Remarks
provided below and via The
Burnt Orange Report.
Thank
you. Thank you very much.
(Cheers,
applause.)
Thank
you so much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Please, please, have a
seat. Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you very much. Please, please.
What a
singular honor it is for me to be here today. I want to thank first and
foremost the Johnson family for giving us this opportunity and the graciousness
with which Michelle and I have been received.
We came
down a little bit late because we were upstairs looking at some of the exhibits
and some of the private offices that were used by President Johnson and Mrs.
Johnson, and Michelle was in particular interested to -- of a recording in
which Lady Bird is critiquing President Johnson's performance. (Laughter.) And
she said, come, come, you need to listen to this. (Laughter.) And she pressed
the button -- (laughter) -- and nodded her head. (Laughter.) Some things do not
change -- (laughter) -- even 50 years later.
To -- to
all the members of Congress, the warriors for justice, the elected officials
and community leaders who are here today, I want to thank you.
You
know, four days into his sudden presidency, and the night before he would
address a joint session of the Congress in which he once served, Lyndon Johnson
sat around a table with his closest advisers preparing his remarks to a
shattered and grieving nation.
He
wanted to call on senators and representatives to pass a civil rights bill, the
most sweeping since Reconstruction. And most of his staff counseled him against
it. They said it was hopeless, that it would anger powerful Southern Democrats
and committee chairmen, that it risked derailing the rest of his domestic
agenda.
And one
particularly bold aide said he did not believe a president should spend his
time and power on lost causes, however worthy they might be, to which, it is
said, President Johnson replied: Well, what the hell's the presidency for?
(Laughter, applause.) What the hell's the presidency for if not to fight for
causes you believe in?
Today as
we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, we honor the men
and women who made it possible. Some of them are here today. We celebrate
giants like John Lewis and Andrew Young and Julian Bond.
We
recall the countless unheralded Americans -- black and white, students and
scholars, preachers and housekeepers -- whose names are etched not on monuments
but in the hearts of their loved ones and in the fabric of the country that
they helped to change.
But we
also gather here, deep in the heart of the state that shaped them, to recall
one giant man's remarkable efforts to make real the promise of our founding. We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Those of
us who've had the singular privilege to hold the office of the presidency know
well that progress in this country can be hard and it can be slow, frustrating.
And sometimes you're stymied. The office humbles you.
You're
reminded daily that in this great democracy, you are but a relay swimmer in the
currents of history, bound by decisions made by those who came before, reliant
on the efforts of those who will follow to fully vindicate your vision. But the
presidency also affords a unique opportunity to bend those currents by shaping
our laws and by shaping our debates, by working within the confines of the
world as it is, but also by reimagining the world as it should be.
This was
President Johnson's genius. As a master of politics and the legislative
process, he grasped, like few others, the power of government to bring about
change. Now, LBJ was nothing if not a realist. He was well-aware that the law
alone isn't enough to change hearts and minds. A full century after Lincoln's
time, he said: Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of
race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins,
emancipation will be a proclamation, but not a fact.
He
understood laws couldn't accomplish everything, but he also knew that only the
law could anchor change and set hearts and minds on a different course. And a
lot of Americans needed the law's most basic protections at that time. As Dr.
King said at the time: It may be true that the law can't make a man love me,
but it can keep him from lynching me. And I think that's pretty important.
(Applause.)
And
passing laws is what LBJ knew how to do. No one knew politics and no one loved
legislating more than President Johnson. He was charming when he needed to be,
ruthless when required. (Laughter.) He could wear you down with logic and
argument, he could horse-trade and he could flatter. You come with me on this
bill, he would reportedly tell a key Republican leader from my home state
during the fight for the civil rights bill, and 200 years from now school
children will know only two names -- Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.
(Laughter.)
(Chuckles.)
And he knew that senators would believe things like that. (Laughter, applause.)
President
Johnson liked power. He liked the feel of it, the wielding of it. But that
hunger was harnessed and redeemed by a deeper understanding of the human
condition, by a sympathy for the underdog, for the downtrodden, for the
outcast, and it was a sympathy rooted in his own experience. As a young boy
growing up in the Texas Hill Country, Johnson knew what being poor felt like.
Poverty was so common, he would later say, we didn't even know it had a name.
(Laughter.) The family home didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing.
Everybody worked hard, including the children. President Johnson had known the
metallic taste of hunger, the feel of a mother's callused hands, rubbed raw
from washing and cleaning and holding the household together.
His
cousin Ava remembered sweltering days spent on her hands and knees in the
cotton fields with Litton -- Lyndon whispering beside her, boy, there's got to
be a better way to make a living than this.
There's
got to be a better way.
It
wasn't until years later, when he was teaching at a so-called Mexican school in
a tiny town in Texas that he came to understand how much worse the persistent
pain of poverty could be for other races in the Jim Crow south.
Oftentimes
his students would show up to class hungry. And when he'd visit their homes,
he's meet fathers who were paid slave wages by the farmers they worked for.
Those children were taught, he would later say, that the end of life is in beet
row, a spinach field or a cotton patch.
Deprivation
and discrimination, these were not abstractions to Lyndon Baines Johnson. He
knew that poverty and injustice are as inseparable as opportunity and justice
are joined. So that was in him from an early age.
Now,
like any of us, he was not a perfect man. His experiences in rural Texas may
have stretched his moral imagination. But he was ambitious, very ambitious, a
young man in a hurry to plot his own escape from poverty and to chart his own
political career. And in the Jim Crow south, that meant not challenging
convention. During his first 20 years in Congress, he opposed every civil
rights bill that came up for a vote, once calling the push for federal
legislation a farce and a shame.
He was
chosen as a vice presidential nominee in part because of his affinity with and
ability to deliver that Southern white vote. And at the beginning of the
Kennedy administration, he shared with President Kennedy a caution towards
racial controversy.
But
marchers kept marching. Four little girls were killed in a church. Bloody
Sunday happened. The winds of change blew. And when the time came when LBJ
stood in the Oval Office -- I picture him standing there taking up the entire
door frame -- looking out over the South Lawn in a quiet moment and asked
himself what the true purpose of his office was for, what was the end point of
his ambitions, he would reach back in his own memory and he'd remember his own
experience with want.
And he
knew that he had a unique capacity, as the most powerful white politician from
the South, to not merely challenge the convention that had crushed the dreams
of so many, but to ultimately dismantle for good the structures of legal
segregation. He's the only guy who could do it.
And he
knew there'd be a cost, famously saying the Democratic Party may have lost the
South for a generation. That's what his presidency was for. That's where he
meets his moment.
And
possessed with an iron will, possessed with those skills that he had honed so
many years in Congress, pushed and supported by a movement of those willing to
sacrifice everything for their own liberation, President Johnson fought for and
argued and horse-traded and bullied and persuaded until ultimately, he signed
the Civil Rights Act into law.
And he
didn't stop there, even though his advisers again told him to wait, again told
him, let the dust settle; let the country absorb this momentous decision. He
shook them off. The meat in the coconut, as President Johnson would put it, was
the Voting Rights Act. So he fought for and passed that as well.
Immigration
reform came shortly after, and then a Fair Housing Act, and then a health care
law that opponents described as socialized medicine, that would curtail
America's freedom -- (laughter) -- but ultimately freed millions of seniors
from the fear that illness could rob them of dignity and security in their
golden years, which we now know today as Medicare.
(Applause.)
What
President Johnson understood was that equality required more than the absence
of oppression; it required the presence of economic opportunity. He wouldn't be
as eloquent as Dr. King would be in describing that linkage, as Dr. King moved
in to mobilizing sanitation workers and the poor people's movement, but he
understood that connection because he had lived it.
A decent
job, decent wages, health care -- those too were civil rights worth fighting
for. An economy where hard work is rewarded and success is shared, that was his
goal. And he knew, as someone who had seen the New Deal transform the landscape
of his Texas childhood, who had seen the difference electricity had made
because of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the transformation concretely day in
and day out in the lives of his own family, he understood that government had a
role to play in broadening prosperity to all those who would strive for it.
We want
to open the gates to opportunity, President Johnson said. But we're also going
to give all our people, black and white, the help they need to walk through
those gates.
Now, if
some of this sounds familiar, it's because today we remain locked in this same
great debate about equality and opportunity and the role of government in
ensuring each. As was true 50 years ago, there are those who dismiss the Great
Society as a failed experiment and an encroachment on liberty, who argue the
government has become the true source of all that ails us and that poverty is
due to the moral failings of those who suffer from it.
There
are also those who argue, John (sp), that nothing's changed, that racism is so
embedded in our DNA that there's no use trying politics; the game is rigged.
But such theories ignore history. Yes, it's true that despite laws like the
Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, our society is still
wracked with division and poverty. Yes, race still colors our political debates,
and there have been government programs that have fallen short. In a time when
cynicism is too often passed off as wisdom, it's perhaps easy to conclude that
there are limits to change, that we are trapped by our own history, and
politics is a fool's errand, and we'd be better off if we rolled back big
chunks of LBJ's legacy, or at least if we don't put too much of our hope,
invest too much of our hope in our government.
I reject
such thinking, not just because Medicare -- (applause) -- not just because Medicare
and Medicaid have lifted millions from suffering, not just because the poverty
rate in this nation would be far worse without food stamps and Head Start and
all the Great Society programs that survive to this day. I reject such cynicism
because I have lived out the promise of LBJ's efforts, because Michelle has
lived out the legacy of those efforts, because my daughters have lived out the
legacy of those efforts, because I and millions of my generation were in a
position to take the baton that he handed to us.
Because
-- (applause) -- because of the civil rights movement, because of the laws
President Johnson signed, new doors of opportunity and education swung open for
everybody, not all at once, but they swung open. Not just blacks and whites, but
also women and Latinos and Asians and Native Americans and gay Americans and
Americans with a disability.
They
swung open for you and they swung open for me.
(Applause.)
And
that's why I'm standing here today, because of those efforts, because of that legacy.
(Applause.)
And that
means we've got a debt to pay. That means we can't afford to be cynical. Half a
century later, the laws LBJ passed are now as fundamental to our conception of
ourselves and our democracy as the Constitution an the Bill of Rights. They are
a foundation, an essential piece of the American character.
But we
are here today because we know we cannot be complacent, for history travels not
only forwards, history can travel backwards. History can travel sideways. And
securing the gains this country has made requires the vigilance of its
citizens. Our rights, our freedoms -- they are not given. They must be won.
They must be nurtured through struggle and discipline and persistence and
faith.
And one
concern I have sometimes during these moments -- the celebration of the signing
of the Civil Rights Act, the March on Washington -- from a distance, sometimes
these commemorations seem inevitable. They seem easy. All the pain and
difficulty and struggle and doubt -- all that's rubbed away. And we look at
ourselves and we say, oh, things are just too different now. We couldn't
possibly do what was done then, these giants, what they accomplished.
And yet
they were men and women too. It wasn't easy then. It wasn't certain then.
Still,
the story of America is a story of progress, however slow, however incomplete,
however harshly challenged at each point on our journey, however flawed our
leaders, however many times we have to take a quarter of a loaf or half a loaf,
the story of America is a story of progress. And that's true because of men
like President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
(Applause.)
In so
many ways, he embodied America, with all our gifts and all our flaws, in all
our restlessness and all our big dreams. This man, born into poverty, weaned in
a world full of racial hatred, somehow found within himself the ability to
connect his experience with the brown child in a small Texas town, the white
child in Appalachia, the black child in Watts. As powerful as he became in the
Oval Office, he understood them. He understood what it meant to be on the
outside.
And he
believed that their plight was his plight too, that this freedom ultimately was
wrapped up in theirs and that making their lives better was what the hell the
presidency was for.
(Applause.)
And
those children were on his mind when he strode to the podium that night in the
House chamber, when he called for the vote on the civil rights law. It never
occurred to me, he said, in my fondest dreams, that I might have the chance to
help the sons and daughters of those students that he had taught so many years
ago, and to help people like them all over this country. But now, I do have
that chance. And I'll let you in on a secret, I mean to use it. And I hope that
you will use it with me.
(Applause.)
That was
LBJ's greatest. That's why we remember him. And if there is one thing that he
and this year's anniversary should teach us, if there's one lesson I hope that
Malia and Sasha and young people everywhere learn from this day, it's that with
enough effort and enough empathy and enough perseverance and enough courage,
people who love their country can change it.
In his
final year, President Johnson stood on this stage, wracked with pain, battered
by the controversies of Vietnam, looking far older than his 64 years, and he
delivered what would be his final public speech. "We have proved that
great progress is possible," he said. "We know how much still remains
to be done. And if our efforts continue, and if our will is strong, and if our hearts
are right, and if courage remains our constant companion, then, my fellow
Americans, I am confident we shall overcome."
(Applause.)
WE shall
overcome. We, the citizens of the United States. Like Dr. King, like Abraham
Lincoln, like countless citizens who have driven this country inexorably
forward, President Johnson knew that ours in the end is a story of optimism, a
story of achievement and constant striving that is unique upon this Earth.
He knew
because he had lived that story. He believed that together we can build an
America that is more fair, more equal and more free than the one we inherited.
He
believed we make our own destiny. And in part because of him, we must believe
it as well.
Thank
you. God bless you. God bless the United States of America.
(Applause.)
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