In 1964 the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan show, Sidney Portier became the first black actor to win an Academy Award, and Sarah Palin was born. Barry Goldwater challenged Lyndon Johnson for the Presidency, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, and Martin Luther King received the Nobel Peace Prize. Lady Bird Johnson also became the first First Lady to campaign solo.

President Johnson, a Texan, signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964. In Virginia Byrd Democrats fumed. In Alexandria State Delegate James Thomson, Senator Byrd’s son-in-law expressed the organization’s concern. Blacks no longer were controlled. Café sit-ins (CORE) and voter registration drives (NAACP) were becoming routine.

As significantly, incumbent City Councilman John Pickens failed to pay his poll tax.

“Mr. Pickens is a man of substance,” The Washington Post reported. “He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, he is an experienced politician, he is a Democrat, and he is white. He is emphatically not the target at which [Virginia’s] Constitutional Convention of 1902 was aiming. He is the victim, as it were, of a ricochet. Mr. Pickens illustrates that civil rights are not only Negroes’ rights.”

Such civil rights stresses, coupled with the President’s declared War on Poverty, convinced Lady Bird Johnson to schedule a four-day, eight-State, 1600-mile, campaign tour. The train, known as The Lady Bird Special, left Alexandria’s Union Station on October 6. The Democratic National Committee “chose Alexandria as the jump-off point [because] it was a quaint southern city.”

 “I took my wife across the Potomac to the Alexandria, Virginia, railroad station,” Johnson wrote in The Vantage Point. “I spoke briefly to the thousands who had assembled there.  But it was Lady Bird’s gentle words that moved the listeners and set the tone for her entire remarkable trip. ‘I wanted to tell you that to this President and his wife the South is a respected and valued and beloved part of this country.’”

The Alexandria Gazette continued, “She found, she said, that there is ‘more love than hate’ in the southland and commended the mass of people for the observance of Civil Rights laws.”

Mrs. Hale Boggs (LA) and Mrs. Donald Russell (SC) co-chaired the vote-seeking event. Lady Bird’s message was heartfelt. “Seek the ties that bind us together rather than the tensions that pull us apart.”

Not all news was glum. Lady Bird touted local accomplishments as well as her husband’s. For example in June 1960 State Senator LeRoy Bendheim, formerly Mayor Bendheim successfully integrated Alexandria’s chain lunch counters: G.C. Murphy’s and Waffle Shop. Public housing however did not integrate until March 1965.

“Up to [1965], the races were separated,” The Washington Post reported, “since the city’s public housing program began 24 years ago. Alexandria has about 950 units, slightly more than half occupied by Negro families.” Today the city’s Braddock/Parker Gray public housing projects remain 91.2% black.
    
In 1964 Lyndon Johnson and running mate Hubert Humphrey received 61% of the popular vote including Alexandria’s. Johnson dubbed his wife “America’s greatest campaigner.” Of the 486 electoral votes, he credited Lady Bird with the eight-States’ 86.
    
“I knew the Civil Rights Act was right and I didn’t mind saying so,” Lady Bird said, “but I also loved the South and didn’t want it used as the whipping boy of the Democratic Party.”
    
Lyndon Johnson ascended to the Presidency following the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He is the only President to take the oath of office from a female official, federal Judge Sarah T. Hughes. The Johnson family retired from Presidential politics in 1968.

In Reply: If the mailbag is any indicator, my January column “The More Things Change, The More They Remain the Same” reverberated. For those who inquired regarding research, I suggest five Washington Post articles: “Alexandria Slum Block Probe Set” (1968), “Renewal Mulled in Alexandria” (1973), “Schools: No longer Separate But Still Unequal (1979), “Alexandria Blacks List Grievances” (1983) and “N. Va. Blacks Differ on Ward Elections” (1983).  

Highlights (1968): “The Alexandria City Council has ordered City Manager Hair to investigate…the 1000 block of Queen Street. Mrs. [Elsie] Taylor, a Hopkins House worker, repeated demands made in an [earlier] petition asking that the block be ‘cleaned up.’ [She] described it as the ‘worst’ in the city and charged that illegal sales of whiskey and narcotics take place there.”  

Highlights (1973): “The crumbling buildings at the intersection of Princess and Payne Streets are partially boarded.  But as in thousands of similar communities trying to decide what to do about deteriorating neighborhoods, city leaders are embroiled in debate. In what amounts to an intragovernmental power struggle, the independent Alexandria Redevelopment and Housing Authority has challenged the idea that upgrading housing means moving poor people out and middle income in. ‘It’s old fashion urban renewal,’” said ARHA Chairman A. Melvin Miller.  “The motives of people who believe in mixed neighborhoods are good ones,” said Bernard Friedan, director of the Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Center for Urban Studies. “They feel the poor need to be educated by having middle-income persons near them to set a good example. Opponents point out that income mixing is expensive to implement, since the city must provide incentives, and that its effectiveness has never been proven.” In 1973 the
Braddock/Parker-Gray neighborhood was called Potomac East, a proximate reference to the Town of Potomac [Del Ray]. The name Parker-Gray did not become popular until 1984; after the School Board voted to close Parker-Gray Middle School and determined alumnae failed to rename George Washington Middle School in 1979.

Highlights (1979): “Theories about [academic] discrepancies abound, but the most common hypothesis is that black students are not being pushed by their parents to study. Civil rights leaders and educators counter that motivation probably is related to economic conditions rather than race.”

Highlights (1983): “[A. Melvin Miller] criticized some council members for advocating public housing alternatives: such as dispersing low-income families in apartments throughout the city and issuing housing vouchers, much like food stamps, to subsidize rents for the poor. Throughout his remarks, parts of the audience cheered and shook placards with painted slogans such as ‘We Shall Not Be Moved.’”

Highlights (1983): “In Alexandria, Ulysses Calhoun, the president of the Alexandria NAACP, gave the plan for promoting ward elections a weak endorsement because of what Calhoun said is a widespread migration of whites into black areas just west of Old Town. There are few remaining black communities large enough to elect blacks if ward elections are held.”

The Alexandria Library has The Washington Post on microfiche.