Give Us the Ballot CRA Newsreel 7/4/64 Now, in This Summer of 1964

Home , Give Us the Ballot, Harry McPherson, Unita Blackwell

CRA Newsreel 7/4/64 Now, in this summer of 1964, the Civil Rights Bill is the law of the land.

Congress passes the most sweeping Civil Rights Bill ever to be written into the law and thus reaffirms the conception of equality => for all men that began with Lincoln and the Civil War 100 years ago.

July 2nd, 1964, was a good day for Lyndon Johnson.

Before an audience of legislators and civil rights leaders who have labored long and hard for passage of the bill, President Johnson calls for all Americans to back what he calls a turning point in history.

The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was indeed a turning point in the country's long and bloody struggle for racial justice, and a hard-won feather in LBJ's cap.

But important as it was, for the civil rights movement, it was only a beginning.

Rhonda Williams African-Americans were under no illusion that the Civil Rights Act was going to be sufficient.

Rhonda Y. Williams teaches American History at Vanderbilt University.

Williams For them, it was not merely about integration -- about being able to sit in a restaurant, to ride on a bus, to get an equal education. It was also about how one could access political power to challenge the white political systems in the South, to make sure that African-Americans had the vote, that they had the ability in the political realm to make decisions about who represented them. This is something that Lyndon Baines Johnson, coming off of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, understood.

In fact, LBJ had understood it for a long time.

Humphrey 3 19:40 Johnson used to tell me just simply this. He'd say, "Let me tell you something, Hubert. All this civil rights talk," he said. "The thing that we've got to do is get those blacks the right to vote.

Hubert Humphrey, LBJ's vice president, had served with Johnson in the Senate in the 50's.

Humphrey 3

He'd say, "Now you fellows are trying to get them public accommodations. You want them to ride in a bus," he said, but what they need is the vote." He said, "That's what I'm gonna get 'em. When they get the vote power, they got the power."

But understanding this idea was one thing, and acting on it was quite another.

Johnson was the most powerful majority leader of modern times. But as long as southern segregationists maintained their iron grip on key senate committees, serious voting rights reform was simply not in the cards.

And LBJ was never one for tilting at windmills.

Virginia Durr As a bill would come up in the Senate, Lyndon was always on the other side.

Virginia Durr and her husband were friends of the Johnsons in LBJ's senate days, and members of the small band of southern whites actively working for civil rights in the fifties.

Virginia Durr I would write him very indignant letters, and then when I saw him, he'd say, ''Why, Honey, you know I'm for you, I'm with you, but you just ain't got the votes." Now this is the essence of Lyndon's political philosophy. He's not going to be for you until you've got the votes because he thinks that just wasting your breath and your energy and your time in a hopeless cause doesn't do very much good. He's a very practical politician.

Very practical, and very ambitious.

McPherson 6 Most people who had any interest in Lyndon Johnson--and that was a lot of people seemed to understand what he was trying to do.

Harry McPherson was a senior Johnson aide and speechwriter from the Senate days on.

McPherson 6 To advance himself as a national political figure, he had to be at least open and relatively friendly toward the civil rights forces, at the same time, he had been hoisted into a position of leadership in the Democratic Party by southerners. His effectiveness in the Senate and hence in the country rested on his ability to make it work on the central riveting question of the day, which was certainly, in the domestic field, civil rights.

On one occasion, in 1957, Johnson had an unexpected opportunity to "make it work," on a bill proposed by President Eisenhower, to help southern blacks gain access to the ballot box.

The bill was not all that strong to begin with, but Johnson gave it his all.

McPherson 6 It was a long debate, the filibusters, and then the great struggle over the passage of that bill, which was the first civil rights bill in eighty years.

Harry McPherson watched LBJ struggle to put the votes together, one-by-one, across a cavernous divide.

McPherson 1 I heard him at one end of the cloakroom talking to Paul Douglas one day...

Paul Douglas was an influential liberal Senator from Illinois.

McPherson 1 He’s saying "Paul, the amendment to the Civil Rights Bill is coming up and I need your support." And he went to the other end of the room and was talking to Sam Ervin and said Sam, “why don’t you all let this [bleep] bill pass?”

The word we just bleeped is the n word.

McPherson 1 That language was not the language that he would ever employ later on, and I've never heard him use the word. But at that time he was down in the trenches with guys who were determined not to let the bill pass, and he was doing his damnedest to bring them around. He warned them that much worse would come unless they would pass this modest bill, and he would tell some of the Northerners that if they would only let this modest bill go through, they would get a better bill later. So he was playing it out of both sides.

In the end, LBJ managed to line up the votes for passage, but the bill that finally made it through was largely stripped of enforcement muscle -- a condition demanded by opponents in exchange for their support.

Still, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was a small step forward, and an early indication that Lyndon Johnson might be more than the typical southern obstructionist that many had supposed.

Humphrey 3 I could not be for the compromises that he wanted at that stage.

This again is Hubert Humphrey.

Humphrey 3

But it told me one thing above all. First of all, I knew he was sincere. It was not just parliamentary tactics. He and I talked many times about it, and I knew that he was not a segregationist. I knew he didn't want to classify himself in those days as a Southerner.

McPherson 6 Had he been a passionate southern liberal on the race question he would have won the tremendous affection of a very small group of people in the North and been utterly ineffectual in the Senate. Had he been merely smooth and content to bargain out the lowest common denominator as some of his predecessors he would have been inconsequential. But he was different, and you could watch him and you knew that he was different, that he wanted a bunch of things done for poor people, wanted the government to be in there, had that New Deal streak, but without I suspect any huge agenda in his own head at the time. He was offended by the injustices visited on blacks, no doubt about that. And he had no patience with that racism. But it took a long time to kind of convert it, I think, into the agenda of the Great Society legislation, all that big agenda I don't think was really burning in him at the time.

It would be another seven years before the breakthrough battle on voting rights was joined in earnest. When the moment came, the forces arrayed on the other side were as powerful and deeply entrenched as ever.

But by then, LBJ had the power of the presidency going for him, and just as important, a grassroots movement that would keep his feet to the fire.

WH 7671 Reuther 5/14/65 I’m not going to be president long, but while I am president, brother, I’m going to take care of voting in this country, and everybody’s going to be able to vote.”

I’m Melody Barnes. And from PRX this is LBJ and the Great Society.

SERIES BUTTON

Episode Five: Give Us the Ballot

--- PRE-ROLL BREAK ---

WH6239 MLK ll/5/64 K: Hello? J: Doctor? MLK: yes, Mr. President! J: Well I just wanted to tell you...

It's November 5th, 1964 -- just two days after his landslide win over Barry Goldwater -- and LBJ is working the phones from his Texas ranch.

WH6239 MLK ll/5/64 Hubert Humphrey left here about 30 minutes ago, and I still haven’t shaved or got off my bathrobe.

Now elected in his own right, Johnson has a lot of people to thank, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is among the first.

WH6239 MLK J: I thought I’d call half a dozen or so folks and tell them how much I appreciated their confidence, and what a good job I thought they’d done, and how many more now we’ve got to help get out of their bondage. MLK: Yes, well, we’re certainly all very happy about the outcome, it was just such a great victory. And I certainly appreciate your calling. We have some bright days ahead, I think.

As is generally the case on their calls, the tone is formal, almost scripted.

Still, however little may connect them personally, deep common interests have brought them together.

Rhonda Williams Martin Luther King recognized the political skill of Lyndon Baines Johnson, approached him with the hope that he would see the moral conscience of the nation needed leadership, that someone had to be the statesman, and lead the nation on a new path.

This again is Vanderbilt historian Rhonda Y. Williams.

Rhonda Williams And Lyndon Baines Johnson saw himself as someone who could provide that statesmanship, who cared about and articulated the commitment to carry forth the civil rights agenda begun under John F. Kennedy.

The previous year, Johnson and King had worked closely together in support of the Civil Rights Act. Its passage, over fierce opposition in the Congress, was testament to the effectiveness of that alliance.

For Johnson, that bill had been a last piece of unfinished business from the Kennedy years. Now he was ready to move on his own agenda. And voting rights was high on the list.

Louis Martin He had a feeling, which I shared, that once you gave that black vote to those millions in the South who had not been able to vote, you would give them a tool with which they could create a new era for themselves.

Louis Martin was the highest-ranking person of color among Johnson's White House staff.

Louis Martin And he was convinced that that political route would ultimately enable blacks to reach a new degree of equality and freedom in the South and have an impact on the Congress and everywhere else.

As eager as LBJ was to move on this issue, the civil rights movement was more eager still.

In theory, the right to vote (at least for men) had been the law of the land for nearly a century, enshrined in the constitution by the Fifteenth Amendment after the Civil War.

In practice, a combination of Jim Crow laws, literacy tests, poll taxes, and intimidation had systematically, and often violently, subverted that right throughout the South, almost from the beginning.

Andrew Young UNC That '64 Civil Rights Act, while it changed traditions and customs, didn't do anything to challenge the power relationships in the South.

This is Andrew Young, an aide to Dr King, recalling his early days as an activist and organizer in rural Georgia.

Andrew Young UNC Voting was understood early as a life-and-death issue. In '55, I went to Thomasville, Georgia, and one of the first things I did there as the pastor of a little church was try to organize a voter registration drive. And in that town, a black man had tried to register. And he was lassoed on the courthouse steps, and tied to the back of a pickup truck, and dragged around the black community until he was dead. So, I mean, that's what it was like.

With passage of the '64 act, the civil rights movement could point to hard-won gains on integration. From buses to lunch counters to public accommodations, deeply entrenched segregationist practices began to give way. Control of the ballot box was the Old South’s last stand. < >

Unita Blackwell (WashU) It wasn't easy to get people to come out to go and try to register to vote.

Like Andrew Young, the revered activist Unita Blackwell had got her start encouraging her neighbors to register to vote, in her case in rural Mississippi.

Blackwell The first time that we went, we had a circle around the courthouse of pickup trucks and rifles and white people getting ready to stop us from going into the courthouse. And we stayed in the courthouse, you know, all day long trying to get registered to vote. And only four people got in that whole day.

Victoria Adams (WashU) The registrar was all powerful really.

Victoria Adams was another frontline activist in the battle for the vote.

Adams There was nothing said you had to be able to read or write, nothing like that to be a registrar, but all that to become a registered voter. And so, a PhD could be denied the right to become a registered voter by a registrar who didn’t finish elementary school …

Stokely Carmichael [WashU] The people could see on their daily lives the relationship of the vote to the political subjugation which they were forced to endure.

Stokely Carmichael was a leader of SNCC -- the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee -- and a central player in the Civil Rights movement.

Stokely Carmichael Since they had no political power they couldn’t get their streets paved. They had nothing to say about the type of schools their children went to. They had absolutely nothing to say about the taxes. I mean they had absolutely nothing to say about anything that affected their lives. So instinctively they could see the necessity of the vote.

And so could LBJ, who'd been spoiling for this fight for a long time. Only now, it appeared, he was ready and able to do something about it.

-- MID-ROLL BREAK --

WH2808 Katzenbach Operator: Mr. Katzenbach on line two.

In December ’64, just after the election, Johnson directed his deputy attorney general, Nick Katzenbach, to begin drafting a voting rights bill. As usual, the president's approach was to go for broke.

WH6611 [12/14/64] J: And try to figure out what I can do to get 100 percent of the people to vote. Our goal wants to be 100 percent. NK: Mm-hmm. J: I basically believe that if we can have a simple, effective method of getting them registered—now, if the state laws are too high and they disqualify a bunch of them, maybe we can go into the Supreme Court and get them held unconstitutional. Let's find some way... NK: That’s a state problem, you know, under the Constitution. J: Yes, sir. That’s right. I know that. Now, how can we beat it?

"How can we beat it" was the big question. Under the Constitution, the only recourse on voting rights abuse was through the federal courts.

The Justice Department had been pursuing that course for some time, but didn’t have much to show for it.

Katzenbach 1 It was an impossible system of law enforcement.

This is Nick Katzenbach.

Katzenbach 1 People obviously were qualified to vote who were being turned down; then we had to bring a lawsuit; then we had to go through all the appeals and another election would go by. It just took forever.

For Lyndon Johnson, forever wasn't an option. Justice lawyers began working on a legislative remedy to replace the cumbersome case-by-case litigation the department had been using up to that time.

Ramsey Clark, a deputy attorney general, was in charge of writing the bill.

Clark 2 We were drafting all that winter. It's a hard thing for lawyers because we're trained to think in terms of due process and deliberation. It reflected a judgment that the game had been played too long and now something decisive had to be done. But we were really literally swept up in this insistence for some reform in this area and just carried along by the civil rights movement and the concern of the country.

MLK/Selma [AP Archive] 5:45 If it is necessary, we are willing, and must be willing, to go to jail by the thousands in Alabama [applause].

On January 3rd, just two weeks after Katzenbach started work on a bill, Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council launched a Voting Rights campaign in Selma, Alabama.

MLK/Selma Give us the ballot. For we know that the vote is the key to democratic government.

For three years, the black community in Selma had been struggling to mount a voter registration drive. As elsewhere in the deep south, their efforts had gotten almost nowhere.

With Dr. King's arrival, all that changed. His speech that night was a galvanizing call to arms.

MLK/Selma We are ready now to march on ballot boxes. Until every situation that keeps us down at the bottom of the economic ladder is changed, we are ready to march on ballot boxes.

As the Selma campaign began to attract national attention, the president reached out to Dr. King for help in building public support for the voting rights bill.

WH6736 MLK 1/15/65 I think it’s very important that we take the position that every person born in this country, when they reach a certain age, that he have a right to vote, just like he has a right to fight, and that we just extend it whether it’s a Negro, or whether it’s a Mexican, or who it is.

Never mind that King is the most admired black leader of his time, and has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. For LBJ, a former schoolteacher, the Rev. King is just another student in need of instruction.

WH6736 MLK J: I think that you can contribute a great deal by getting your leaders and you, yourself, taking very simple examples of discrimination where a man’s got to memorize Longfellow, or whether he’s got to quote the first ten amendments. And if we can just repeat and repeat and repeat—I don’t want to follow Hitler, but he had a idea— that if you just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn’t true, why, people accept it. Well, now, this is true, and if you can find the worst condition that you run into in Alabama, Mississippi, or South Carolina, and get it on radio, and get it on television, pretty soon the fellow that didn’t do anything but drive a tractor, he’ll say, “Well, that’s not right, that’s not fair.” And then that will help us on what we’re gonna shove through in the end. And if we do that, it’ll be the greatest breakthrough of anything, not even excepting this ‘64 act -- I think the greatest achievement of my administration, was the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But I think this will be bigger.

Now at this point, Johnson appears to be all in on voting rights. But there’s a catch -- the president has a slew of other bills already in the pipeline.

Bumping voting rights to the front of the line, he fears, will put these other bills in jeopardy.

So he's pressing King, hard, to hold off on the vote issue, and support the rest of the Great Society program first.

WH6736 MLK 1/15/65 I’ll tell you what our problem is: We’ve got to try . . . with every force at our command, to get these education bills that go to those people under $2,000 a year income. A billion and a half, and this poverty, that’s a billion and a half, and this health, that’s going to be 900 million next year. We’ve got to get them passed before the vicious forces concentrate and block them. Now, if we can get that and we can get our Medicare—we ought to get that by February. Then we’ve got to come up with the . . . qualification of the voters.

“Qualification” is Johnson’s shorthand for voter registration.

WH6736 And I’ve talked to the Attorney General, and I’ve got them working on it. I don’t want to start off with that because I wouldn’t get anything else.

Johnson's pitch to King is not subtle.

WH6736 J: I don’t think you have any conception of the proportion of assistance that comes to your people in these bills. I haven’t pointed that out. I haven’t stressed it. You can figure out, though, what $8 billion in education and what $1 billion in health and what a billion and a half in poverty would do if it goes to people who earn less than $2,000 a year. Now, you know who earns less than 2,000, don’t you? [chuckles] So that’s what we got to do now, and you get in here and help us.

LBJ’s powers of persuasion are legendary, but in this instance, they’re not enough. Again, Professor Rhonda Y. Williams.

Rhonda Williams African-Americans who engaged in this fight for the suffrage don't care if Lyndon Baines Johnson is ready or not. They are ready. There's an indictment of the slowness, of the gradualism around this issue of the vote. They're like, "No, we need to fight this battle now. People are dying." And so they're amping up the tension.

Through January, that battle escalated on the streets of Selma. The raw power of the segregationist south was arrayed against them, but the organizers had a strategy, honed over countless earlier campaigns.

Rhonda Williams Martin Luther King knew that one of the ways to prick the conscience of America was to show the world the viciousness and brutality that they were facing at the hands of not only white citizens but white police officers.

Sheriff Clark Do you have any business in the courthouse?

CTV This is not a local problem. This is a national problem. You can't keep anyone in the United States from voting without hurting the rights of all other citizens. Democracy's built on this.

This is the Reverend C.T. Vivian. CTV We’re willing to be beaten for democracy, and you misuse democracy in the streets. You beat people bloody in order that they will not have the privilege to vote. // We’ve come to register to vote.

Rhonda Williams The police responded spectacularly. The media was there to film it, and the world began to see it in ways that were shocking to the eyes and shocking to the conscience.

NBC News Tape

By early February, Dr. King and his group had effectively seized control of the narrative. On Feb. 5th, Nick Katzenbach, now Attorney General, called the president to report, with some exasperation, on the latest developments.

WH6804 1/5/65. Katzenbach Demonstrations are still continuing down in Selma and about 400 schoolkids were arrested just a little while ago for singing in front of the courthouse down there. They’ve gotten about everything they wanted, but they’re still demonstrating. And they’ve got these kids so worked up there, you know, that they don’t, I suppose, want to lose the momentum. They’ve lost their own judgment about it, but maybe they’ll calm down.

Selma Newsreel: This is an unlawful assembly. You are ordered to disperse. This march will not continue...

On Sunday, March 7th, the conflict came to a head. 600 demonstrators, attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery, were brutally attacked by Alabama state troopers.

Boynton (WashU) The Edmund Pettis Bridge spans the Alabama River. When we got across the Edmund Pettis bridge, there was a wall of officers, and we were told to stop.

Amelia Boynton Robinson was a much admired civil rights activist and a leader of the Selma march.

Boynton (WashU) Josiah Williams who was at the head said, “May I say something to say?” And through the bullhorn, “No, you cannot have anything to say. Charge on them men.” They came upon us and started beating us with their nightsticks. They tried to run the horses over some of them and the horses would not step on them. They started gassing us.

“Bloody Sunday,” as this day came to be called, would prove to be a crucial turning point in the civil rights struggle.

Andrew Young (WashU) Dr. King said you had to bring the violence in the system to the surface. See, it's one thing to be brutalized by yourself on a dark night when nothing can be done about it. Most folk there, in that march, had been abused and brutalized, at some time or other, by the police, verbally if not physically. But when you're brutalized together, on national television, something in the society is going to change.

And something did change. With his own timetable overtaken by events, Johnson swiftly set a new course.

Newsreel- AP Today in History Selma March President Johnson addresses a joint session of Congress to push a voting rights bill aimed at ending discrimination.

J speech Mr. Speaker, members of the Congress. I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.

Goodwin C-SPAN It's a speech that I drafted and had to draft, really, in one day, < > beginning the morning that it was to be delivered < > to that evening at 8:00, when it was to be given to congress, the last pages going on the teleprompter at about 6:00 pm.

Richard Goodwin, the president's chief speechwriter, recalled the day in a speech of his own, many years later.

Goodwin C-SPAN I went up with him in the car, and I stood in the well of the house, and heard him begin and you may even remember, it says, "A time < > history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom >>

J speech A time 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.

Twenty-one minutes in to the speech came the moment that the country would remember.

Goodwin C-SPAN Looking straight out at his audience, Johnson proclaimed, "Their cause must be our cause too. It is not just Negroes, but it is all of us,

J speech who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice, and we shall overcome.

Goodwin C-SPAN Speechwriting [over applause] It was an instant of silence and then the gradually apprehended realization that the President had adopted as his own rallying cry, the anthem of black protest. Almost the entire chamber of congress, floor and gallery together, were standing, applauding and shouting, some stomping their feet. Tears rolled down the cheeks of Senator Mansfield of Montana. Standing there, I felt it too. God how I loved Lyndon Johnson, at that moment.

The "We Shall Overcome speech," as it would come to be called, and the Voting Rights Act which followed from it, may well have been Lyndon Johnson's finest hour -- the jewel in the Great Society crown.

But it's important to remember, as Johnson was at pains to point out that night, that he didn't do it alone.

LBJ 3/15/65 The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this Nation. He has called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery, and his faith in American democracy. [applause]

Johnson’s acknowledgement was no overstatement. The Voting Rights Act was a joint effort, driven as much by forces outside the White House as by the president himself.

Indeed, without the uncommon courage and resolve of the civil rights movement, it’s doubtful the bill would ever have passed.

The alliance forged between the movement and President Johnson was a shaky affair, often strained to the breaking point.

But somehow it held -- long enough, anyway, to produce what is by nearly every account the most transformative piece of civil rights legislation in American history.

C.T. Vivian It was a victory like none other.

This again is C.T. Vivian, who had risked his life, time and again, on the front lines in Selma.

C.T. Vivian It was an affirmation of the movement. It guaranteed us as much as anything could that we would vote and that millions of people in the South would have a chance to be involved in their own destiny. It was really the final breakup of segregation as we knew it, in the old South.

Newsreel J signing J: Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield.

On August 6, 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

J: Today, we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds.

Newsreel So far, the strongest link in the chain which the president calls the Great Society, the voting bill promises a profound effect on the future politics of the entire nation.

Rhonda Williams It was a major celebratory moment. Martin Luther King was there for the signing. Amelia Boynton who had been beaten and gassed and left for dead in Selma, Alabama was there for the signing as well as many others. It was a profound, remarkable time of hope and possibility and actual achievement for African Americans in their struggle for the suffrage. And that opportunity does translate into real change because more African Americans are elected to political office on the local, state, and national level. And yet, there is still intense caution and reticence about how it will be implemented to actually secure the right to vote to make it real as opposed to see it as something on a piece of paper.

The voting rights act would in fact have a profound effect on the nation’s politics, as LBJ predicted, but it would not happen overnight or without a great deal more struggle.

KKK rally My fellow white Mississippians Concerning this Voting Rights Bill—lt's a law now. I … know it is, because LBJ done signed it. That makes it law. But that doesn't mean that I like it a bit. And it doesn't mean that I'm not going to do everything in my power to repeal it.

While some of the resistance came from openly extremist groups, like the Klan, obstacles to black voting often took more subtle forms as well.

Rhonda Williams It doesn't just include the KKK. It includes every day white citizens who want to maintain segregation and feel that African-Americans are inherently inferior, and shouldn't have the right to exercise the vote.

So, there's still a struggle to gain the actual franchise in their place of voting. In fact, this is one of the critiques that King and others have.

By the time Dr. King was assassinated in April ‘68, he had grown disillusioned with the pace of progress at home and had publicly broken with the president over the war in Vietnam.

Rhonda Williams In an article that was published posthumously by Martin Luther King in Playboy, it's called “A Testament of Hope”, King talks about how there were 900 counties that needed federal referees to ensure that African Americans were not being impeded in their ability to register to vote, and that only 58 counties had them. He acknowledges in this piece LBJ's skills as a legislator and as an executive. And yet, King says, This was not enough. We need the government actually helping to restructure society, not just opening up pathways in a society whose structures will not change. I think that's really important.

Important, and prescient, considering where we find ourselves today.

Rhonda Williams There are things that are going on now in the Supreme Court, redistricting, voter suppression, things are happening that are undermining what was landmark legislation in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The past is never past. The past is always with us in the present unless we pay attention to it and shepherd it and protect it and fight for it, then we're going to lose the gains that were won through hard fought battles, blood, death, broken lives, trauma, and the struggle of people really trying to make a change in society.

In our next and final installment, we’ll look at one of the most enduring programs of the Great Society -- Head Start -- and at the continuing argument over LBJ’s impact on American life.

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