Lyndon B. Johnson

Abstract

Rarely has a president responded so directly to radical protest as in this speech Lyndon B. Johnson gave to Congress on March 15, 1965, just after the bloody repression of protests in Selma, Alabama. LBJ indicted segregation with the authority of a white southerner who had upheld it for decades. In an extraordinary gesture, he invoked the slogan of the civil rights movement by declaring with great firmness, “We shall overcome. ” Concretely, he demanded a voting rights act that would guarantee African Americans a share of power in the United States, and he got it. The act passed in August 1965, mandating federal elections registrars in any county where 40 percent of the eligible voters were not registered. It was the most direct intervention in state and local politics since Reconstruction.