Enactment Below:
(Frozen set: The family, Dr. King, and Coretta and the Oval Office. LBJ is shown behind the Resolute Desk as aides jostle on couches to say their piece).
LBJ AIDES: Mr. President, I speak for all of us here. Leave this Civil Rights bill alone. It is a lost cause. Just kick the can down the road like everyone else before you. Let it not be that you made the Democratic Party lose elections for the next 40 years. The Democrats will never smell the White House again. You will be yielding the entire South to the Republican Party.
LBJ: What the hell is the Presidency supposed to achieve? Should it always be about winning elections? How about leaving behind a legacy for eternity? I may not have the eloquence of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but God knows I am a Texan. We know how to get things done, and we do them big, big! We have talked enough in this country about equal rights. The time has come, and the time is now—we must do something about it. It is time to write the next chapter and to write it in the books of the law. If we fail on this, we fail on everything. Get me Dr. King on the line.
DR. KING: Mr. President, good evening, sir. Coretta said you wanted to speak with me.
LBJ: I am sending you a list of some holdout Congressmen and Senators. Go to work on them.
DR. KING: Thank you, Mr. President.
DAD: That was one man who understood the power of the Presidency and knew how to deploy that power. And so—LBJ, a man of very few words, little charisma compared to his old boss, JFK, a Southerner to boot, but howbeit, a man of definitive action;—he had the burden of moving against his ilk and the good fortune of being a modern-day Moses—emancipating Black people from the evil of Jim Crow finally. Congress passed the Civil Rights Bill on July 2, 1964. It outlawed discrimination based on Race, Color, Religion, Sex, or National Origin. Johnson, a legislative genius sensing the wave created by the Civil Rights Act, quickly enunciated the Great Society, a set of programs aimed at eliminating poverty and racial injustice in the distribution of infrastructure. And then, to cap it all, he had the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965. With all these achievements, the Democratic Party had effectively sealed its relationship with Black people forever; hence, most Black people vote Democratic today. We were happy, but we were also sad because we lost Malcolm X in February of 1965.
(As Johnson bellows his speech on Civil Rights and the Great Society— “The Answer is Blowing in the Wind” by Bob Dylan and— “In the Ghetto” by Elvis playing. An Elvis impersonator does Elvis; A Change is gonna come by Sam Cooke).
CURTAIN
Dear reader, we will be concluding our Serialization with Act 10 tomorrow. The Play runs all the way to Act 20–taking us to, and concluding in the year 2000. If you live abroad, get your copy from Amazon. If you live in Nigeria, call Tony: 08086390607. He will deliver your copy anywhere in Nigeria.
