Progressives Have Failed to Heed LBJ’s Final Warning – By Mark Updegrove (TIME) / Dec 12, 2022
Fifty years ago, on December 12, 1972, former President Lyndon Johnson gave what would be his final speech, six weeks before his death from a heart attack. He delivered the remarks at a civil rights symposium he had convened at his presidential library in Austin, Texas, where leaders from the Civil Rights Movement had come to mark the progress made over the last decade and to take a hard look at the racial injustice that continued to plague America.
Hardly the colossus he had been a few years before when he dominated Washington, the visibly frail LBJ was suffering from Angina. Doctors had urged him not to attend at all. But Johnson, popping nitroglycerin pills to keep chest pains at bay, had something to say about the inextricable nature of racial and economic justice—and the message he delivered resonates just as pressingly a half a century later.
While the former president spoke proudly of the advances in civil rights that had come during the course of his administration, he used his remarks not to advance his own legacy, nor to simply say that more needed to be done, but to say that he himself hadn’t done enough.
CONTINUE > https://time.com/6240424/progressives-failed-to-heed-lbjs-final-warning/
