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| President Barack Obama delivers remarks as First Lady Michelle Obama, Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and LBJ Presidential Library Director Mark Updegrove, listen at right at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, April 10, 2014. They attended a Civil Rights Summit to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson) |
Today, 50 years after President Lyndon Baines
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, President
Obama spoke at the LBJ Presidential Library to honor the work and legacy of
our nation’s 36th president.
By Megan Slack
“As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, we honor the men and women who made it possible,” President Obama said. “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 they helped to change.”
“But we also gather here,” President Obama said, “deep in the heart of the state that shaped him, 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.”’
April 10, 2014
Remarks by the President at LBJ Presidential Library Civil Rights Summit
Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library
Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas
12:16 P.M. CDT
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 and nodded her head. Some things do not change --
(laughter) -- even 50 years later.
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.
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 advisors, 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 and 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 they
helped to change.
But we also gather here, deep in the heart of the state that shaped
him, 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 have 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.
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 was 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,
schoolchildren will know only two names: Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen!”
(Laughter.) And he knew that senators would believe things like that.
(Laughter and 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
calloused hands, rubbed raw from washing and cleaning and holding a household
together. His cousin Ava remembered sweltering days spent on her hands and
knees in the cotton fields, with 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 a Jim Crow South.
Oftentimes his students would show up to class hungry. And when he’d visit
their homes, he’d 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 a 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 sham.” 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 doorframe, 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
endpoint 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 would 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 advisors 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, 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 into mobilizing sanitation workers and a 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 life 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 are 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 that 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, that nothing has changed; that racism is so
embedded in our DNA that there is 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 racked 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 roll 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. (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. (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. 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 and the
Bill of Rights. They are foundational; 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 is 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 that 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 his 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 greatness. 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, racked
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.)
END
12:46 P.M. CDT
12:46 P.M. CDT
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