On June 4th, 1965, President Johnson gave one of the most important yet forgotten speeches in American history. Following his lack of support, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, President Johnson was going to very well lose the election in 1968. Knowing this and knowing the fact that he needed to take the opportunity to address the inequity and inequality of black people in the United States. With this speech, he echoed the idea that the government must do more than just grant the freedoms to black people, but address the actual societal inequality and do what must be necessary to bring black people to an equal playing field.
49 years after President Johnson, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote the essay, "The Case for Reparations," a paper outlining the legal and moral basis for reparations for black Americans. But nearly half a century earlier, President Johnson attempted to acknowledge this level of inequality. In his address to the famous HBCU Howard University, Johnson outlined that "To end this equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough." Johnson saw how once you free a group of oppressed people, they don't know how to deal with and combat the societal inequity they must face once they aren't held down by legislation.
Besides further explaining and diving into this fundamental idea of prejudice in American society, he lists directly statistics about how black people has gotten significantly more poor as their fight for rights have gone on. He shares that, "In 1948 the 8 percent unemployment rate for Negro teenage boys was actually less than that of whites. By last year that rate had grown to 23 percent, as against 13 percent for whites unemployed." He also mentions the statistic that "the infant mortality of nonwhites in 1940 was 70 percent greater than whites. Twenty-two years later it was 90 percent greater." He goes lengths to list many statistics about this societal imbalance to state that America has failed black people.
Throughout his address, he is also clear to define that the difference between white and black poverty is "simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice." While some actions and causes have been the same between the two groups of poor people, black Americans dealing with the societal and past legal oppression that has been placed upon them, and it calls and forces them to be placed at a lower level than other Americans.
Ultimately, Lyndon B. Johnson's address is a lost source of optimism. He saw that this level of inequity was a dangerous issue that is responsible for the lack of opportunity for African Americans across the country. He saw that the government could do something more to preserve the continued growth from the CRM and to bring more support to black Americans because it is the right thing to do. His speech was a landmark in history that is lost, yet must be used as a reflection of how little our country really has come in fifty years and how so many of the issues he mentioned in that speech are still relevant today.
Sources:
VOF #168
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/06/04/for-howard-grads-lbjs-to-fulfill-these-rights-remarks-are-still-relevant-half-a-century-later/?utm_term=.03361ca30df4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcfAuodA2x8
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=27021
Noah -- This was honestly such an incredible post because it's great to see parts of history that are often overlooked. As we learn about the Civil Rights Movement, it is disheartening to see the abuse that those who participated in the movement had to experience at the expense of achieving what we now consider basic human rights. Johnson was taking a stand and voicing his support because he saw a need in the country and felt responsible to take it upon himself to voice what others were to fearful to speak about. President Johnson suffered a case of inadequacy after the assassination of JFK and felt that he had to prove himself as a worthy president. Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, a law that aimed to provide some aid to American Poverty which is relevant to when you mentioned the economic disparity with African Americans. Through his "Great Society" Social Programs, he helped with achieving voting rights for all African Americans (ridding of the literacy tests), achieved funding for public schools and helped save 9.1 million acres of forestland. He even instituted the Immigration Act that would end discriminate quotes surrounded by your ethnicity. Johnson was fundamental to America's history of segregation.
ReplyDeleteSources:
https://www.biography.com/people/lyndon-b-johnson-9356122
http://www.ushistory.org/us/56e.asp
Thank you for writing this post about President Johnson's speech which called for support for African Americans. One thing I noticed which was especially surprising was that in 1948 the unemployment rate for young black men was at 8% and was lower than that of whites. With the existence of Jim Crow laws and widespread segregation and discrimination against blacks, especially in the South, why would there be a lower percentage of blacks unable to find work? Another fact which interested me was how the unemployment rates rose so rapidly to 13 and 23 percent. With the Cold War essentially in full swing and the US building so many missiles and spending so much government money on defense, why would unemployment have gone up by this much?
ReplyDeleteShawn, to address your first question, that statistic must be due to the fact that there were simply way more young whites than blacks. Because there were more whites, it just meant it was more difficult for a larger percentage of them to find work, whereas there did not need to be as many employed blacks to make up a larger percentage of the black population. As for the second statistic about the rise in unemployment, it might have something to do with the Baby Boom and how the increase in population put strain on the labor market.
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