The speech given by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 was a milestone in history, and took place just a week after there was a deadly racial outburst surrounding the issue of voting. President Johnson spoke to the people and he stated that citizens are indeed citizens, regardless of race, and should all have the same rights and privileges as one another, as states the constitution. The deadly violent outburst wasn’t caused by just any random racist white Americans, it was caused by police officers who did not want to allow African Americans to travel in order to vote – they did not believe that African Americans held the right to vote and were going to do anything to stop it from happening.
President Johnson brought the attention to a bill that he would be sending into the legislature. The bill was to strike down any voting restrictions in all elections, federal, state, and local which have been used to deny African Americans the right to vote. The bill will provide for citizens to be registered by officials of the United States Government, if the state officials refuse to register them. Johnson stated that “It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country”, which is what was happening. Regardless of race, culture, and beliefs, those people are Americans and deserve to have the same rights and privileges as white Americans do.
Overall, President Johnson, who was a white American, was standing up for the rights of the African Americans and believed that they should get the right to vote, and that the U.S. Constitution indeed fits for them also, as long as they are American citizens, regardless of skin color, they are granted the same rights as others. You would think that if the entire nation saw that their president, a white man, was to stand up for the rights of African Americans, the rest of the nation would follow through with him in order to do their best to be a “good citizen”.
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