Bill Moyers gives us a much-needed history lesson

A week from today, Democrats in South Carolina, many of them rural and about half of them African American, will vote in a presidential primary that has been marred by controversy stemming from Hillary Clinton's remark that it took Lyndon Johnson to realize Martin Luther King's dream of civil rights. Last night on Bill Moyers' Journal, Moyers effectively and eloquently agreed with Clinton and reminded us of the pivotal role his fellow rural Texan played in passing the public-accommodations law of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the law that ensured change would come, and remain.

Moyers criticized the reaction from the commentariat, in particular The New York Times for saying in an editorial that Clinton made "the distasteful implication that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change." He aired Clinton's full quote: "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done."

"There was nothing in that quote about race. It was an historical fact, an affirmation of the obvious," Moyers said. He recalled that when he was White House press secretary, he watched as Johnson backed off his plea for King to call off civil-rights demonstrations and "came down on the side of civil disobedience, believing it might quicken America's conscience ... " Ultimately, Johnson adopted the movement's rallying cry in a speech to Congress for the 1965 law.

Moyers concluded, "The movement had come first, watered by the blood of so many, championed bravely now by the preacher turned prophet who would himself soon be martyred. But there is no inevitability to history, someone has to seize and turn it. With these words at the right moment -- "We shall overcome" -- Lyndon Johnson transcended race and color, and history, too -- reminding us that a president matters, and so do we." (Watch the story)