AS I watch Barack Obama?s speech to the Democratic convention tonight, I will be remembering another speech: the one that made Martin Luther King cry. And I will be thinking: Mr. Obama?s speech ? and in a way his whole candidacy ? might not have been possible had that other speech not been given.
That speech was President Lyndon Johnson?s address to Congress in 1965 announcing that he was about to introduce a voting rights act
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In March 1965, black Americans in the 11 Southern states were still largely unable to vote. When they tried to register, they faced not only questions impossible to answer ? like the infamous ?how many bubbles in a bar of soap?? ? but also the humiliation of trying to answer them in front of registrars who didn?t bother to conceal their scorn. Out of six million blacks old enough to vote in those 11 states in 1965, only a small percentage ? 27 percent in Georgia, 19 percent in Alabama, 6 percent in Mississippi ? were registered.
What?s more, those who were registered faced not only beatings and worse but economic retaliation as well if they tried to actually cast a ballot. Black men who registered might be told by their employer that they no longer had a job; black farmers who went to the bank to renew their annual ?crop loan? were turned down, and lost their farms. Some, as I have written, ?had to load their wives and children into their rundown cars and drive away, sometimes with no place to go.? So the number of black men and women in the South who actually cast a vote was far smaller than the number registered; in no way were black Americans realizing their political potential.
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Some civil rights leaders who had been talking to Lyndon Johnson since he became president were now, by the spring of 1965, convinced of his good faith, but most were not, and the mass of the movement, symbolized by those protesters outside the White House gates, still distrusted him.
Men and women who knew Lyndon Johnson, however, felt there was another element to the story. They included the Mexican-American children of impoverished migrant workers he had taught as a 21-year-old schoolteacher in the little town of Cotulla, Tex.; to the ends of their lives they would talk about how hard he had worked to teach and inspire them. ?He used to tell us this country was so free that anyone could become president who was willing to work hard enough,? one student said.
Others remember what one calls the story about the ?little baby in the cradle.? As one student recalled, ?He would tell us that one day we might say the baby would be a teacher. Maybe the next day we?d say the baby would be a doctor. And one day we might say the baby ? any baby ? might grow up to be president of the United States.?
His former students weren?t alone. Men and women at Georgetown dinner tables were also convinced of the sincerity of Johnson?s intentions. ?I remember at this dinner party, Johnson talking about teaching the Mexican-American kids in Cotulla, and his frustration that they had no books,? recalls Bethine Church, the wife of Senator Frank Church of Idaho. ?I remember it as one of the most passionate evenings I?ve ever spent.?
These men and women felt Johnson truly wanted to help poor people and particularly people of color, and that he was held back only by his ambition: his desire to be president, and because he was a senator from a Southern state. But when, in 1957, ambition and compassion were finally pointing in the same direction ? when he realized that he would never become president unless he removed the ?magnolia scent? of the South ? he set out to pass a civil rights bill, he did it with a passion that showed how deeply he believed in what he was doing.
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When Johnson stepped to the lectern on Capitol Hill that night, he adopted the great anthem of the civil rights movement as his own.
?Even if we pass this bill,? he said, ?the battle will not be 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.?
And, Lyndon Johnson said, ?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.?
He paused, and then he said, ?And we shall overcome.?
Martin Luther King was watching the speech at the home of a family in Selma with some of his aides, none of whom had ever, during all the hard years, seen Dr. King cry. But Lyndon Johnson said, ?We shall overcome? ? and they saw him cry then.
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The heroism of the march at Selma, the heroism all across the South, the almost unbelievable bravery of black men and women ? and children, so many children ? who marched, and were beaten, and marched again, for the right to vote, created the rising tide of national feeling behind the passage of civil rights legislation, the legislation not only of 1965 but of 1964 and 1957. That feeling did so much to make the legislation possible. It has taken me scores of pages in my books to try to describe that heroism, and all of them inadequate. But it also took Lyndon Johnson, whom the black leader James Farmer, sitting in the Oval Office, heard ?cajoling, threatening, everything else, whatever was necessary? to get the 1965 bill passed and who, with his legislative genius and savage will, broke, piece by piece, in 1957 and 1964 and 1965, the long unbreakable power of the Southern bloc.
?Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans,? I have written, ?but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy?s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.?
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To me, Barack Obama is the inheritor of Lyndon Johnson?s civil rights legacy. As I sit listening to Mr. Obama tonight, I will be hearing other words as well. I will be hearing Lyndon Johnson saying, ?We shall overcome.?
Robert A. Caro, who has won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, is at work on the fourth and final volume of his Johnson biography.
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