Chocura750 wrote:
How things have changed, now Republicans are racists, and Democrats are for all the people. Have you noticed Republicans only do things to take care of their own. Nothing for the common people.
Yes, it was LBJ the great Democrat who said
"There’s no question that Lyndon Johnson, despite championing the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and signing it into law, was also a sometime racist and notorious vulgarian who rarely shied away from using the N-word in private. For example, he reportedly referred to the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as the “nigger bill” in more than one private phone conversation with Senate colleagues. And he reportedly said upon appointing African-American judge Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, “Son, when I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”
According to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, he also uttered this cynical-sounding statement, which sometimes circulates in tandem with the “voting Democratic” remark:
These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.
To be fair, historians point out that sometimes — as in the case above, presumably — Johnson’s more bigotry-laden statements were calculated to achieve a specific end, such as convincing his pro-segregation Dixiecrat colleagues that it was in their best interests to support civil rights legislation. MSNBC reporter Adam Serwer writes:
In Senate cloakrooms and staff meetings, Johnson was practically a connoisseur of the word. According to Johnson biographer Robert Caro, Johnson would calibrate his pronunciations by region, using “nigra” with some southern legislators and “negra” with others. Discussing civil rights legislation with men like Mississippi Democrat James Eastland, who committed most of his life to defending white supremacy, he’d simply call it “the nigger bill.”