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Primary source: President Lyndon B. Johnson, "To Fulfill These Rights," commencement address, 1965.
Caption: President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73) made this landmark speech in 1965 to students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically black institution, to delineate the tenets of his Great Society program.
In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope.
In our time change has come to this Nation, too. The American Negro, acting with impressive restraint, has peacefully protested and marched, entered the courtrooms and the seats of government, demanding a justice that has long been denied. The voice of the Negro was the call to action. But it is a tribute to America that, once aroused, the courts and the Congress, the President and most of the people, have been the allies of progress.
The voting rights bill will be the latest, and among the most important, in a long series of victories. But this victory—as Winston Churchill said of another triumph for freedom—"is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
That beginning is freedom. . . But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.
. . . We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result. . .
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President Lyndon B. Johnson, "Commencement Address at Howard University: 'To Fulfill These Rights,'" (4 June 1965); reprinted in The American Reader,, ed. Diane Ravitch (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 340.
Courtesy of Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum at the National Archives and Records Administration.
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