President Johnson publicly linked the uprisings to three hundred years of oppression

Evidence

President Johnson was not among those who denied that legitimate reasons existed for the rebellions. Echoing Thomas Jefferson more than a century after he’d warned of the dangers of holding a “wolf by the ear,” Johnson said of the uprisings that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.” In a July 1967 speech about Black rebellions in Detroit and Newark, he condemned the violence as criminal but also admitted that “the only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack—mounted at every level—upon the conditions that breed despair and violence.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 400

Categorization

• XREF: Johnson’s ‘wolf by the ear’ echo of Jefferson plus the three-hundred-year reckoning directly serves the reader’s reframing case study — the origin dating shaping how a president read contemporary violence.