WELL WORTH REPEATING

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Government for the people, by the people ...that;...":


There are those rare times when politics and politicians somehow combine to create a noble deed. Here follows one such combination. It is a great tragedy that they don 't happen more often.

For a period of thirty years, as a Texan and a southerner he had fought against civil rights legislation.

"As the long line of limousines began to pull away from the White House in the darkness, the protesters were there, outside the gates, as they had been for weeks. They were singing 'We Shall Overcome.' "

"Inside the fourth in the line of long vehicles that headed for the South gates
Lyndon Johnson sat in the back seat. He had entered the limousine without a word of greeting, and had immediately opened the notebook for a last-minute study of the speech. He didn't look up from the notebook as the limousine passed the White House gates - with the pickets singing We Shall Overcome" as if to tell him to his face. But one of the assistants riding with him had worked for him for almost twenty years, and saw his expression, and knew what it meant. "He heard."

With almost the first words of his speech, the audience - those elected as Congressmen and Senators, the Cabinet, the black-robed Justices of the Supreme Court, Ambassadors from other nations, the packed galleries rimming him above - knew that Lyndon Johnson intend to take the cause of civil rights further than it had ever gone before.

"At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.

This time, on this issue, there must be no delay, no hesitation and no compromise. Even if we pass this bill the battle will not over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.

Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice."

Briefly, he paused again. He always had so much trouble in his speeches with the emphasis on the words, But he got it right this time. The next four words fell like sledgehammers."And we shall overcome."

There was a brief moment of silence, and then the applause rolled across the chamber.

There were testimonies to the power of that speech even more eloquent than that applause. In Selma, Alabama, where Martin Luther King and several of his aides were watching the speech on television those with him had never seen him cry. When Johnson said "We shall overcome" they looked at his face and he began to cry.

Another testimony took place on the motorcade's return to the White House. As the limousines slowed to turn into the White House gates, the turn was made in silence.

The pickets were gone."

From Robert A. Caro The Years of Lyndon Johnson