Replies

Yeah, Johnson was a shrewd man and wanted to get blacks the right to vote - so they'd vote democrat.

Johnson used to tell me just simply this: "Let me tell you something, Hubert, [about] all this civil rights talk. The thing that we've got to do is get those blacks the right to vote. When they've got that vote power there will be no more of this segregation around here." He said, "That's what will shape up all these people in Congress, because they've got the swing vote." And he said, "Now you fellows are trying to get them public accommodations. You want them to ride in a bus"--and he'd go over all the little things--"but what they need is the vote. That's what I'm going to get them. I'm going to get them the vote power. When they get the vote power, they got the power. You wait and see. In any state where the blacks have got the vote power, you'll see their senators are much more willing to listen to their requests."

More info about LBJ and his strategy on Civil Rights legislature at http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/caro/excerpt.html:

Lyndon Johnson was, in fact, using that word a lot in the Democratic cloakroom that Summer. “Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again,” he told one of the southern senators, Sam Ervin of North Carolina. Walking over to a group of southerners, he told them there was no choice but to take it up, and to pass at least part of it. “I’m on your side, not theirs,” he told them. “But be practical. We’ve got to give the goddamned n------ something.” “Listen,” he told James Eastland of Mississippi, who was anxious to adjourn for the year, “we might as well face it. We’re not gonna be able to get out of here until we’ve got some kind of n----- bill.”

Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation. In Senate and House alike, his record was an unbroken one of votes against every civil rights bill that had ever come to a vote: against voting rights bills; against bills that would have struck at job discrimination and at segregation in other areas of American life; even against bills that would have protected blacks from lynching. His first speech in the Senate—a ringing defense of the filibuster that was a key southern tactic—had opened with the words “We of the South,” and thereafter, as this book will demonstrate, he had been not merely a member of the Senate’s southern anti–civil rights bloc, but an active member...

Another one from that last link. Not related to civil rights but interesting nonetheless.

Sometimes he (Johnson) would indulge in an even more blatant manifestation of his power. Somehow the vote hadn’t worked out as he had thought it would; he was a vote or two short of victory. So a vote or two would be changed—right out in the open. Johnson would walk across the floor to a senator who had been in opposition, and whisper to him, and the senator would rise and signal the clerk that he had been incorrectly recorded. “You would see votes changed right in front of your eyes,” the Senate aide says. Neil MacNeil, who knew the Senate so well, could hardly believe what he was seeing. “He did it in front of God,” MacNeil was to recall. “It didn’t happen much, but it happened. He was absolutely brazen about it. He put the arm on guys right on the floor.”

Sometimes Johnson would not even bother to walk across the floor. Once he yelled across the well to Frear, who was sitting at his desk: “Change your vote, Allen!” The Senator from Delaware did not immediately respond, so Johnson yelled again, in a shout heard, in the words of one writer, by “more than eighty senators and the galleries”: “Change your vote, Allen!” Allen changed his vote. Small wonder that Hugh Sidey, remembering years later the “tall man” with “his mind attuned to every sight and sound and parliamentary nuance,” who “signaled the roll calls faster or slower,” who gave another “signal, and the door would open, and two more guys would run in,” would say, “My God—running the world! Power enveloped him.”