The following is shared for those who might have missed the remarks of President Obama at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas
The remarks release by the White House are unedited here:
12:16 P.M. CDT
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause.) Thank you so much. Please, please, have a seat. Thank you.
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. And Michelle was in particular
interested to -- of a recording in which Lady Bird
is critiquing President Johnson’s performance. (Laughter.) And she
said, come, come, you need to listen to this. (Laughter.) And she
pressed the button and nodded her head. Some things do not change --
(laughter) -- even 50 years later.
To all the members of Congress, the warriors for justice, the elected
officials and community leaders who are here today -- I want to thank
you.
Four days into his sudden presidency -- and the night before he would
address a joint session of the Congress in which he once served --
Lyndon Johnson sat around a table with his closest advisors, preparing
his remarks to a shattered and grieving nation.
He wanted to call on senators and representatives to pass a civil rights
bill -- the most sweeping since Reconstruction. And most of his staff
counseled him against it. They said it was hopeless; that it would
anger powerful Southern Democrats and committee
chairmen; that it risked derailing the rest of his domestic agenda.
And one particularly bold aide said he did not believe a President
should spend his time and power on lost causes, however worthy they
might be. To which, it is said, President Johnson replied,
“Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” (Laughter and applause.)
What the hell’s the presidency for if not to fight for causes you
believe in?
Today, as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act,
we honor the men and women who made it possible. Some of them are here
today. We celebrate giants like John Lewis and Andrew Young and Julian
Bond. We recall the countless unheralded
Americans, black and white, students and scholars, preachers and
housekeepers -- whose names are etched not on monuments, but in the
hearts of their loved ones, and in the fabric of the country they 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 have had the singular privilege to hold the office of
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 before, reliant on
the efforts of those who will follow to fully vindicate your vision.
But the presidency also affords a unique opportunity to bend those
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 of 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 of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but
not a fact.”
He understood laws couldn’t accomplish everything. But he also knew
that only the law could anchor change, and set hearts and minds on a
different course. And a lot of Americans needed
the law’s most basic protections at that time. As Dr. King said at the
time, “It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me but it can
keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”
(Applause.)
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. (Laughter.) 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 200 years from now,
schoolchildren will know only two names: Abraham
Lincoln and Everett Dirksen!” (Laughter.) And he knew that senators
would believe things like that. (Laughter and applause.)
President Johnson liked power. He liked the feel of it, the wielding of
it. But that hunger was harnessed and redeemed by a deeper
understanding of the human condition; by a sympathy for the underdog,
for the downtrodden, for the outcast. And it was a sympathy
rooted in his own experience.
As a young boy growing up in the Texas Hill Country, Johnson knew what
being poor felt like. “Poverty was so common,” he would later say, “we
didn’t even know it had a name.” (Laughter.)
The family 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
a household together. His cousin Ava 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 of poverty could be
for other races in a Jim Crow South. Oftentimes his students would
show up to class hungry. And when he’d visit their homes, he’d meet
fathers who were paid slave wages by the farmers 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 that 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 South, that meant not challenging convention.
During his first 20 years in Congress, he opposed every civil rights
bill that came up for a vote, once calling the push for federal
legislation “a farce and a sham.” He was chosen as a vice
presidential nominee in part because of his affinity with, and ability
to deliver, that Southern white vote. And at the beginning of the
Kennedy administration, he shared with President Kennedy a caution
towards 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 asked himself what the
true purpose of his office was for, what was the endpoint of his
ambitions, he would reach back in his own memory and he’d remember his
own experience with want.
And he knew that he had a unique capacity, as the most powerful white
politician from the South, to not merely challenge the convention that
had crushed the dreams of so many, but to ultimately dismantle for good
the structures of legal segregation. He’s the
only guy who could do it -- and he knew there would be a cost, famously
saying the Democratic Party may “have lost the South for a
generation.”
That’s what his presidency was for. That’s where he meets his moment.
And possessed with 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 horse
traded and bullied and persuaded until ultimately he signed the Civil
Rights Act into law.
And he didn’t stop there -- even though his advisors 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. Immigration
reform came shortly after. And then, a Fair Housing Act. And then, a
health care law that opponents described as “socialized medicine” that
would curtail America’s freedom, but 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 a poor people’s movement, but he understood that
connection because he had lived it. A decent job, decent wages, health
care -- those, too, were civil rights worth fighting for. An economy
where hard work is rewarded and success is
shared, that was his goal. And he knew, as someone who had seen the
New Deal transform the landscape of his Texas childhood, who had seen
the difference electricity had made because of the Tennessee Valley
Authority, the transformation concretely day in and
day out in the life of his own family, he understood that government
had a role to play in broadening prosperity to all those who would
strive for it.
“We want to open the gates to opportunity,” President Johnson said, “But
we are also going to give all our people, black and white, the help
they need to walk through those gates.”
Now, if some of this sounds familiar, it’s because today we remain
locked in this same great debate about equality and opportunity, and the
role of government in ensuring each. As was true 50 years ago, there
are those who dismiss the Great Society as a failed
experiment and an encroachment on liberty; who argue that 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 has changed;
that racism is so embedded in our DNA that there is no use trying
politics -- the game is rigged.
But such theories ignore history. Yes, it’s true that, despite laws
like the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, our
society is still racked with division and poverty. Yes, race still
colors our political debates, and there have been
government programs that have fallen short. In a time when 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 if 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 this 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
generation were in a position to take the baton that he handed to us.
(Applause.)
Because of the Civil Rights movement, because of the laws President
Johnson signed, new doors of opportunity and education swung open for
everybody -- not all at once, 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. And
that’s why I’m standing here today -- because of those efforts, because
of that legacy. (Applause.)
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 foundational;
an essential piece of the American character.
But we are here today because we know we cannot be complacent. For
history travels not only forwards; history can travel backwards, history
can travel sideways. And securing the gains this country has made
requires the vigilance of its citizens. Our rights,
our freedoms -- they are not given. They must be won. They must be
nurtured through 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 is rubbed away. And we look at ourselves and we
say, oh, things are just too different now; we couldn’t possibly do
what was done then -- these giants, what they accomplished. And 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 harshly challenged at each point on our
journey, however flawed our leaders, however many times we have to take a
quarter of a loaf or half a loaf -- the story of
America is a story of progress. And that’s true because of men like
President Lyndon Baines Johnson. (Applause.)
In so many ways, he embodied America, with all our gifts and all our
flaws, in all our restlessness and all our big dreams. This man -- born
into poverty, weaned in a world full of 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 them. 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 what the hell the presidency was
for. (Applause.)
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 those students” that he had taught so many years ago, “and
to help people like them all over this country. 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.)
That was LBJ’s greatness. That’s why we remember him. And if there is
one thing that he and this year’s anniversary should teach us, if
there’s one lesson I hope 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, racked with
pain, battered by the controversies of Vietnam, looking far older than
his 64 years, and he delivered what would be his final public speech.
“We have proved that great progress is possible,” he said. “We know how
much still remains to be done. And if our efforts continue, and if our
will is strong, and if our hearts are right, and if courage remains our
constant companion, then, my fellow Americans,
I am confident, we shall overcome.” (Applause.)
We shall overcome. We, the citizens of the United States. Like Dr.
King, like Abraham Lincoln, like countless citizens who have driven this
country inexorably forward, President Johnson knew that ours in the end
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. (Applause.)
END 12:46 P.M. CDT
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