In what some historians consider one of the best political speeches of the 20th century, former President Lyndon B. Johnson, 60 years ago this month, evoked memories of his former Mexican American students in Texas while urging Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act.
The big picture: As the nation marks the 60th anniversary of the historic march from Selma to Montgomery, many have forgotten the LBJ speech that made Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. cry and connected Latinos to the nation’s civil rights struggle.
- The speech led to the passage of the landmark law.
- The American Promise speech, delivered on March 15, 1965, drew attention when the Texas-born Johnson told the nation that bigotry still stained the country, “and we shall overcome.”
State of play: The speech stands in stark contrast to the State of the Union that President Trump gave earlier this month when he said “wokeness is trouble” and called some Latino immigrants “savages.”
- LBJ told the nation to wake up to racism and tried to humanize his former Mexican American students, who endured racism and segregation, Mark K. Updegrove, the LBJ Foundation’s president and CEO, tells Axios.
- “Imagine Donald Trump saying that Black Lives Matter after the murder of George Floyd, right? That’s exactly what Lyndon Johnson does when he says, ‘We shall overcome.’ Wow.”
Context: On March 7, 1965, future U.S. Rep. John Lewis and 600 other civil rights demonstrators crossed the bridge from Selma for a planned march to Montgomery to protest voting discrimination against Black Americans.
- State troopers violently attacked the unarmed demonstrators with batons and tear gas — images that shocked the nation and prompted LBJ to give his emergency address to Congress.
Yes, but: LBJ then shocked the nation by recalling a transformative experience he had as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, at a segregated Mexican American school.
- “Few of them could speak English, and I couldn’t speak much Spanish,” Johnson said.
- The students were poor, hungry and aware that people hated them, but they didn’t know why, Johnson said, and he often wished there was more he could do for them.
- “Somehow, you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child,” Johnson said.
LBJ said he never thought he’d have the opportunity to help the children of those students, and others like them.
- “But now I do have that chance. And I’ll let you in on a secret: I mean to use it.”
Five months later, Johnson got Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act.
Flashback: Mike Herrera, son of the late Houston civil rights attorney John J. Herrera, said in a 2013 interview that his father wept when Johnson brought up Cotulla.
- LBJ’s Cotulla experience and his time teaching at Sam Houston High School in Houston were widely known among Mexican Americans in Houston, but not among the wider public, Mike Herrera said.
- “Dad felt that, finally, a president was saying we mattered.”
- Mike Herrera died in 2015.
Between the lines: Johnson often repeated his teaching experience in private and never forgot those children, Updegrove said.
- “He saw through those eyes what poverty and prejudice and racial injustice looked like.”