I recently visited the LBJ Presidential Library, there on the campus of the University of Texas, Austin. Being born in 1961, I don’t have any personal memories of LBJ’s presidency. Later in life, I mostly thought of him the way he himself lamented he would be remembered: as the president who catastrophically escalated the Vietnam War, dividing our nation and leading our military into a quagmire. While the Library gives full and unsparing attention to the Vietnam conflict, the central focus of the displays are instead of LBJ’s other war, the war at the heart of his hopes for his presidency: the War on Poverty. Using his prodigious political skills and tireless energies, he successfully initiated over 40 major programs (including Medicare and Medicaid) and signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act (ending legal segregation), the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. LBJ considered these acts his proudest achievements.
In narrating LBJ’s War on Poverty, the Library features one other figure above all others: Martin Luther King Jr. From 1963 to 1965, LBJ and MLK collaborated, mostly out of the public eye, to pursue and pass these legislative landmarks. For instance, on January 15, 1965, LBJ and MLK discussed the need to turn the public’s attention to voting rights. This helped crystalize the spring 1965 Alabama protest marches from Selma to Montgomery, including the nationally televised “Bloody Sunday” events of March 7th. Public opinion did shift, and the Voting Rights Act was signed into law that August 6th.
Knowing I would be at NCB’s MLK Retreat the next week, I stopped at the Library gift shop and bought a stack of postcards to give away, with the below picture of the July 2, 1964 signing of the first Civil Rights Act, with MLK standing directly behind LBJ.
Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, National Archives
Unfortunately, the close collaboration and soaring optimism pictured in that moment lasted only a few years. By 1967, MLK was publicly speaking out against LBJ and the Vietnam War, both because of its harm to the Vietnamese people and because it drained away all-important funds from the domestic War on Poverty. Losing MLK’s support was one factor in LBJ’s dramatic withdrawal from the 1968 presidential race. Then MLK was assassinated, at age 39, just one week after LBJ’s announcement. LBJ himself had many health problems and died in January 1973, at age 64.
When I meet people a decade older than myself, people who came of age during those years, I sometimes ask them, “How do you live it down?” It was all so intense and vivid, so distilled, so fully consequential. After the fulsome hopes and crushing disappointments of that era, what was left? My own earliest political memories were of Watergate and President Ford, the oddly subdued Bicentennial, and the ongoing but mostly unseen Cold War. And by the time I was a UC Berkeley student, bookstores were being replaced by stores like the Gap, and there was maybe a brief Anti-Apartheid protest at most. Berkeley’s anti-war and free speech movements had become more a nostalgic mural than an animating force.
But now, six decades after MLK and LBJ, we may be still trying to catch up with them. Before this NCB retreat, I had never closely read MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963), and never read at all his “Three Evils” and “Beyond Vietnam” speeches (both 1967). Adjusting for our post-Cold War, post-postcolonial era, and substituting Iraq and Afghanistan for Vietnam, MLK’s words all seemed strongly relevant today in their calls for justice, non-violent protest, social and spiritual renewal, reset national priorities, and basic equality.
In my hometown of Oakland, there is now a new Black Panther Museum, with very prominent signage right at Oakland’s prime downtown intersection. At the foot of our Nelson Mandela Parkway is a recently-installed bronze Huey Newton bust and memorial. Around downtown and West Oakland are many new, large mural tributes to the Panthers and the Black Lives Matter movement. And each February, there is now the Black Joy Parade right along Broadway, a major Oakland event. These were all unimaginable in the Oakland of my youth, even though the African American population in Oakland was much larger then, peaking at 47% in 1980 but now at 21%. Oakland had long had an elementary school, boulevard, branch library, and regional park named in honor of the (non-violent) MLK, but never a permanent, public memorial to the (militant) Panthers, even though Oakland was the movement’s birthplace. What had changed?
My guess is that the households that were the least open to racial integration departed Oakland during the decades of white flight. (I remember, as a child, the constant stream of classmates’ families moving away.) Those who stayed and those who newly arrived were necessarily more racially open-minded than the white-flighters. In time, the Black Lives Matter movement spread, and the city was covered in BLM signs, painted streets, murals, and flags. Even Oakland’s uber-wealthy enclave city of Piedmont sported any number of (tidy, tasteful) BLM lawn signs. So, a half-century after MLK, the majority culture of even a now famously progressive city like Oakland was finally ready to fully and openly embrace a cri de cœur such as “Black lives matter.” (Indeed, the phrase originated in a 2013 Facebook post by then-Oaklander Alicia Garza.) And as part of BLM, Oakland was finally ready to honor even its most controversial children, such as the Panthers.
And yet, in a sense, BLM represented only the most fractional and minimal prerequisite to MLK and LBJ’s vision. It was “Don’t kill us,” which is surely only the most basic precondition to the full equal opportunity and equal participation in community and national life that both LBJ and MLK envisioned. The original name of the Panthers was the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which could be rephrased, “We won’t let you kill us”; the group’s original mission was simply to witness and confront abusive encounters between police and African American neighbors. How vast is the distance between “Don’t kill us,” “We won’t let you kill us,” and MLK’s Beloved Community?
Since 1999, a bronze statue of MLK has stood at UT Austin, prominently located in the middle of a central walkway, atop a large pedestal depicting Civil Rights themes. He is dressed in robes, gesturing and reaching out, as if offering an entreaty mid-sermon. He is looking toward the LBJ Library, a mile east. In 2015, at the south entrance of UT Austin, the university removed a bronze statue of Jefferson Davis from Littlefield Fountain, with other Confederate statues and inscriptions following later. Controversy over the removals reached the Texas Supreme Court, which upheld the action. Indeed, the whole fountain complex had been controversial even when first installed in 1933 as a memorial to the Confederacy.
Meanwhile, the U.S. poverty rate fell from 20% in 1963 to 11% by 1973, and has fluctuated between 11% and 15% since then. However, since the U.S. population has grown, the absolute number of people in poverty is larger now than in 1963. And presently, there are major funding cuts and cancellations threatening some of LBJ’s remaining programs, including Medicaid and Medicare, Head Start, and PBS and NPR.
What are we to make of these idealistic aspirations and achievements, of pleas for survival, of monumental debates, of national administrations and historic movements, of wars and world events, of seeming progress, and seeming stasis and regress? What are we to make of LBJ and MLK with the passing of time?
In my own sense of Christian calling, I find myself regularly torn between two pulls: 1. A pull towards doing what is good and right, the living out of Kingdom values regardless of present cultural and political values, the following of MLK’s example of skillful and self-sacrificial leadership in calling both his own community and the whole nation towards the common good, all framed as a response to Jesus’ call to love one’s neighbors; and 2. A pull towards being painfully and unattractively honest and frank about our utterly reliable failings to do all those things, at all levels from immense government programs, always a mixed bag of goods and harms; to our well-intentioned local organizations and faith communities, always beset by human shortcomings and limitations; and to even our very best individual efforts, ever full of mixed and tenuous motivations, and never far from the selfish core of each of our hearts.
The tragedy of the human condition is not that we didn’t know the right things to do, it is that we knew the right things to do and just didn’t fully and finally do them. MLK and LBJ told us the right things to do about justice, racism, voting rights, education, and equal opportunity. The total of our best efforts to do those right things have brought about some good while leaving us with—truthfully—as much overall need as ever. And that is why you and I and everyone need a savior.
As a teenager, LBJ was baptized in the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church) tradition, and kept that affiliation the rest of his life. However, he regularly attended services in other traditions, sometimes even attending more than one service on a given Sunday. As he once explained to his daughter Luci, “When you’re in this position [as president], you need all the help you can get.” And, as far as I can tell, no matter what our station in life, that is true for all of us, in this life, and the next.
The last clearly documented conversation between LBJ and MLK took place on August 20, 1965, in the aftermath of the Watts riots in Los Angeles. MLK had just returned from a largely unsuccessful peacemaking trip to Los Angeles. LBJ was frustrated with Senate opposition to War on Poverty reauthorizations. The conversation ended with a tense exchange about Vietnam. The two men also discussed their hopes for what became the June 1966 White House Conference on Civil Rights, which MLK and over 2,400 other civil rights leaders participated in, but LBJ—consumed by Vietnam—did not.
The two men did have one final collaboration. On April 4, 1968, MLK was assassinated, and LBJ harnessed the sympathy and outrage of the moment to push through and sign the Fair Housing Act exactly one week later. At the signing ceremony, LBJ remarked, “We have come some of the way, not near all of it. There is much yet to do.” Now, today, in 2025, a new president is actively canceling various anti-segregation provisions and much else. Now, today, there is even more to do.
Russell Yee is a third-generation Oakland native and a graduate of UC Berkeley, Dallas Theological Seminary, and the Graduate Theological Union. He pastored an American Baptist church for ten years and has taught for Fuller Theological Seminary, St. Mary’s College of California, Logos Evangelical Seminary, and elsewhere. He currently serves as Academic Director of New College Berkeley and as a California Citizens Redistricting Commissioner.