Austin, Texas
The Big Four — a sitting president and three former presidents — came to praise Lyndon Baines Johnson upon the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The historic gathering was held at the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum, not far from the Hill Country where the 36th president grew up in a cabin without electricity or indoor plumbing, poor and segregated, a product of the Jim Crow South.
They say everything is bigger in Texas, and for three days the presidential quartet of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter — and an unconventional assemblage of panelists including John Lewis, Billie Jean King, Bill Russell, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Mavis Staples, Andrew Young and Graham Nash — served up a homage to LBJ that was at once bigger and more burnished than the sum of his parts.
Robert Caro has expended more than a million words plumbing the shadows and light of LBJ's complex legacy and is at work on a fifth and final volume of his magisterial biography. By comparison, this summit was a kind of CliffsNotes on a shining moment in LBJ's clouded history.
"President Johnson liked power, the feel of it, the wielding of it," Obama said in his keynote address. "But that hunger was harnessed and redeemed by a deeper understanding of the human condition, by sympathy for the downtrodden and the downcast, sympathy rooted in his own experience."
Obama noted that Johnson voted "no" on every single civil rights bill during his first 20 years in Congress. But he played the game better than anybody else and understood that timing is everything in politics. Although LBJ was told it was too soon after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy for a country still in mourning, and that he would risk the rest of his domestic agenda on a lost cause, Johnson turned to his aides and said: "Well, what the hell's the presidency for?"
As Obama described, "He fought for, argued, horse-traded, bullied and persuaded," until he ultimately signed the historic legislation.
Before his talk, Obama and wife, Michelle, paused during a private tour of the LBJ library to study an exhibit where documents of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act were displayed alongside Lincoln's top hat and Johnson's cowboy hat. In silent introspection, the nation's first African-American president seemed to take the full measure of those twin pillars of the nation's long struggle with racial equality.
On stage a short while later, Obama said: "Progress in this country can be hard and slow. This office humbles you. You're reminded daily you're but a relay swimmer in the current of history."
The night before, Clinton put it bluntly: "The Civil Rights Act made it possible for Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to be president of the United States."
Clinton plunged headlong into a blistering rebuke of recent efforts that erect barriers and attempt to limit voting rights established in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, another LBJ accomplishment.
Clinton criticized stalled immigration reform legislation and noted that the extraordinary discovery of DNA sequencing determined that "we are 99.5 percent the same, so why are we spending 99.5 percent of our time on the .5 percent that is different."
This remark received loud and sustained applause. "How could we possibly consider doing anything to shrink the pool of talent?" Clinton asked. "America is great because of our diversity."
Carter talked about growing up in the 1920s and '30s, the lone white family in small towns in segregated, rural Georgia, the son of a peanut farmer, whose playmates and babysitters were African-American. "My life was shaped as much as any other white American by black culture," he said. His mother was a registered nurse who crossed the racial divide and took care of black people in their homes. He was taught to ignore taunts and ugly epithets hurled at him by racist white folks.
"I came to appreciate black culture," he said. He noted that three of the five people besides his parents who had the greatest impact on his life were black.
Echoing several other speakers, Carter declared civil rights in America a work in progress today.
"We've fallen short in a lot of ways," he said. "There is still disparity in employment and in the quality of education between blacks and whites. A good number of public schools in the South are still segregated."
He cautioned against "the kind of self-congratulation of this 50th anniversary and feeling that Lyndon Johnson did it and we don't have to do anymore. Too many people are at ease over the racial disparity that exists today."
During a panel that discussed the complicated relationship between LBJ and Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph Califano Jr., special assistant to Johnson, said that Obama's initiatives have been stymied in Congress "because he is black." It seemed to stun the audience with its frankness.
In his speech, Obama spoke of how much work remains to be done on civil rights while sounding an optimistic note.
"The story of America is a story of progress," he said, "however slow, incomplete and harshly challenged."
Outside, 100 demonstrators chanted "Obama! Obama! Don't deport my momma!" and called on the president to do more on immigration reform. They criticized Obama for deporting more than 2 million people for being in this country illegally. Three protesters were arrested and charged with criminal trespass after they refused to move behind metal barricades.
Before Obama took the stage, gospel and R&B singer Mavis Staples, a civil rights activist in the '60s, offered a soulful rendition of "We Shall Overcome." The diverse audience of 1,000 stood up, held hands, swayed and sang in a single voice: "Oh, deep in my heart/I do believe/We shall overcome some day."
And for a few shining moments, everything did seem bigger in Texas.
pgrondahl@timesunion.com • 518-454-5623 • @PaulGrondahl