Quote Originally Posted by jmm99 View Post
...One can cite use of all four methods by local, state and Federal authorities in that era; but the Kennedy-Johnson approach was to emphasize #2 (enforcement of the Civil Rights Acts) and #4 (bringing Black voters into the Democratic Party, realizing that substantial numbers of White voters would be lost).
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The foregoing is an explanation by hindsight - the various responses developed because of the US system of governance - not because of some magical 50-year plan.
there are a lot of myths about that time and effort.

While your summation is generally correct, as one who lived in the south during most of that period, there are three things that often get discounted or ignored. First, as a result of WW II and Korea and Truman's desegregation of the Armed Forces plus a lot of returning black veterans and a lot of white guys who became aware that black was not bad, the south was in process of changing. Barriers were falling all over the place. The Kennedy developed Act that Johnson got passed just sealed the issue. Goldwater's contention that the Act was not truly necessary and could do some harmful if uintneded things was correct I believe.

Secondly, the 'antis' were vocal but really rather few in number and the so-called Nixon southern strategy while real was successful not because of blacks becoming strong Democratic supporters or because the Democratic party had passed the CRA but because Nixon, whom no less an authority than Noam Chomsky calls the last liberal American President signed more legislation that helped the south than did his democratic predecessors. Most of the later stuff -- school and busing issues were more a result of mishandling and bad court decisions as anything else. Not to say there weren't bitter dead enders; there were -- but poor handling exacerbated things significantly.

Lastly, the Baby Boomers had nothing to do with all that.

Long way of getting to the point -- I don't agree that the era and the civil rights imbroglio were a COIN effort in any sense. I do understand that one could use the actions as a corollary and have no objection to that, though I wouldn't do it.

However, if one was there at the time, it wasn't quite the way the academics like to portray it in their somewhat revisionist history and it may have been a COIN-like preemption in Stage 0 seen through that prism but on the ground at the time, Stage 0 had not yet arrove, much less Stage 1...

Lot of shrewd, party enhancing domestic politics though, that's for sure.