Civil Rights Summit at LBJ Library: President Barack Obama's

Keynote Address, April 10, 2014

[APPLAUSE]

MARK UPDEGROVE [Director, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library]: Welcome to the Civil

Rights Summit, as we welcome the President and First Lady of the United States.

State Troopers in a day of infamy that became known as Bloody Sunday.

President Lyndon Johnson was never one to let a good crisis go to waste. A week later he used

Bloody Sunday the show the need to pass the Voting Rights Act that he had proposed, but that

had stalled in the halls of congress. In a plea before Congress and the nation, he said, “It is all

of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice -- and we shall overcome.”

John Lewis watched that speech in Selma with his mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, at his side.

As President Johnson said those words, Mr. Lewis saw Dr. King cry for the first time. “We will

march from Selma to Montgomery,” Dr. King said, with tears in his eyes. “The Voting Rights Act

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming to this stage Congressman John Lewis

[APPLAUSE]

CONGRESSMAN JOHN LEWIS: Thank you Mark and the staff of the Lyndon Baines Johnson

Library.

My beloved friends, my sisters and brothers, I have the special honor to introduce the keynote

speaker for this fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is so fitting and

hotel. People’s home were bombed. Their lives were threatened for taking a simple drink from

the same water fountain, for sharing the same table in a restaurant or at a lunch counter. There

were signs everywhere that said “white” and “colored” and they imposed an unholy order on the

lives of the average American citizen.

President Johnson used his political power and the force of his will to pass the Civil Rights Act

of 1964 and later the Voting Rights [Act] of 1965. All of those signs came tumbling down. And

you will not see those signs -- our children will not see those signs -- except in a museum, in a

book, or on a video.

Lyndon Johnson, using his skills and his power, made this possible. And when people said

nothing had changed, I said, come and walk in my shoes and I will show you change.

When President Barack Obama walked through the doors of the White House, he ushered in a

time of great hope, silent prayers, and deep aspiration. As a nation, we felt we may have finally

realized the vision President Johnson had for all of us: to live the ideal of freedom and eliminate

injustice from our beloved country.

We used the liberty we gained from Johnson’s legacy to elect a man with the raw courage and

tenacity to do all he could to make our society a better place, and move us closer to the Beloved

[APPLAUSE]

Now my dear friends, it is my great honor and pleasure to present our friend, our president,

President Barack Obama and the First Lady.

[APPLAUSE]

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Please, please have a seat. Thank you. 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. Michelle

was in particular interested in a recording in which Ladybird is critiquing President Johnson's

performance. And she said come, come, you need listen to this. And she pressed the button

and nodded her head. Some things do not change, even fifty years later.

Senators and Representatives to pass a civil rights bill -- the most sweeping since

reconstruction.

Most his staff counseled him against it. They said it was hopeless; that would anger powerful

southern Democrats and Committee Chairmen; that it risked derailing the rest of his domestic

agenda. One particularly bold aide said he did not believe a president should spend his time in

power on lost causes, however worthy they might be. To which, it is said, President Johnson

replied, “Well, what the hell's presidency for!?”

What the hell's presidency for -- if not to fight for causes you believe in.

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’ve had the singular privilege to hold the office 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

But, the presidency also affords a unique opportunity to bend 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 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 men's’ skins,

emancipation will be a proclamation -- but not a fact.”

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. 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 two hundred years from now

school children will know only two names: Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.” [LAUGHTER]

And he knew that Senators would believe things like that. [APPLAUSE]

President Johnson liked power: he liked the feel of it, the wielding of it. But that hunger was

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 the household together. His cousin

Eva 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 and poverty could be

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 the 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

a caution toward 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 ask 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 would remember his

own experience with want.

He knew that he had a unique capacity, as the most powerful white politician from the South, to

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 horsetraded and bullied and persuaded until

ultimately he signed the Civil Rights Act in the 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.

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 the poor people's movement, but he understood that connection because he had

lived it.

A decent job, decent wages, healthcare -- those too were civil rights worth fighting for. An

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.

debate about equality and opportunity, and the role of government in ensuring each. As was

true fifty 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, that nothing's changed, that racism is so embedded in

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 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 our 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

the Civil Rights Movement, because of the laws President Johnson signed, new doors of

opportunity in education swung open for everybody. Not all at once but -- 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. That's why I'm standing here today -- because of those efforts, because of that

legacy. 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 a foundation;

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 say, things are too different now, we couldn’t possibly do what

was done then. These giants, what they accomplished -- 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

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 that. 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 ultimately what the hell the

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

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]

this year’s anniversary should teach us, if there’s one lesson 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

Like Dr. King, like Abraham Lincoln, like countless citizens who have driven this country

inexorably forward, President Johnson knew that, in the end, ours 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.