The commencement speech Lyndon Johnson gave in front of the Howard University library in Washington on a June evening in 1965 has become a hallmark of civil rights oratory: You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
