Sublime

He was as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the creation of the republic in the eighteenth century. This is not hyperbole. It is fact—observable, discernible, undeniable fact.

Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation.

longtime Clinton foe Jeff Gerth. He’s the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist

But he was about to become—beginning in that summer of 1957—the greatest champion that the liberal senators, and Margaret Frost and the millions of other black Americans, had had since, almost a century before, there had been a President named Lincoln.

“Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.”

En passe de devenir une figure emblématique, mais controversée, du mouvement africain-américain, Williams va faire de la section locale de la NAACP une véritable « unité de combat10 », essentiellement composée de vétérans expérimentés11, décidée à mettre un terme à l’injustice raciale et à l’« Empire invisible » (terme par lequel s’autodésigne le K