Freedom's Pragmatist: Lyndon Johnson and Civil Rights

1. Formative Experiences: Childhood and Early Career

9 1 Formative Experiences Childhood and Early Career [LBJ] came out of the Hill Country formed, shaped—into a shape so hard it would never change. Robert Caro I knew that . . . discrimination existed through the South. We all knew it. But somehow we had deluded ourselves into believing that the black people around us were happy and satisfied; into thinking that the bad and ugly things were going on somewhere else, happening to other people. Lyndon Johnson On November 22, 1963, when Lyndon Baines Johnson suddenly became president of the United States, many expected him to be a typical southern Democrat with conservative racial attitudes. He was not. And a significant reason why Johnson could instead be considered a “radical reformer” from the South by the time he reached the White House was his formative experiences as a young person living and working in the state of Texas. His early attitudes on race and poverty were undoubtedly influenced by his family, life experience, and the landscape and politics of the Texas Hill Country in which he was raised. If he was molded as a personality by the time he left the area, on race this was to 10 · Freedom’s Pragmatist prove no bad thing. It would also mean, however, that he would develop a complex connection with his own region. As William Leuchtenburg has recently reminded historians, “place” can be as important as race, class, and gender in shaping the individual and his or her actions. This is certainly the case with Lyndon Johnson. As others have already noted, in order to understand his evolving racial attitudes it is essential to understand his roots and his relationship with the South. On more than one occasion, Johnson claimed to be without prejudice as a result of his childhood environment and upbringing. He wrote in his memoirs that he never sat on his “parents’ or grandparents’ knees listening to nostalgic tales of the antebellum South. . . . I was never a part of the Old Confederacy.” Shortly before he died, Johnson claimed in a CBS interview with Walter Cronkite that “we are all the products of our environment and here on the Pedernales we did not grow up in any prejudiced atmosphere.” He went on to explain his understanding of Blanco County’s local history: “This area is populated by Germans who emigrated here a hundred years ago. We have few if any black citizens. Although when I was a child three or four years old, I grew up with Mexican-Americans and they were my playmates. But like most other citizens of this country, I took my own rights for granted and I did not see and feel and was not as concerned with my fellow man as I later became as my service extended itself and as I became more acquainted with the problems of the land.” He may well have been ignorant of the realities of life for Texan minorities as a child, but he was nevertheless shaped by the region, state, and the county in which he was raised in important ways for his future involvement in the history of civil rights in the United States. As Randall B. Woods has made abundantly clear in his richly detailed biography of the thirty-sixth president, “Texas and Lyndon Johnson are inseparable.” The Lone Star State was not like other southern states. A peripheral southern state, Texas had a distinct southwestern identity as much as a southern one. In his seminal work, Southern Politics in State and Nation, V. O. Key noted that, in some ways, the state was like other southern states because at the start of the Civil War “a substantial part of its population consisted of Negro slaves” living in East Texas; as a result, it turned away from Lincoln’s Republican Party and toward the Democratic Party. It soon became a one-party state and adopted segregationist practices. In 1860, in line with the rest of the Old South, Texas had a large slave population of over 182,921, representing over 30 percent of Formative Experiences: Childhood and Early Career · 11 the total state population. The black population increased steadily over the coming decades, reaching 620,000 in 1900 and 924,000 by 1940, but the white population increased still further, leading to a decline in the percentage of African Americans in Texas, so that by 1900 they made up 20.4 percent of...