"... Johnson's civil rights actions permanently transformed the South. They destroyed the long standing de jure and de facto traditions of racial segregation and opened the way to equal treatment of African Americans in every region of the country. Johnson himself believed that this was his greatest achievement. He was right. And his claim on presidential greatness here is served by the reality, which he glimpsed at the time, that his support of black equality would allow the Republican Party to eclipse his Democratic Party in his native Texas and across the rest of the South."
A wild guess but I suspect that the folk in Ferguson MO (and several other communities) might have a bone to pick with that rosy view.
There is no question that racism still exists. But racism is not exclusively a Southern phenomena, and pockets of virulent racism can be found almost anywhere in this country and in every county in the world. There used to be a truism that in the South people hated the race but loved the individual while in the North they loved the race but hated the individual. While serving in the military during the Vietnam conflict I ran into that often enough that I believed it to be true. I could tell several personal stories that would attest to that. Suffice it to say that in my experience the Southerners got along pretty well with one another, but the most blatant racism showed up among those from the North.
Living in Texas I can attest to the dramatic changes in race relations that have taken place since LBJ's presidency. Race relations are not perfect, but from where I sit, the nexus of conflict is most often cultural and economic and only coincidentally racial. Before LBJ become president Texas schools where separate but equal{/i] (more accurately [i]separate butand UNequal. Today they are fully integrated (and too often woefully underfunded but that is another subject). Before LBJ housing was racial segregated but now that segregation is very much economic. When i saw an older white security guard drinking coffee and chatting companionably with the young black woman manager of a Mississippi motel I knew the worm had turned. I live in a very heterogeneous area of Fort Worth and there are occasional hurt feelings and ill will, but most of those bumps are cultural and/or economic in nature, although it would be easy for a lazy headline writer to characterize them as racial.
It is part of the human condition those who perceive they have something to lose (the illusion of power and/or control) fear and resist change. That does not excuse the actions/reactions of the Ferguson, MO officials and police (or some of the wing nuts in the Texas legislature). Culture may be the most difficult change to make and some will never be able to do it. But, no one lives forever, and if you look closely at the racists in this country, their average age is increasing much faster than that of the general population. So hopefully racism will eventually die out or at least tamped down to a level society can tolerate. That kind of cultural change is measured not in years but generations.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?
