LBJ Declares War on Jim Crow Bigotry

Good morning. It’s March 15th, the Ides of March. On this day in 1965, Congress and the president gathered in one place to hear Lyndon Johnson throw down the gauntlet on an issue vastly more significant than the budget impasse that stymies today’s office-holders.

With his plain countenance, monotone twang, and record of inattention to civil rights while rising through the ranks of Democratic Party politics in segregated Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson was perhaps an unlikely choice to lead the struggle for equality in this country – and as dissimilar from Martin Luther King Jr. as two orators could be.

Yet there he was on March 15, 1965, making a momentous speech to a joint session of Congress on that very subject. Whether LBJ was placed there by the vagaries of history or by Providence, he rose to the occasion, channeling the Rev. King, quoting Lincoln, invoking the Founders – along with God’s will – while challenging Americans to live up to the ideals that justified the very formation of this country.

“I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” President Johnson began. “I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause.

“At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed.

“There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight.”

Johnson’s challenge to white Southerners – white Americans – went beyond granting full rights to African Americans because it was the right thing to do or because it would help the black community. It would help whites, too, he said, to overcome their own “crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”

Then he added, “And we shall overcome.”