my history collection

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." Well, I must honestly say, I don't see how any Negro or white person with self-respect can vote for Mr. Goldwater."

Ronald Reagan: [1964 Republican Party Campaign Commercial] "I'm Ronald Reagan. Every American should hear what Barry Goldwater really has to say, not what a bunch of distorters of the truth would have you believe."


President Johnson moved the Civil Rights Act of 1964, first introduced by President Kennedy, through a reluctant Congress.

While the act protected constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, prohibited discrimination in federally assisted programs, it also provoked the ire of most southern Democrats. As President Johnson prepared to run for election in his own right, his advisers debated how to deal with the anger of white southerners.

Lady Bird, a product of an East Texas town steeped in traditional southern values, stood as an invaluable spokesperson. At her urging, Lady Bird's staff began working up plans for a train tour of key southern states. Democratic governors urged the president and First Lady not to go through with the trip, saying they could not guarantee her safety. But the First Lady insisted on the whistle-stop tour winding 1,628 miles through eight states in four days. Organized by Lady Bird, her staff and the wives of southern members of Congress, the trip traveled through rural and poor areas where the First Lady faced large and unruly crowds of whites and a growing number of Republican supporters opposed to her husband's policies.

By now, Lady Bird could deliver a compelling speech and knew how to reach out to an audience. "You may not agree with what I have to say," she said in her soft southern drawl, "but at least you will understand the way I say it." As her tour moved farther south into South Carolina, protesters turned more hostile, confronting her with placards deriding her as a "Black Bird" and screaming, "Lyndon Johnson is a Communist, Johnson is a Nigger-lover." At each stop Lady Bird listened to the chants and then asked for people to listen to her. The First Lady's personal appeal and courteous manner calmed most crowds. The media -- there were 150 national press reporters onboard the train at all times -- portrayed Lady Bird as a fearless moral representative of her husband.

By the time the tour, the first time a First Lady had campaigned on her own, wrapped up in New Orleans on October 9, 1964, Lady Bird had delivered some 47 formal stump speeches to an estimated 500,000 southerners. One nationally syndicated columnist would say of the Lady Bird Special, "Perhaps this marks the emergence of women as central figures to a national contest instead of being on the edges of a campaign."[/quote]

Rep. James Pickle: And he kept saying to his southern friends, "If I can advocate it, as President, you ought to be able to vote for it in your constituency. This may be the best chance we'll ever have. I think we got to change our way of doing things." It's not like a Yankee from New York we got to do this. This was a southerner saying it ought to be done and that helped. It didn't help a whole lot because the southern boys, they knew that they again were going to catch heck for it.

Roger Wilkins: That's what he got from the southerners , that, "You're killing us by loving up the niggers. You're ripping the party apart here. You're hurting us." And Johnson's answer was, "This is what we've got to do and this is what I'm going to do and this is what the Democratic Party is supposed to do."


20 Oct 1965 California gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan is quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying: "I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at the point of a bayonet, if necessary."

17 Jun 1966 California gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan is quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying: "I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964."