President Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas was lauded by four successor presidents as a Lincoln-esque groundbreaker for civil rights, but President Barack Obama also noted that Johnson also had long opposed civil rights proposals.
"Now, like any of us, he was not a perfect man," Obama said in his April 10, 2014, speech at the Civil Rights Summit at the LBJ Presidential Library. "His experiences in rural Texas may have stretched his moral imagination. But he was ambitious, very ambitious, a young man in a hurry to plot his own escape from poverty and to chart his own political career. And in the Jim Crow South, that meant not challenging convention.
"During his first 20 years in Congress," Obama said, "he opposed every civil rights bill that came up for a vote, once calling the push for federal legislation a farce and a shame."
On one level, it’s not surprising that anyone elected in Johnson’s era from a former member-state of the Confederate States of America resisted civil-rights proposals into and past the 1950s. But given Johnson’s later roles spearheading civil-rights measures into law including acts approved in 1957, 1960 and 1964, we wondered whether Johnson’s change of course was so long in coming.
Johnson initially won election to the U.S. House in 1937, outpacing nine other aspirants on April 10, 1937, to fill the seat opened up by the death of Rep. James P. Buchanan, according to Johnson’s biographical timeline posted online by his presidential library. He advanced to the Senate in the November 1948 election, later landing the body’s most powerful post, majority leader, before resigning after his ascension to vice president in the 1960 elections.
So, Obama was speaking to Johnson’s position on civil rights measures from spring 1937 to spring 1957, a stretch encompassing many votes.
For this fact check, we asked our Twitter followers (@PolitiFactTexas) for research thoughts. A reader guided us to excerpts of an interview with historian Robert Caro, who has written volumes on Johnson’s life, presented on the Library of Congress blog Feb. 15, 2013.
The applicable portion:
The nation will be marking the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War. Like Lincoln, Johnson’s true motives on promoting racial equality have been questioned. Have you come to any conclusions about that?
Caro: The reason it’s questioned is that for no less than 20 years in Congress, from 1937 to 1957, Johnson’s record was on the side of the South. He not only voted with the South on civil rights, but he was a southern strategist, but in 1957, he changes and pushes through the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. He always had this true, deep compassion to help poor people and particularly poor people of color, but even stronger than the compassion was his ambition. But when the two aligned, when compassion and ambition finally are pointing in the same direction, then Lyndon Johnson becomes a force for racial justice, unequalled certainly since Lincoln.