern white President would help lead the way toward the salvation of the Negro."

Martin Luther King led the movement; Lyndon B. Johnson supported that movement, played the politics, guided the legislation, and signed it into law. Both were indispensable to the civil rights successes of the 1960s. To acknowledge both denigrates neither man. Describing such an acknowledgement as a denigration of Dr. King is, at best, bad history. At worst, it is a manipulative and inflammatory racial appeal concerning a crucial era in American history--an era that needs very, very careful consideration indeed. Either way, the current heated rhetoric demonstrates that the utopia of post-racial politics has hardly arrived.