Blogs > David J. Garrow reviewed Nick Kotz's Judgment Days: Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America (Houghton Mifflin)

Jan 16, 2005

David J. Garrow reviewed Nick Kotz's Judgment Days: Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America (Houghton Mifflin)



For reviewer David J. Garrow, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” Nick Kotz’s book “Judgment Days,” is “fresh and vivid” history augmented by newly released secretly taped LBJ phone conversations and J. Edgar Hoover’s missiles to the White House about King, which Garrow notes were “hostile and sometimes distorted.”

The LBJ-King relationship helped promote and finally enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but the trauma of the Watts uprising and America’s quagmire in Vietnam, continued to sour their relationship until it became mutually antagonistic.

All the same, Garrow praises Kotz’s “thorough and thoughtful book [which] rightly emphasizes that “without both Johnson and King, the civil rights revolution might have ended with fewer accomplishments and even greater trauma than it did.”

Washington Post, January 16, 2005




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