LBJ's Forgotten Message on Freedom
“Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society…”
Post 6: 11 February 2025
I have been writing, these past few weeks, about freedom and how we need to change the way we think about it. Today, I want to finish up this sequence of posts by recalling what President Johnson had to say on the subject since I think he mostly agrees with me.
LBJ made some mistakes. But he also got a lot right. Today, I want to remember the message he delivered to the 1965 graduating class of Howard University. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had recently passed and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was progressing through Congress. President Johnson was already looking forward. He said that passing these historic bills did not complete the project of Civil Rights; they marked only the “end of the beginning.”
He continued:
Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society--to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.
But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.
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.
This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities--physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness.
LBJ, Howard University, June 04, 1965
Here’s a clip of the speech:
https://texasarchive.org/2010_00081?b=699&e=806
My only quibble with Johnson’s message is the transition sentence “Freedom is not enough.” To me, this contradicts the opening point that freedom consists of sharing “fully and equally, in American society.” Full membership is freedom, at least in a “free” society of equals. What I’d rather he said was something like, “Freedom is more than just these formal rights.” Johnson wants to add “opportunity” to freedom, implicitly accepting the traditional liberal idea that freedom is (only) a set of formal rights. I think that opportunity is freedom. With that fairly minor semantic correction, I say, good job Mr. President.
Next Post: Three Political Languages? (18 February 2025)
<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>
Notes
The video clip is available from the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (https://texasarchive.org/ ). See the direct link in the post.
Transcript from The American Presidency Project: Lyndon B. Johnson, Commencement Address at Howard University (June 4 1965): "To Fulfill These Rights." Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/241312