Forty years ago, Pres. Johnson's Signed the Voting Rights Bill

[MrScorpio]

40 Years ago. A time when we had a real president. Instead of the faux cowboy clown that we're cursed with today.

Please read.

As delivered in person before a joint session at 15 March 1965, 9:02 p.m.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Members of the Congress:

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.

I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause.

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 at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.

There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed.

There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight.

For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great Government—the Government of the greatest Nation on earth.

Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man.

Continued here: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6336/




President Johnson Signing the Voting Rights Bill on 6 August 1965

[B Calm]

1. I wished I was in Atlanta today! Mike Malloy & Randi Rhodes

together..

[journalist3072]

2. And right after he did it...

He said to Bill Moyers: "Bill, I've just handed the South to the Republicans for fifty years, certainly for the rest of our lifetimes."

He knew racist Whites in the South would be upset, but he also knew the Voting Rights Act was the right thing to do. He put country ahead of political expediency.

And it's amazing to me that today, we have an Oval Office occupant who says he's "unfamiliar" with the Act. The President of the United States says he doesn't have a clue about one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation ever!