Obama speaks today at civil rights summit
HOUSTON — Barack Obama was 2 years old when Lyndon Baines Johnson sat in the East Room of the White House with Martin Luther King Jr. and signed the Civil Rights Act, putting an end to an America where schools, restaurants and water fountains were divided by race.
Half a century later, the first black man to become president is commemorating what’s been accomplished in his lifetime and recommitting the nation to fighting deep inequalities that remain.
Obama takes the podium this afternoon on the third and final day of a 50th anniversary summit that’s bringing four living presidents, civil rights leaders and cultural icons to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. The celebration comes as Johnson’s legacy, four decades removed from the end of the Vietnam War, is being revisited, with his prolific domestic achievements serving as a reminder of how little Washington seems to accomplish today.
For Obama, who was criticized by some African-Americans in his first term for doing too little to help minorities, the commemoration dovetails with a focus on inequality and economic opportunity that has become an early hallmark of Obama’s second term with modest success. Democrats have seized on the broader theme as their battle cry for the election year.
Lingering injustices in the U.S. notwithstanding, the significance of Obama’s participation in today’s ceremony isn’t lost on Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who withstood violence and arrest during the civil rights marches through Alabama in the mid-1960s.
“If somebody told me back in 1964 that a man of color would be president of the United States, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy, you’re out of your mind, you don’t even know what you’re talking about,”’ Lewis said in an interview. “When people say to me nothing has changed, that feels like, come and walk in my shoes.”
The summit kicked off Tuesday with remarks from former President Jimmy Carter, who lamented residual racial inequality. Former President Bill Clinton followed on Wednesday, riffing on immigration and voting rights while warning that a modern-day reluctance to work together threatened to “put us back in the dustbin of old history.”
Obama and first lady Michelle Obama were to fly to Austin in time to appear at the summit this afternoon.
“It’s probably the most important moment in the history of the library since LBJ died in 1973,” Mark Updegrove, the presidential library’s director, said of the 50th anniversary.
When Americans look back 200 years from now at the nation’s broader trajectory on civil rights, they’ll likely single out three major markers along the way, presidential historian and LBJ biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin said: Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Act and Obama’s election in 2007.
