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In early 1965 Lyndon Johnson was well aware that his landslide presidential victory and the large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress offered an unusual opportunity for governmental action. In a speech in December of 1964 he said: "Great social change tends to come rapidly in periods of intense activity before the impulse slows. I believe we are in the midst of such a period of change."
In the field of civil rights, one of the remaining arenas for action and change was voting rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1960had dealt with voting problems for blacks in the South, but the judicial solutions proposed had not been effective in overcoming state literacy tests that were administered in such a way that blacks could not pass them and gain the ballot. President Johnson pledged in his State of the Union address in January of 1965 that he would call on Congress to eliminate "all barriers to the right to vote." He repeated this promise of voting rights legislation to Martin Luther King, Jr., when the now-renowned civil rights leader visited Johnson at the White House in early February of 1965.
On January 18, 1965, King had begun a series of voting rights demonstrations in Selma, Alabama. Dallas County, where Selma was located, had more black citizens than white citizens, but 9,700 whites were registered to vote compared to only 325 blacks. When King staged a march on the county courthouse in Selma, he and 2,000 other blacks were jailed for "parading without a permit." Later, when King attempted to lead a march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery, he and his fellow marchers were confronted by Alabama state troopers as they walked across the Alabama River highway bridge leading out of Selma.
Once again the television sets and front-page newspaper photographs of America showed white state troopers attacking civil rights demonstrators. The state police, many of them mounted on horseback, fired tear gas at the marchers and then beat them back with clubs. The demonstrators, almost all of them black, were chased, bleeding and limping, all the way to their headquarters church in Selma. Millions of Americans were outraged, and civil rights advocates from throughout the North and the West, both black and white, began to pour into Selma to support Martin Luther King and his voting rights campaign.
President Lyndon Johnson seized the opportunity presented by Selma to introduce his proposed voting rights bill to both Congress and the country. Addressing the Senate and the House of Representatives meeting together at a special evening session, Johnson said situations such as the one in Selma could not be allowed to continue. He ended his speech with the title of the civil rights marchers' hymn, "We Shall Overcome."
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