To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (7314 ) 1/23/2012 10:09:02 PM From: Win Smith Respond to David Halberstam, in his book on the Civil Rights movement entitled "The Children", quotes Lyndon Johnson talking with Bill Moyers right after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had passed by large margins in the Congress of the United States. This positive vote followed the arousing of the public's consciousness by the Abu Ghraib-like use of dogs and fire hoses on black citizens in Alabama. Klan groups, under the direct protection of Southern State Troopers and local police, had also attacked blacks with baseball bats and lead pipes in public places, which had been seen on national television. Moyers expected to find President Johnson jubilant over this legislative victory. Instead he found the President strangely silent. When Moyers enquired as to the reason, Johnson said rather prophetically, "Bill, I've just handed the South to the Republicans for fifty years, certainly for the rest of our life times." (the-ridges.net ,but there are many other source, it's been confirmed by Moyers himself )James Strom Thurmond (December 5, 1902 – June 26, 2003) was an American politician who served as a United States Senator . He also ran for the Presidency of the United States in 1948 as the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrat) candidate, receiving 2.4% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes . Thurmond later represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 until 2003, at first as a Democrat and after 1964 as a Republican . He switched out of support for the conservatism of Republican presidential candidate and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater , who shared his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act . [2] He left office as the only senator to reach the age of 100 while still in office and as the oldest-serving and longest-serving senator in U.S. history (although he was later surpassed in the latter by Robert Byrd ). [3] Thurmond holds the record for the longest-serving Dean of the United States Senate in U.S. history at 14 years.He conducted the longest filibuster ever by a lone senator, in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957 , at 24 hours and 18 minutes in length, nonstop. In the 1960s, he continued to fight against civil rights legislation. He always insisted he had never been a racist, but was merely opposed to excessive federal authority. However, he infamously said that "all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement", while attributing the movement for integration to Communism. [4] Starting in the 1970s, he moderated his position on race, but continued to defend his early segregationist campaigns on the basis of states' rights in the context of Southern society at the time, [5] never fully renouncing his earlier viewpoints. [6] [7] Six months after Thurmond's death in 2003, it was revealed that at age 22 he had fathered a daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams , with his family's African-American maid Carrie Butler, then 16. Although Thurmond never publicly acknowledged his daughter, he paid for her college education and passed other money to her for some time. The Thurmond family acknowledged her. [8] en.wikipedia.org
