LBJ on the riots of 68: “What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for 300 years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.”
More LBJ after the assassination of MLK: “If I were a kid in Harlem, I know what I’d be thinking right now: I’d be thinking that the whites have declared open season on my people, and they’re going to pick us off one by one unless I get a gun and pick them off first.”
And: “We need something positive to carry to the people. Otherwise we’ll be caught with nothing. And the people just won’t behave in a vacuum.”
You can read more in this @washingtonpost piece by historian Kyle Longley: washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/0…
