These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Johnson, leveraging the nation’s sympathy for the martyred president, pressed Congress for legislation. The next year, he signed the Economic Opportunity Act and the Food Stamp Act. He believed poverty would be eradicated within a decade. He had more ambitions, too. Wrangling congressmen like cattle, as ever, he secured passage of the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; gave the attorney general power to enforce desegregation; allowed for civil rights cases to move from state to federal courts; and expanded the Civil Rights Commission. “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long,” Johnson said, in a canny piece of political rhetoric.51 Both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X went to Washington to watch the congressional debates over the civil rights bill, a rare bringing together of the two men. Malcolm X had fallen out with the leadership of the Nation of Islam. He’d mocked the August 1963 March on Washington but, disobeying the explicit orders of Elijah Muhammad, had attended anyway. In December, he’d answered reporters who asked him to comment on Kennedy’s assassination—despite specific instructions from Muhammad not to speak on the subject. He said Kennedy’s assassination sounded to him like “chickens coming home to roost.” In the ensuing controversy, Muhammad had ordered Mal...