MLK, LBJ, and the VRA

In the wake of a new wave of concern over voting rights, History Professor KC Johnson remembers when two momentous leaders forged past a fragile relationship to advance landmark legislation. 

Depending on who you ask, there may not have been a lot of love lost between the two men, and there was certainly a fair amount of mistrust between their respective camps. Still, when it came to civil rights, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Baines Johnson kept their eyes on the proverbial prize.

Both were men of unique talents, says History Professor KC Johnson, an LBJ scholar who points out that perhaps their most noble feat was putting aside their differences—if only for a short time—to pass both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“MLK would never have boycotted that speech,” says Johnson, referring to voting rights activists who sat out President Joseph R. Biden’s remarks in Atlanta in early January out of frustration that his efforts in the current battle over the issue were too little, too late. “He pressed Johnson in private. They didn’t always agree on strategy, but MLK understood tactical patience and that whatever short-term benefit might come from a public confrontation would not serve the majority’s interests.”

There was more of a willingness to accept half a loaf, the professor argues. Both King and President Johnson understood, for example, that you wouldn’t have the Civil Rights Act of 1964 without the failure of two previous incarnations in 1957 and 1960. King wanted a large omnibus bill and a repeal of the poll tax that President Johnson didn’t think stood a chance of making it through Congress.

Yet for all his fierce urgency of now, King collaborated with the president on a months-long inside/outside strategy that employed both men’s strengths. The president worked the lawmakers while encouraging the grass roots revolutionary to use the media, the pulpit, and other means to highlight discrimination at the polls in order to build public pressure. Professor Johnson has a treasure trove of audio files on his website illustrating their tactics—one tête à tête in particular where King cunningly reminds President Johnson of his debt to Black voters.

After a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court gutting of the 1965 bill and more recent challenges to ballot access in many states, voting rights is once again on the agenda of a U.S. president who was similarly carried to the White House on the strength of Black support.

As the nation celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the U.S. Senate prepares to take a vote on the matter, Professor Johnson says it's enlightening to revisit the union between the 36th president and the most consequential civil rights leader in modern times.

There are, to be sure, critical differences between 2022 and 1965 that further complicate the passage of any new legislation. For one, Johnson says, despite Biden’s numerous years as a lawmaker, he’s no LBJ, a Senate institutionalist and the president historians consistently rank first for his deal-making prowess with the legislative branch.

“Johnson understood how the Senate of the 50s and 60s operated,” says Professor Johnson, noting that President Johnson had been the majority leader in the Senate just before he became vice president in the John F. Kennedy administration and then president after Kennedy’s assassination. “The Senate that Biden remembers in which he was an effective operator simply no longer exists. In some ways, his experience is a negative.”

All told, the political landscape was far less partisan, there was no social media peanut gallery looking for reform on demand, and today there is no singular social justice leader with the moral heft that King commanded.

What remains the same is that the effort is “part of an everlasting struggle to redeem the original sin of the U.S.—the institution of slavery, racism, and how that has affected American society as a whole,” says Professor Johnson. “History continues to resonate.”