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As an aside, in his research for his acclaimed three volume biography of LBJ, with a fourth to come in 2012, Robert Caro discovered a tape of LBJ talking to his friend Richard Russell (D Ga) after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, an act that the Democrats could not pass on their own but got significant Republican help. LBJ said, “That will keep the niggers voting Democrat for 200 years.” He seems to have been right.

As with most Democrat actions, it was more about cementing a voting block than any concern for blacks.

That's hardly an aside. That's a huge punctuation mark to my point. Thank you!

The Dems are now, and have always been racists. For a hundred years, the truth of who stood more for integration and equality led blacks to vote Republican.

But LBJ and the Civil Rights Act and the massive welfare state he enacted were designed with one goal in mind........to get the black vote and enslave them in poverty and in the Democrat party for decades.

Unfortunately, it worked.

As with most Democrat actions, it was more about cementing a voting block than any concern for blacks.

1. Johnson also famously said that, when he signed one of the Civil Rights bills (think it was the 1965 one), the Democrats had just signed away the White House for 20 years.

2. The Republicans, during Reconstruction, played the same game. They weren't in favor of ex-slaves' having the franchise as a matter of principle, but as a matter of holding their freshly-conquered Southern marches in thrall. Black codes remained in place north of Mason-Dixon and the Ohio River and internal migration of former slaves was not looked on with favor by mainstream Republicans of the 1860's.

Lincoln himself had an active interest in the ideas of the colonization movement, and the day he died, he had Gen. Dan Sickles in New Granada (Colombia today), looking into the possibility of using an army of ex-slaves to build a Panama Canal. Persons looking into that corner of American and Panamanian history have found the U.S. State Department files filletted; papers and reports Sickles's journals and letters refer to are nowhere to be found. Of course, there was a small matter of U.S. indemnification of Colombia in the 1920's, for the way in which Panama got its independence and the Canal got built, so there has been plenty of motive on the U.S. side for a "cleaning up" of the Panama files and correspondence.