Well, it moved me--

There aren't too many of us who remember when LBJ was president, and most of us who do remember him for sending troops to Vietnam and for not ending that war (conflict). I have an image of a poster my brother had in his room of LBJ pulling his beagle up by their ears--he had 2 beagles, Him and Her, and he swore that pulling them up by the ears to make them bay was good for them--with the quote "He who meddles in a quarrel not his own is like one who takes a passing dog by the ears" I've always remember that quote, though not the exact phrase, but the gist of it.

Anyway, here's an excerpt of a story in today's NYTimes--it's about the speech he made as Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Until then it had been nearly impossible for blacks to register to vote in the South and there were violent attacks on demonstrators by police--with snarling, biting German Shepherds, with water cannons--these are all images burned into my mind. So reading this made me cry. I am happy and proud beyond words that Obama is our candidate.


By ROBERT A. CARO
"As I watch Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic convention tonight, I will be remembering another speech: the one that made Martin Luther King cry. And I will be thinking: Mr. Obama’s speech — and in a way his whole candidacy — might not have been possible had that other speech not been given.

That speech was President Lyndon Johnson’s address to Congress in 1965 announcing that he was about to introduce a voting rights act, and in some respects Mr. Obama’s candidacy is the climax — at least thus far — of a movement based not only on the sacrifices and heroism of the Rev. Dr. King and generations of black fighters for civil rights but also on the political genius of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who as it happens was born 100 years ago yesterday...

The bill he got was the weak one, and civil rights leaders blamed him because the advances it made were meager. Only a week before the March 1965 speech, Dr. King had said that at the rate voter registration was going, it would take 135 years before even half the blacks in Mississippi were registered. And as the limousines were pulling through the gates that night in March, the protesters were singing “We Shall Overcome,” as if to tell Lyndon Johnson, we’ll do it without you.

But they didn’t have to.

When Johnson stepped to the lectern on Capitol Hill that night, he adopted the great anthem of the civil rights movement as his own.

“Even if we pass this bill,” he said, “the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.”

And, Lyndon Johnson said, “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”
He paused, and then he said, “And we shall overcome.”

Martin Luther King was watching the speech at the home of a family in Selma with some of his aides, none of whom had ever, during all the hard years, seen Dr. King cry. But Lyndon Johnson said, “We shall overcome” — and they saw him cry then.


Ok, so Johnson certainly was no saint, but as I say, few give him credit for the advances made in civil rights and toward racial equality during his administration. Even I didn't realize it until it was history and I studied it as part of the past.