On Monday, March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson addressed a Joint Session of Congress. It was a mere week after the deadly clashes in Selma, Alabama, where the police had attacked protestors as they assembled for a march to Montgomery to highlight voter rights discrimination. President Johnson had been concerned about racial violence in the South almost from the moment he had been sworn in as president on Air Force One in late November 1963. In early June 1964, as the Civil Rights Act moved toward enactment, LBJ had become so concerned that he asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to "to fill up Mississippi and infiltrate everything he could, that he haul them [the KKK] in by the dozens." (conversation with Associate Counsel to the President, Lee White, June 23rd, 1964). This was during the Freedom Summer, an effort organized by the NAACP, CORE, SCLC, and SNCC to register as many blacks to vote in Mississippi as possible. When their efforts were met with unrelenting violence, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed in an attempt to have its delegates seated at the Democratic National Convention in lieu of the all-white undemocratically elected delegates of the official Democratic Party of Mississippi. President Johnson had felt compelled to intervene at the convention on the side of the segregationists. Now, in the fresh light of the Selma violence, he was introducing the Voting Rights Act. Johnson was finally taking a stand.
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