You nailed it, buddy.

"For Johnson, civil rights loomed as the most intractable legislative problem of the decade. The Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, ordering an end to segregated schools, had outraged Southern senators. They circulated a Southern Manifesto urging massive resistance to school integration, but Johnson declined to sign it. In 1957 President Eisenhower proposed a tough civil rights bill that Southerners adamantly resisted. Johnson recognized the symbolic value of enacting the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, but he feared that a protracted filibuster would split his party. His removal of the key enforcement provisions of the law steered it through to enactment. Not until 1964, when Johnson was president, would a strong civil rights act finally win passage."

Although he took lots of flak--much of it deserved--over thge Vietnam War, and despite doing his best he mostly just managed to say "Nigrah", he stood up for laws that enabled a more meaningful civil rights to be realized by people who needed it. There were then and are now many things I admire about Lyndon Baines Johnson.