At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68

by Taylor Branch

Barriers to freedom were “tumbling down,” Johnson told the audience of five thousand at Howard University. “But freedom is not enough.” He foresaw a new and “more profound stage” of battle ahead—to seek “not just freedom but opportunity…not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.” To frame a visionary future, Johnson confronted the past with sweeping metaphors from warfare and sports. “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,” declared the President, “and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” Johnson described the remaining handicap as a virulent form of the “inherited, gateless poverty” that stubbornly plagued segments of the whole population, including white families in largest number. Its heritage and prospects were distinct by race, he observed, “for Negro poverty is not white poverty.” Captured Africans had landed in the status of products imported for servitude, uniquely by contrast with the self-selected immigrant waves of other new Americans. The non-African arrivals endured hardships far short of chattel slavery or segregation, said Johnson, and none yet faced such ostracism by race and color. He called the distinctive racial animus “a feeling whose dark intensity is matched by no other prejudice in our society.”