YOUR RIGHT TO VOTE HAS A TARGET ON ITS BACK

As we reach the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the same forces that made it necessary in the first place are tearing it down. Next, they're coming for all of us.

- CHARLES P. PIERCE

President Lyndon B. Johnson celebrates with Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil-rights leaders after signing the Voting Rights Act into law in August 1965.

SIXTY YEARS AGO THIS past March, President Lyndon B. Johnson, of the Johnsons of Gillespie County in Texas, rose to speak at a joint session of the United States Congress. In his hand was a speech crafted by aide Richard Goodwin that was meant to end history—or at least a dark and painful chapter of it. The oration declared the death of a Democratic Party that had allied itself with the shambles of the slavery system left standing after the Civil War. It promised fulfillment of one lost guarantee of Reconstruction. It was a balm to those mourning the recently martyred, and a promise of a better day for those who would come after. The people who suspected what was coming either rejoiced in their hearts, or they sank into the existential and accumulated dread of centuries. It was a fraught and heavy moment.

The president had come to Capitol Hill to persuade Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, a law designed to strike down the barriers thrown up by tobacco-chewing county clerks that prevented citizens of color from voting throughout the South. Johnson aimed a kill shot at the dark heart of that history right from the first line of his address.

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.

It remains the greatest speech given by an American president in my lifetime. It gave no quarter to the history it was trying to kill. It took no prisoners among the politicians who had obstructed, stalled, and temporized down through the years of terror and American apartheid. It gave life back to the people who had bled and died in their resistance to the history the president had come to kill. But first, he spoke to the nation at large.