Actor Anthony Mackie is but the latest Hollywood star to spew historical inaccuracies that cast Republicans as a gang racists hellbent on brutalizing black people.
In an extensive interview with the Daily Beast, Mackie said “Republicans have been trying to capture the vote and rework the delegation of voting rights since Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Since he signed that, the Republicans have not figured out how to get elected without the black vote.”
Mackie’s half-baked history is a tired act. He praises Lyndon B. Johnson as if the man was some sort of civil rights hero.
Here’s a quick history lesson for Anthony Mackie and any other high-minded liberal elites who happens to think they know a thing about civil rights history.
For decades, dedicated segregationist Democrats–led by Lyndon B. Johnson–fought like hell to keep blacks on a virtual plantation of Black Codes and Jim Crow laws.
Lyndon B. Johnson was elected to the U.S. House in 1937. He was elected U.S. senator in 1948 and later became one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate, serving as majority leader.
Throughout his 24-year Congressional career, Lyndon B. Johnson opposed every single civil rights measure that came to a vote.
In fact, from 1937 to 1957, if there was a bill before Congress that would advance the standard of living for black Americans, Lyndon B. Johnson didn’t left a finger to support it.
“He had been a congressman, beginning in 1937, for eleven years, and for eleven years he had voted against every civil rights bill,” wrote historian Robert Caro. Lyndon B. Johnson voted “against not only legislation aimed at ending the poll tax and segregation in the armed services but even against legislation aimed at ending lynching: a one hundred percent record.”
Newsflash, Anthony Mackie: Lyndon B. Johnson didn’t give a damn about your parents’ civil rights. He voted to kill legislation that would put an end to lynchings, and you make him your hero?
What’s more, Johnson wasn’t alone in his hatred for blacks.
Democrats poured massive amounts of political capital into killing the Civil Rights act of 1964. Bill Clinton’s “mentor” and “friend,” former Klansman J. William Fulbright, joined the Dixiecrats, an ultra-segregationist wing of Democratic lawmakers, in filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and in killing the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
When Lyndon B. Johnson did finally decide to support civil rights legislation, he did it for purely political reasons. As presidential historian Ronald Kessler notes, when asked why the Civil Rights Bill had recently become so important to him, President Johnson said: “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.”
Even President Obama has admitted that Lyndon B. Johnson’s legacy as a champion for civil rights is fraudulent.
During Lyndon B. Johnson’s first 20 years in Congress, “he opposed every civil rights measure that came up for a vote,” said President Barack Obama on Thursday, April 10th, 2014 in a speech at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library.
Aside from being historically clueless about the Voting Rights Act, Anthony Mackie’s views on voter ID laws are at odds with most Americans.
Last year, a Fox News survey of 1,025 registered voters found that Americans across every major demographic, including black voters (51%) and Democrats (55%), support voter ID laws.
So what, Mr. Mackie? A majority of Democrats and black people support voter ID laws because they want to help Republicans “suppress” voting?
It would be funny if it weren’t so asinine.
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