President Johnson is well known for the work he did a civil-rights advocate. One point that was not brought up in the first blog post that I found interesting was his mention that discrimination was an injustice to Americans who fight for our country. President Johnson said, “Our fathers believed that if this noble view of the rights of man was to flourish it must be rooted in democracy. This most basic right of all was the right to choose your own leaders. The history of this country in large measure is the history of expansion of the right to all of our people.” His words were so powerful because he wasn’t speaking to any one group of people, he was speaking to all people of our country—it is one of the privileges of living in the United States that we have a democracy, and that what we say as citizens is valued. To take that right away, or to weaken that right, based on race, religion or whatever reason is not what being an American about, and it is not what our soldiers fight to protect every day. President Johnson also said that, “The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or his color”. He kept driving home the point that our country was not built off from the idea that it was ok to discriminate for any reason. Our Constitution was written so that we would be a fair country to live in, and that everyone would have equal rights. People leave there countries to come to ours for a new start every day, and President Johnson was reminding our country of what we were founded on.
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