Lyndon B. Johnson

"The American Promise" address to a joint session of Congress, March 15, 1965 Lyndon B. Johnson spoke days after marchers were brutally assaulted at Selma, asking Congress for a voting rights law. A Southern president, speaking in the House chamber, takes up the movement's own anthem and declares, "And we shall overcome." Listen for the long passage about his first job, teaching poor Mexican-American children in Cotulla, Texas, which makes the speech more personal than its famous line suggests. Set it against Hamer's testimony from the year before, when the same president worked to keep her off television.