Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, June 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed what would be his final major piece of domestic legislation.

And it is a controversial one. It's an omnibus crime bill,

which even he admitted he was signing because it contained, quote, more good than bad.

And I guess this part of me that says that should be lauded, that any legislator should be honest

that most big bills contain a mix of good and bad, but the nature of that mix says a lot

about where the politics of crime was by

1968 and where LBJ was. You can see this bill is marking a clear shift away from some of the

war on poverty, grassroots civil rights gains of the mid-60s to, and we've discussed us on the show

a little bit, to a little bit of a backlash of sorts in the later part of the decade, a crackdown.

And of course, we now can see how the war on poverty shifted to the war on crime or how those became divergent and sometimes even opposing efforts as we moved into the 70s and the 80s.

A lot of those seeds were planted in this moment with this big

omnibus crime bill. So here to discuss the last of LBJ's big, not so beautiful bills.

As always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wesley. Hello there.

Hello, Jody. Hey there. Can I just say that we've done enough episodes of this show where when you find yourself

uttering the three-word phrase omnibus crime bill.

Maybe not so great things are in store.

Oh, no.

Yes.

And, you know, we'll get into what's in the bill itself.

I want to offer just a little bit of that context.

I hinted at it in the

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