Three are the most notorious of the mandate of Johnson, the Vietnam War, the struggle for civil rights and the space race. The three inherited them from his predecessor, JFK.
Lyndon Johnson, as everyone knows, became president of the United States after the assassination of JFK and later won the 1964 election. The image has Hollywood and television broadcast is a jerk Texan, wearing a hat and riding boots. However, it has probably been the president who has done more for social equality in the United States since World War II to the present.
The 60's was that of the great struggle against racial discrimination. In 1954 the Supreme Court had abolished racial segregation laws, which affected mainly to abolish segregation made from the states themselves. This affected, for example, schooling.
However, the southern segregationist movement took little notice. The KKK was rampant and threats, beatings and killings went unpunished. Until 1955 when the victim a teenager from Chicago, was beaten, shot and thrown into a river in the state of Mississippi.
The photographs of the corpse were widely disseminated throughout the country. The murderers, two white men were tried and acquitted. The jury's decision caused a wave of anger in the north and the revival of the movement for civil rights.
Only a year later, Rosa Parks was the case, the bus, which ended with the abolition of the law of segregation on public transportation.
should be noted that the South in those days was in the hands of Democrats and even the governor of Arkansas blocked black students attending classes at a school for whites, segregation once banned. Until the Republican President Eisenhower had to send paratroopers to enforce the law.
The atmosphere is warmed far from normal. In Mississippi some thirty federal agents were shot in 1962 when protecting a black student who asserted their right to go to college.
The situation was no longer than whites go unpunished for their crimes, is that the security forces attacked the black with an unprecedented violence when demanding their rights. The images of children attacked by dogs egged on by the agents of law or felled him with water from fire hoses further angered the people of the north.
But the straw that broke the camel's back was the 1964 murder of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, widely known especially for the movie "Mississippi Burning."
This was the racial situation was found when Lyndon Johnson won election in 1964. And this is what he said a year later.
"As a man of deep Southern roots I am, I know how cruel are racist prejudices. I know how difficult it is to change attitudes and the structure of our society. But a century has passed since the Negroes were declared free and today, still are not fully (...) It's been a century since they were promised equality and blacks still are not equal. A century has passed since the day he made that promise and the promise was not fulfilled. It has therefore come when justice. "
The speech was delivered by presenting the Voting Rights Act, the law that would guarantee voting rights for blacks.
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