On June 4, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave the commencement address at Howard University. “It is a tribute to America that, once aroused, the courts and the Congress, the President and most of the people, have been the allies of progress,” he said.56 But he also showed why decades of racial progress rhetoric had been shortsighted. Progress has primarily come for “a growing middle class minority,” while for poor Black people “the walls are rising and the gulf is widening,” Johnson pointed out. “Thirty-five years ago the rate of unemployment for Negroes and whites was about the same,” he
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