S2 Ep 5 - Give Us the Ballot
Nixon at War
PRX
4.8 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 3 March 2020
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
By his own account the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was Lyndon Johnson’s greatest achievement – the jewel in the crown of the Great Society, and widely considered the most effective piece of civil rights legislation in American history. This episode focuses on the extraordinarily eventful eight-month period — January to August 1965 — when the battle for Voting Rights was joined and ultimately fought to a successful conclusion. The outcome was hard won, and in doubt up until the last frantic weeks of negotiation and maneuvering in the wake of the bloody protests in Selma, Alabama. We hear from historian Rhonda Y. Williams, the John L. Seigenthaler Chair in American History at Vanderbilt University, about the complex and precarious alliance forged between the President on the inside, and Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement on the outside.
Includes interview excerpts from Washington University Libraries, drawn from the Henry Hampton Collection. This digitized resource includes complete video interviews with Civil Rights Movement leaders, recorded for the influential and award-winning documentary film, Eyes on the Prize.
Learn more at LBJsGreatSociety.org.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Now, in this summer of 1964, the Civil Rights Bill is the law of the land. |
| 0:10.0 | Congress passes the most sweeping civil rights bill ever to be written into the law. |
| 0:15.0 | July 2nd, 1964 was a good day for Lyndon Johnson. |
| 0:19.0 | Before an audience of legislators and civil rights leaders who had |
| 0:22.4 | labored long and hard for passage of the bill, President Johnson calls for all Americans to back what |
| 0:28.5 | 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 one feather in LBJ's cap. |
| 0:46.3 | But important as it was, for the Civil Rights Movement, it was only a beginning. |
| 0:51.3 | African Americans were under no illusion that the Civil Rights Act |
| 0:57.0 | was going to be sufficient. |
| 1:00.0 | Rhonda W. Williams teaches American history at Vanderbilt University. |
| 1:05.0 | For them it was not merely about integration. It was about being able to sit in a restaurant, |
| 1:10.0 | ride on a bus, get an equal education. |
| 1:13.6 | But it was also about how one could access political power to challenge the white political systems in the South, |
| 1:21.6 | to make sure that African Americans had the vote, that they had the ability in the political realm to make decisions about |
| 1:29.6 | who represented them. |
| 1:31.5 | This is something that Lyndon Baines Johnson, coming off of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, |
| 1:38.7 | understood. |
| 1:41.2 | In fact, LBJ had understood it for a long time. |
| 1:45.3 | Johnson used to tell me just simply this. |
| 1:47.2 | He'd say, let me tell you something, Hubert. |
| 1:49.2 | All this civil rights talk. |
| 1:50.8 | He said, the thing that we've got to do is get those blacks the right to vote. |
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