A big step toward justice

No one meaningful Civil Rights Bill — no bill with effective enforcement teeth in it—had been passed since 1875. Not since Reconstruction. So in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson became President, no strong civil rights bill, no meaningful civil rights bill had been passed in eighty-nine years. . . .

And looking at Lyndon Johnson’s passage of that Civil Rights Act of 1964, watching how he got it through Congress, trying to understand how he did it, how he did something that no one had been able to do, at least not for all those decades, taught me some things, things about which I had had no idea, about a particular form of political power: legislative power. And about legislative genius, too—genius in its highest sense, with the greatest significance, because what he accomplished wasn’t merely the passage of an Act, a bill, a piece of legislation. It was a step—a big step—toward justice. . . . 

Johnson takes up the cause of civil rights four days after John Kennedy’s assassination. He tells Congress: “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”

The books of law.  A law. That was what Johnson felt mattered. An executive order, as we’re all learning now to our sorrow, is just a piece of paper and can be repealed by another piece of paper. But to write it in the books of law—once you succeed in that, it’s not so easy to change. . . .

Now it's 1965. And “We Shall Overcome” is being sung again, and this time it wasn’t being sung just in the South or just in churches or in synagogues. This time it was being sung in front of the White House. I wrote about that: You know at that time Pennsylvania Avenue was not closed off as it is now, so the protesters could come and march and sing right up against that black iron fence in front of the White House. . . .

Although Johnson had passed the civil rights bill in 1964, it didn’t include what they most wanted, it didn’t include what they felt was crucial: a strong provision for voting rights. It’s four days after a clergyman, the Reverend James Reeb, was clubbed to death [during a Selma to Montgomery protest march]. Still  no one has been sent to protect the clergymen who had come from all over the country to take Reeb’s place and to protect the marchers. And they didn’t believe in Lyndon Johnson. They didn’t trust him. They remembered the twenty-year record, they heard his southern accent. He had said that now he would address a joint session of Congress, but the expectation was, it wasn’t going to be what they wanted. They didn’t think that whatever he was going to ask for was going to be much stronger than the 1964 law.

So outside the White House they are singing “We Shall Overcome.” And they’re chanting. Remember some of the chants? “Hey, hey, LBJ/How many kids did you kill today?” “LBJ, just you wait / See what happens in ’68.”. . .

[T]he evening of March 15, 1965. Johnson is going to address a joint session of Congress and he comes out of the White House and gets into the backseat of the limousine for his ride to Capitol Hill. Three of his assistants, Richard Goodwin, Horace Busby, and Jack Valenti, were sitting on the limousine’s jump seats facing him. . . . I kept asking Goodwin and Busby, What was the ride like? “What did you see? What did you see?” My interviewees sometimes get quite annoyed with me because I keep asking them “What did you see?” “If I was standing beside you at the time, what would I have seen?” I’ve had people get really angry at me. But if you ask it often enough, sometimes you make them see. So finally Busby said, Well, you know Lyndon Johnson was really big. And sitting on that backseat, the reading light was behind him, so he was mostly in shadow, and somehow that made him seem even bigger. And it made those huge ears of his even bigger. And his face was mostly in shadows. You saw that big nose and that big jutting jaw. I didn’t stop. “Come on, Buzz, what did you see?” And he finally said, “Well, you know—his hands. His hands were huge, big, mottled things. He had the looseleaf notebook with the speech open on his lap, so you saw those big hands turning the pages. And he was concentrating so fiercely. He never looked up on that whole ride. A hand would snatch at the next page while he was reading the one before it. What you saw—what I remember most about that ride—were the hands. And the fierceness of his concentration—that just filled the car.”. . .

And then you also ask—another question that over the years has gotten more people angry at me than I could count—“What did you hear?” And Buzz and Goodwin say, Nothing. He didn’t say one word of hello to us when he got into the car, and he didn’t say one word the whole ride up there. No one said a word. You would have thought the ride to Capitol Hill was made in complete silence. . . . Buzz at first—and second, and third, etc.—replied, Well, nothing. He didn’t say anything. So I said something like, So the ride was in complete silence? And then he finally said, “Well, I guess except for when the car passed out through the gates.” He meant the gates of the White House onto Pennsylvania Avenue to turn right and go to Capitol Hill. The pickets were there. And Buzz said, Well, they were singing “We Shall Overcome.” And they sang it as we came out, “as if,” I wrote, “to tell Lyndon Johnson to his face, ‘We’ll win without you.’ ” Busby and Goodwin said Johnson never looked up as they passed the pickets. But Busby knew Johnson, and he knew his expressions. So I said to Busby, Well, did he hear them? And Busby said, He heard them.

And of course the speech that Johnson gave is one of the greatest speeches, one of the greatest moments in American history. I watch it over and over. I’m thrilled every time. He 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. And we shall overcome.”

There are a number of testimonies to the power of that speech. One is that Martin Luther King was listening to it in the living room of one of his supporters in Selma. His aides were there, and when Johnson spoke that line, they turned to look at Martin Luther King, and he was crying. And that was the only time they ever saw Martin Luther King cry. Another proof of the speech’s power I got from Busby and Goodwin: when the limousine was coming back to the White House and turned in to the White House gates, the turn was made in silence. The pickets were gone.

Excerpted from Working, by Robert A. Caro

Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law on August 6, 1965