July 21 Session 11: Dr. Sharron Wilkins Conrad
Johnson and Civil Rights Leadership in the African American Imagination
When asked which of the five most recent presidents achieved the most for civil rights, black respondents to a 1966 Harris Poll named John Kennedy over Lyndon Johnson by fifty-four percentage points. This, even though President Johnson had signed into law the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act--the most significant civil rights legislation of the twentieth century--in the previous two years. The disconnect between LBJ's accomplishments and the frosty response he received in the poll points to the deep mistrust Johnson generated in the black community. When Jet magazine's Simeon Booker's warned a month after Johnson's swearing-in that, "the odds are against him in our community," he could not have been more prescient. This presentation examines the genesis of that mistrust and why it lingers more than fifty years later.