So long as I'm talking about Democratic history today, I was watching the PBS documentary on Sargent Shriver and was struck by a particular historical point they made. It's often said that Johnson's embrace of the Civil Rights movement lost the Democrats the South for a generation. Less frequently mentioned is that it also gave Johnson, and Kennedy, his office. Shortly before the 1960 election, Martin Luther King Jr. was sentenced to four months hard labor in a Georgia prison -- the result of breaking parole on a traffic violation. Many figured this was a death sentence, that he'd be killed within the prison's walls. Sargent Shriver convinced Kennedy -- then locked in a tight campaign against Nixon -- to call Coretta Scott King an express his anxiety over her husband's fate. The call made the front page of the next day's New York Times, and set off a firestorm. Bobby Kennedy, in particular, was furious at Shriver, who he feared had just lost them the election. But in for a penny, in for a pound, and Bobby then went to work on the sentencing judge, eventually securing King's release. This was a huge deal in the (usually Republican) African-American community, which switched registration and overwhelmingly voted for Kennedy, tipping five Northern states in a grindingly close election. Without that early alliance with the civil rights movement, you probably have no Kennedy, and without Kennedy, no Johnson, and without Johnson, no Great Society, no Medicare, no Civil Rights Act, no modern Democratic Party. So, putting aside issues of justice, it's not even clear that the Democratic Party's electoral fortunes would have been better off had they hid from civil rights.
