The Great Society speech came from a very personal place for Johnson. LBJ had grown up poor in the Texas Hill Country. He'd taught poor Mexican-American kids at a segregated school in south Texas. He knew something about poverty and unfair treatment. In the speech, Johnson points out the inequality of opportunities in American society, but he refuses to accept that those discrepancies are permanent ways of life.
Johnson gave the speech as the civil rights movement was reaching its boiling point. Martin Luther King had been putting issues of race and class all up in LBJ's face as he pushed for racial justice and equal opportunity for all Americans. Johnson was counting on the Michigan grads to be equal-opportunity warriors, despite their generally privileged positions as students in an elite university. The wars on poverty and racism was gonna start with them.
Questions About Society and Class
- Johnson uses the word "class" five times in his speech. How many of those references are to social class?
- As a boy, Johnson was at best a mediocre student. Why was he so gung-ho on education?
- Two very different areas became a focus of Great Society programs—inner cities and Appalachia What did these areas have in common? How were they different?
Chew on This
LBJ was proud of his Texas roots, but he often felt like an outsider in the Kennedy administration, which was full of sophisticated Ivy Leaguers.
Despite Brown v. Board of Education and other civil rights legislation outlawing segregation and discrimination, Black Americans were still cut out of equal educational and job opportunities.