The nature of a silent agreement is that its terms are never spoken aloud. For this reason, there is no extant evidence to document why President Johnson gave the choir a “pass” on its racial politics in a historic moment suspended between the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, a moment when the president was engaged in one-to-one conversations about mounting tensions in Selma with Martin Luther King Jr. It seems plausible that the inaugural committee either did not recognize what it meant to invite a racially segregated choir to the nation’s ceremonial mainstage or did not find
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