Two months later, Johnson would sign the Voting Rights Act and the black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts would undergo race riots that left dozens dead, a thousand injured, and thousands more in prison. There had always been a good deal of bluff about Johnson and other Southern white apostles of civil rights, a whiff of the nineteenth-century Southerner’s claim to know the ways of “our” black folk better than you ever could. Now their reputation for expertise and fine-tuned sympathy was damaged. The country’s political leadership was thrown into a consternation from which it would not emerge
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