Many southern states used so-called literacy tests as a way to deny blacks the right to vote.
LYNDON JOHNSON: “The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent. And if he persists and, if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his middle name, or because he abbreviated a word on the application.
President Johnson talks with civil rights leaders, from left, Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, Dr. Martin Luther King Junior and Whitney Young at the White House in January 1964
“And if he manages to fill out an application, he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex provisions of state law.
And even a college degree cannot">cannot be used to prove that he
can
read and write.”
The Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-five said states could not prevent citizens from voting just because they could not read very well.
The nineteen sixty-eight law barred discrimination against blacks in housing.
Johnson was from the South. That -- and his ability to persuade people -- helped him get southern conservatives in Congress to support the civil rights legislation.
He also had other ideas for a better America. He called his plan the Great Society. He talked about it in a speech at the University of Michigan:
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