Acknowledging the role of Southern Democrats in dismantling reconstruction is a vital component of LBJ’s brilliant efforts to institutionalize blacks in poverty status after the passage of civil rights law.
By providing financial support that required families be broken and fatherless generations of blacks have grown up without the foundation of an in tact family. This was more than incentive. It was and remains today a requirement. It was not simply unintended consequences.
Government welfare was a deliberate effort to create and sustain economic hardship and dependency in the black community. It persists even today with cries of more money for the embattled ghettos of Baltimore.
You give them too much credit for intelligence. The plain truth is that they don't give a crap about the black family, they give a crap about black voters.
It has long been my belief that the "War on Poverty" which began in 1964, was the consequence of the one-two punch of the Passage of the 24th amendment (You don't have to pay taxes to vote) and the "Civil Rights Act of 1964". Both of these things were actually Republican schemes to gain more power by enfranchising blacks that had previously been marginalized by various Democrat tactics to suppress their representation.
I have to give it to Johnson. When he saw which way the wind was blowing, he acted quickly to flip all those voters over to his side. By giving them free government money, and by acting like he cared, he created millions of new Democrat voters. Just look at the Black Voting percentages from 1936 to 2012.
The Black vote for Republican Presidential candidates
1936-2012
1936: 28%
1940: 32%
1944: 32%
1948: 23%
1952: 24%
1956: 39%
1960: 32%
1964: 6%
1968: 15%
1972: 13%
1976: 15%
1980: 12%
1984: 9%
1988: 10%
1992: 11%
1996: 12%
2000: 8%
2004: 12%
2008: 4%
2012: 6%
See what happened in 1964? No, the Democrats aren't explicitly *TRYING* to keep black people in Poverty, (Well, maybe some of them are) that is merely the unintended consequences of their policies. The fact appears to be that the "Great Society" and the "War on Poverty" were in fact, nothing more than Democrat vote farming schemes, and they have worked brilliantly.
Much of what is wrong with the Nation today is the result of the success of Johnson's tactic.