Originally Posted by
Seneca Pilot
I don't bring up the 50's and early 60's to say blacks should be in their place. I bring it up to point out that blacks were making huge gains in living standard and wealth. It all came to a screeching halt in 1965. Why?
The people who were in power and passing laws were racists. LBJ was one of the worst racists to ever hold power, certainly since Woodrow Wilson. Why would a racist push for passage of any law that would advance the lives of blacks. Malcolm X was exactly on target with what he said. Racists will do their best to convince you they are your friend and you just need their solutions. Meanwhile your supposed enemy is pushing for charter schools to get your children out of bad schools. Pushing for accountability for teachers. Trying to get cities to lessen zoning requirements to get more housing built to lower prices.
I refer to people like Thomas Sowell, Lee Elder, and Walter Williams because their research is fact based, accurate, and backed with footnotes and sources. They don't want your money. They don't want your vote. They have nothing to gain except educating. Anyone who tells you anything who has votes, money, or power to gain from you should be looked at with skepticism, white or black.
There’s a lot to unpack here. LBJ was a racist. As was Kennedy, Nixon, probably not Ford, certainly not Carter, Reagan (oh yes) ... but I digress. The Civil Rights Act, The Voting Rights Act, and to a lesser extent and not nearly robust enough, the Fair Housing Act did more to shore up the Law of the Land for Civil Rights than any other signature legislation. Up to that point civil rights were a ragged and piecemeal collection of disparate Federal Circuit Holdings and Supreme Court Case Law. The Law of the Land WAS NOT the Law of all of the land in the same place at the same time. Brown was a bit different but even it took 40 YEARS to be fully implemented thanks to Arkansas and Alabama. (Alabama is my home state and it holds the distinction doing more than any other state to advance civil rights simply by being on the losing side of so many landmark Supreme Court cases. If you’re going to be wrong, be consistent).
However, you posit that it was some kind of ploy or conspiracy to disenfranchise and take away the agency of a group of people for control or gain is a bridge to far.
I do agree that the follow though was severely lacking but LBJ (and he was a sunova*****) was too busy micromanaging the daily target list in Vietnam to do everything. A war that affected the poor and minorities in much greater numbers than the rest of America by the way. Couple that with the murders of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy in ‘68, the way Tet was perceived back home, and quite frankly, there was a lot going on. And then came Nixon. And that paranoid drunk was no Uniter. But legislation can only provide the foundation. There must accountability and follow through and there was very little of that to be found I agree.
I’ve read Sowell and Williams for years, but they are educated opinion sharers, not oracles. One of my favorite jurists, the now retired Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit, a prolific writer of the Economic solutions and principles as applied to the law, has since repudiated many of his earlier stances that affected housing and zoning in Chicago for example, after seeing and living with the weight his economically defendable decisions had on real people. On their health, their reduced longevity, and their opportunities. He got it wrong and he’s not too proud to say so now.
You mentioned Charter Schools and I’ll just say this: Everything, including education, that this administration does is designed to shift public services into private hands for the profit of the 1%. It has nothing to do with accountability.