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GED Social Studies – LBJ & Civil Rights
GED Social Studies · U.S. History & Civics
Civil Rights Era — LBJ & the Voting Rights Act (1965)
Question 1 of 8 Score: 0 / 0
Source 1 · President Lyndon B. Johnson — Speech to Joint Session of Congress, 1965
1I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. . . .
2At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. . . . So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.
3There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. . . .
4There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain.
5There is no moral issue. It is wrong, deadly wrong, to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.
6There is no issue of States' rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. . . .
7We cannot . . . refuse to protect the right of every American to vote in every election that he may desire to participate in. . . .
8But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. . . .
9Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
10And we shall overcome. . . .
11This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall overcome.
Source 2 · Senator Richard Russell of Georgia — Telegram to President Eisenhower, 1957
12. . . As a citizen, as a senator of the United States, and as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, I must vigorously protest the highhanded and illegal methods being employed by the federal government to force the co-mingling of the races in the public schools of the South.
13The Supreme Court, in flagrant abuse of its judicial authority, has reduced the Constitution to a scrap of paper and substituted raw power for established law.
14The armed might of the nation is now being used to destroy the rights of the states and to subordinate the will of the people of one section to the will of others. . . .
15I urge the people of the South to keep cool, be patient, and rely on the power of reason and the democratic processes to restore to them the rights that have been swept away. . . .

Johnson's Position

Federal government must guarantee voting rights. States' rights arguments are irrelevant — human rights take precedence. Selma's violence made federal action urgent.

Russell's Position

Federal intervention in Southern states is illegal and unconstitutional. States have the right to manage their own affairs without federal interference.

Point of View

How a speaker's personal experience, position, and historical context shape their perspective and argument.

States' Rights

The principle that state governments retain powers not specifically given to the federal government by the Constitution.

Selma, Alabama (1965)

Civil rights marchers were violently attacked by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, galvanizing national support for voting rights legislation.

Voting Rights Act (1965)

Federal law that banned discriminatory voting practices, especially literacy tests, that had prevented Black Americans from voting across the South.

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