In August we observe the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.  The bill, one of the greatest achievements of LBJ’s term, is celebrated for making the suffrage a reality for millions of black voters.

Many people were surprised that Johnson turned out to be so progressive on the issue of race.  He was, after all, from east Texas, the most “southern” part of the state, and at least one of his ancestors owned slaves before the Civil War.  But Johnson was born in 1908, and his political hero was Franklin Roosevelt.  His views on race had evolved over his many years in Washington, D.C., and by the early 1960s, he was probably more egalitarian than most Democrats, whatever the region.

His thoughts on race are evident in a speech he made at Gettysburg on Memorial Day, 1963, while he was still vice president.  The speech is often overlooked, perhaps because it lacks the eloquence of Abraham Lincoln’s famous address at the same location in 1863.  It was also longer than Lincoln’s short, pithy speech.  But Johnson made the case that the time had come to act on civil rights legislation. In the speech, he observed, “‘The Negro says, ‘Now.’ Others say, ‘Never.’ The voice of responsible Americans–the voice of those who died here and the great man who spoke here–their voices say, ‘Together.’ There is no other way.”

It took all of LBJ’s legendary powers of persuasion to make it happen, but the bill passed a little over two years later.

Joan E. Cashin received her doctorate from Harvard University, and she is an associate professor of American history at Ohio State University.  She is the author of A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier (1991) and First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis’s Civil War (2006) and the editor of Our Common Affairs: Texts from Women in the Old South (1996) and The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War (2002).  She is currently working on a book on the civilian population in the South during the Civil War.