Commencement Address at Howard University (1965)

Commencement Address at Howard University (1965)
Lyndon Johnson
But freedom is not enough. . . . It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equality but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result. For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities-physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness.
To this end equal opportunity is essential but not enough, not enough. Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just the product of birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with, and the neighborhood you live in-by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child, and finally the man.
-Ideas like those espoused by Johnson

A) were realized through Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s and 1970s.
B) were supported widely across the entire political spectrum.
C) failed to produce any legislation on equality.
D) were opposed primarily by immigrants.