University of Virginia Library

Introduction

"Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child." So spoke President Lyndon B. Johnson in the course of one of the most deeply felt, and deeply moving, addresses ever delivered by an American president. The date was March 15, 1965; the occasion was an extraordinary joint session at night of the Senate and the House of Representatives, televised across the nation. It was the "time of Selma" — only a few days after the historic mass demonstration in support of voter registration in Alabama, in which many of the peaceful marchers were physically attacked and one of them, a white clergyman from the north, was killed. The nation itself was a shocked witness, via television, of much of that unforgettable scene: the long rows of marchers, a cross-section of American courage, among them nuns and schoolteachers, priests and rabbis, old men and young women, Negroes and white, Californians and New Yorkers — resolutely striding, smiling, singing to hide their exhaustion, trying not to see the hate-twisted faces and shouting menace of the sidewalk crowd, trying not to fear the armored troopers and police with their notorious supporting artillery of dogs, clubs, and cattle prods. . .

This was the moment chosen by the President, himself a Southerner with a reputation for compromise, to bear witness before the nation, and to call upon his former associates of Congress to stand up and be counted with him — more specifically, to take action on a bill which would correct the conspicuous weakness of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, its failure to protect the right of Negroes to vote "when local officials are determined to deny it." In forthright terms, President Johnson spelled out the full cruelty and ingenuity of that discrimination, and crisply defined the central issue involved: "there is no Constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong — deadly wrong — to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of state's rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights."

The President spoke slowly, solemnly, with unmistakable determination. His words and his manner were perfectly synchronized; indeed he made the nationwide audience aware of how deeply personal the issue of Negro rights was to him. He recalled his own southern origins, and his shattering encounter with Mexican-American children as a young schoolteacher ("they never seemed to know why people disliked them, but they knew it was so because I saw it in their

eyes"). He spoke more directly, more explicitly, and more warmly of the human experience of prejudice than any president before him. But he also placed the problem of Negro rights in a broader frame of reference — that of poverty and ignorance, bigotry and fear. "Their cause must be our cause too. Because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome."

In terms of its immediate objective, at least, the President's address to Congress was a complete success. The Voting Rights Bill of 1965, enacted shortly after, contains these three main provisions: (1) it permits the Federal government to send Federal examiners into voting districts within the states where less than 50 percent of voters are registered, and to take over registration; (2) it suspends the so-called "literacy tests" in such areas as Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and thirty-four counties of North Carolina; (3) it authorizes the Attorney General to take court action toward declaring the poll tax unconstitutional in state and local elections. The new legislation thus supplements the broader civil rights measure of 1964 at precisely the points where it was being rendered inoperative.