General Discussion

bigtree

(85,996 posts) Sun Jan 14, 2018, 12:31 PM Jan 2018

MLK at the White House

Martin Luther King, Jr. looks on as President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the East Room. July 2, 1964.

Dr King's interactions with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson leading up to the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the 1968 Civil Rights Act are well documented, but his first visit to the White House was actually in 1958, when he and other prominent civil rights leaders met with President Dwight Eisenhower.

Following the Brown v. Board decision, Eisenhower vowed “to uphold the constitutional processes in this country” and, in 1957, sent federal troops to Little Rock to do just that. In addition, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, addressing voting rights, was the first such legislation since Reconstruction.

MLK meeting with JFK August 28, 1963

Video: Martin Luther King, Jr speaking about his meeting with President John F. Kennedy

President Lyndon B. Johnson met with Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young, and James Farmer in the Oval Office. January 18, 1964.

Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King

LBJ made clear, in his remarks at the signing of the Voting RightsAct, that the defense and protection of voting rights for black Americans was, ultimately a powerful advance for ALL Americans:

"It is difficult to fight for freedom. But I also know how difficult it can be to bend long years of habit and custom to grant it. There is no room for injustice anywhere in the American mansion. But there is always room for understanding toward those who see the old ways crumbling. And to them today I say simply this: It must come. It is right that it should come. And when it has, you will find that a burden has been lifted from your shoulders, too.

It is not just a question of guilt, although there is that. It is that men cannot live with a lie and not be stained by it.

The central fact of American civilization—one so hard for others to understand—is that freedom and justice and the dignity of man are not just words to us. We believe in them. Under all the growth and the tumult and abundance, we believe. And so, as long as some among us are oppressed—and we are part of that oppression—it must blunt our faith and sap the strength of our high purpose.

Thus, this is a victory for the freedom of the American Negro. But it is also a victory for the freedom of the American Nation. And every family across this great, entire, searching land will live stronger in liberty, will live more splendid in expectation, and will be prouder to be American because of the act that you have passed that I will sign today."