What's forgotten in What's forgotten in all this talk about Hillary Clinton's remark that "Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964," is some historical context on LBJ. Though he signed off on civil rights legislation in 1964, just 16 years earlier he was giving campaign speeches in which he compared civil rights legislation to "a police state in the guise of liberty," as biographer Robert Caro notes in The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and opposing Truman's civil rights legislation. Johnson wasn't always a supporter of civil rights legislation, and he didn't come around on the issue by himself. He came around because of the growing pressure in the country, because it became politically imperative for him to do so. And that pressure was coming from leaders like King.
So perhaps it's a question of what Clinton really means by "began to be realized." I would say that the dream of equity began to be realized when people like Johnson were forced to change their position on it. It began to be realized when Americans, both black and white, united in saying that segregation was immoral and unsustainable. Johnson signing it into law was an imperative part of progress, but it was by no means the first, or the last.
But I don't think Clinton's statements qualify as racist. If anything, they more clearly highlight how she thinks about "change," a word that everyone keeps dropping this primary season. In Clinton's mind, change is something that comes from Washington, not from the desires of the American people. And that's been one of the chief criticisms her opponents have offered in the primary – that she's too invested in the Beltway to yield the real change citizens are longing for. If anything her statements are more indicative of some truth to those criticisms than they are evidence of racist intent.
--Kate Sheppard
