(not too many meals missed here)
People cannot contribute to the nation if they are never taught to read or write, if their bodies are stunted from hunger, if their sickness goes untended, if their life is spent in hopeless poverty just drawing a welfare check. So we want to open the gates to opportunity. But we're also going to give all our people, black and white, the help that they need to walk through those gates.~ Lyndon B. Johnson ~
from his speech, "We Shall Overcome,"
given to Congress on March 15, 1965,
after racial violence broke out in
Selma, Alabama
Forty-five years and two weeks ago, he gave this speech. We have a long way to go to rectify the situation.
A step at at time.
May all your needs be met today.
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3 comments:
Yes. And I'm working hard to determine just what those are, and aren't.
I was a teenager during the Johnson era. I heard the phrase "Great Society," but I never understood what he was trying to do. To me he was the ugly man lifting his shirt and showing his surgical scar, or picking his dog up by the ears, and most especially, the man who replaced the beautiful John F. I wasn't paying attention to the politics, until Vietnam. In my young mind at that time, he gave us Vietnam.
Now I know better, of course, but I'm still learning all that this man tried to--and did--accomplish. Thank you for this quote. It shows a side I never noticed in those days. Only in later adulthood have I begun to understand how much Johnson, like Roosevelt before him, tried to give a hand up to the weakest among us.
Change comes slowly, slowly.
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