And We Shall Overcome

On March 15, 1965, Lyndon Johnson went before Congress to deliver the speech that would forever define his administration’s commitment to civil rights. In a nationally televised, nighttime address, the president called on Congress to pass the legislation that became the Voting Rights Act of 1965, banning such practices as the poll tax and literacy test, which in the past had allowed the states of the Deep South to keep blacks off their voter rolls. The changes in American political life that Johnson’s bill called for were sweeping, but the importance of his speech, like the importance of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, came from his insistence that America faced an issue ultimately religious in nature and inseparable from the values on which the country was founded.