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The Best Presidential Speech of My Lifetime, Half a Century Later
"There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem."
By Charles P. Pierce
Mar 15, 2018
It was 53 years ago today that President Lyndon B. Johnson stood before a joint session of Congress and delivered the finest address given by an American president in my lifetime. A week earlier, peaceful civil rights marchers were brutally attacked in Selma, Alabama, by the state-sanctioned forces of white supremacy. John Lewis was nearly killed. A minister from Boston named Jim Reeb actually was.
Then, on March 15, LBJ came to Capitol Hill, a speech largely crafted by the great Dick Goodwin in his pocket, and he laid it on the line in front of god, Richard Russell, Strom Thurmond, and the world. The president of the United States, a son of Texas, had had by god enough of this.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19445682/lbj-civil-rights-speech/
[Much more at link]
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The Best Presidential Speech of My Lifetime, Half a Century Later (Original Post)
Hermit-The-Prog
Mar 2018
OP
Wwcd
(6,288 posts)1. Best Speech indeed. K & R & Thanks
Hermit-The-Prog
(33,021 posts)2. amazing we are still fighting the same things
Johnson enumerated poverty, ignorance, and disease as the things we should fight instead of our fellow man. Yet here we are still fighting racism along with those three.
RussBLib
(8,983 posts)3. We've come a long way
But we still have far to go.
Thanks.