United States

Johnson provided dynamic and successful leadership at a time of national trauma, and in the election of 1964 he won a landslide victory over his Republican opponent, the conservative senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. More importantly, the Democrats gained 38 seats in the House of Representatives that year, enough to override the conservative bloc and enact a body of liberal social legislation.

With this clear mandate, Johnson submitted the most sweeping legislative program to Congress since the New Deal. He outlined his plan for achieving a “Great Society” in his 1965 State of the Union address, and over the next two years he persuaded Congress to approve most of his proposals. The Appalachian Regional Development Act provided aid for that economically depressed area. The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 established a Cabinet-level department to coordinate federal housing programs. Johnson’s Medicare bill fulfilled President Truman’s dream of providing health care for the aged. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 provided federal funding for public and private education below the college level. The Higher Education Act of 1965 provided scholarships for more than 140,000 needy students and authorized a National Teachers Corps. The Immigration Act of 1965 abolished the discriminatory national-origins quota system. The minimum wage was raised and its coverage extended in 1966. In 1967, social security pensions were raised and coverage expanded. The Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Area Redevelopment Act of 1966 provided aid to cities rebuilding blighted areas. Other measures dealt with mass transit, truth in packaging and lending, beautification, conservation, water and air quality, safety, and support for the arts.

Lyndon B. Johnson.© Bettmann/Corbis William L. O'Neill

The civil rights movement

The American civil rights movement came to a head under the Johnson administration. Many had seen the March on Washington in August 1963 as the apotheosis of the nonviolent struggle for civil rights. Some 200,000 people had come from all over the country to gather at the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Earlier in the decade, black and white Freedom Riders had been violently attacked when they rode through the South together on buses, hoping to provoke the federal government into enforcing its bans on segregation in interstate bus travel and in bus terminals, restrooms, and other facilities associated with interstate travel. With passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the civil rights movement saw many of its goals embodied in federal law.

Freedom Riders preparing to board a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, May 24, 1961.Perry Aycock/AP Images

Despite the Civil Rights Act, however, most African Americans in the South found it difficult to exercise their voting rights. In the summer of 1964, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which both had been instrumental in the Freedom Rides—and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), whose history reached back to W.E.B. Du Bois and the Niagara Movement—organized a massive effort to register voters in Mississippi. They also conducted “Freedom Schools” in which the philosophy of the civil rights movement, African American history, and leadership development were taught. A large number of white student activists from the North had joined this “Freedom Summer” effort, and, when one black and two white volunteers were killed, it made headlines nationally and greatly heightened awareness of the movement. These murders echoed, on a small scale, the violence visited upon countless African Americans—those who had participated in demonstrations and many who had not—during the previous decade, in forms that ranged from beatings by police to bombings of residences and black institutions. In 1965, mass demonstrations were held to protest the violence and other means used to prevent black voter registration. After a peaceful protest march was halted by police violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Johnson responded with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which abolished literacy tests and other voter restrictions and authorized federal intervention against voter discrimination. The subsequent rise in black voter registration ultimately transformed politics in the South.

Selma MarchSelma March.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Kenny Chmielewski