LBJ Signs the Civil Rights Act: The Texas Paradox

Lyndon Baines Johnson grew up in a farmhouse on the Pedernales River, the same river running through the Hill Country around you. He attended a one-room school in Johnson City. He represented Texas in the United States Congress for two decades. In all that time, he voted against every major piece of civil rights legislation that came before him.

On July second, nineteen sixty-four, he signed the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-four in the East Room of the White House. It was the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.

One year later, on August sixth, nineteen sixty-five, he signed the Voting Rights Act at the White House. That law dismantled the legal apparatus of voter suppression that had disenfranchised Black Americans across the South since the end of Reconstruction.

Johnson reportedly told an aide after the Civil Rights Act signing that he had just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a generation. The aide was Bill Moyers. Johnson's prediction proved accurate, and then some.

The Hill Country ranch near Stonewall, the land he had retreated to think, to rest, to telephone senators and coerce them in the recorded calls that are now among the most remarkable documents in American political history, was where he carried both sides of his biography. The senator who had blocked civil rights legislation and the president who cracked it open were the same man. He was also the man who escalated the United States military involvement in Vietnam from sixteen thousand advisers to more than five hundred thousand troops, a decision that destroyed his presidency and killed more than fifty-eight thousand Americans.

His ranch sits a few miles from here. The Pedernales runs past it. The Hill Country holds both the man who stood with the civil rights movement in its moment of greatest legal victory and the man who lied to the country about the Gulf of Tonkin. History rarely hands you a cleaner example of the difficulty of judgment.