Phone Call Into History
By MARY JO MURPHY
Published: January 27, 2008
“IT took a president to get it done.”
With those words, Senator Hillary Clinton cracked open a door and a dust-up blew in. She was referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and although she set her remarks in a historical continuum that took in three presidents as well as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., her critics suggested that she had favored President Lyndon B. Johnson’s role over Dr. King’s.
But in the several weeks since, history books have been cracked, archives searched. And Americans have been reminded that President Johnson and Dr. King worked in tandem not only on the Civil Rights Act, but on the Voting Rights Act that came the next year. The following transcription is of an excerpt from a telephone call the president made to Dr. King on Jan. 15, 1965, two months before the Selma-to-Montgomery march, seven months before the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. The president made the call from his ranch in Johnson City, Tex. (and Dr. King was unaware of the taping). The two were discussing strategy before the president submitted his proposal to Congress.
KC Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College, provided the tape to the Voting Rights and Citizenship Web site and calendar project of the CUNY/New York Times Knowledge Network. Jay Hershenson, senior project director and a vice chancellor at the City University of New York, described the conversation as “a wonderful example of what some observers of politics call ‘inside-outside’ — when the protester works with those in authority who are sympathetic, behind the scenes, to achieve the desired goal and where those in authority, who are sympathetic, work with the protester on tactics that they believe would be helpful to the cause.” MARY JO MURPHY
DR. KING And it’s very interesting, Mr. President, to notice, that the only states that you didn’t carry in the South, five Southern states, have less than 40 percent of the Negroes registered to vote. Very interesting to note it. I think a professor in the University of Texas in a recent article brought this out very clearly. So it demonstrates that it’s so important to get Negroes registered to vote in large numbers in the South, and it would be this coalition of the Negro vote and the moderate white vote that will really make the new South.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON That’s exactly right. I think it’s very important that we not say we’re doing this and we’re not doing, just because it’s Negroes and whites, but we take the position that every person born in this country when he reaches a certain age that he have a right to vote, just like he has a right to fight, and that we just extend it to whether it’s a Negro, whether it’s a Mexican, or who it is. And No. 2, I think we don’t want special privilege for anybody, we want equality for all and we can stand on that principle. But I think you can contribute a great deal by getting your leaders and you, yourself, taking very simple examples of discrimination; where a man’s got to memorize a Longfellow, or whether he’s got to quote the first 10 Amendments, or he’s got to tell you what Amendment 15, 16 and 17 is and then ask them if they know and show what happens and some people don’t have to do that, but when a Negro comes in he’s got to do it, and if we can just repeat and repeat and repeat. I don’t want to follow Hitler, but he had a idea that if you just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn’t true, why people would accept it. Well, now this is true. And if you can find the worst condition that you run into in Alabama, Mississippi or Louisiana or South Carolina, where — but I think one of the worst I ever heard of is the president of the school at Tuskegee or the head of the government department there or something being denied the right to cast a vote and if you just take that one illustration and get it on radio, get it on television, get it on — in the pulpits, get it in the meetings, get it everyplace you can. Pretty soon the fellow that didn’t do anything but drive a tractor will say, “Well, that’s not right, that’s not fair,” and then that will help us on what we going to shove through in the end.
KING Yes, you’re exactly right about that.
JOHNSON And if we do that, we will break through as — it will be the greatest breakthrough of anything not even excepting this ’64 act, I think the greatest achievement of my administration, I think the greatest achievement in foreign policy, I said to a group yesterday, was the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But I think this will be bigger, because it will do things even that even that ’64 act couldn’t do. |
