One of the great presidential speeches came a half-century ago Sunday, as President Lyndon Johnson urged Congress to pass voting rights legislation, and invoked an anthem of civil rights demonstrators.
"Their cause must be our cause too," Johnson said on March 15, 1965. "Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice -- and we shall overcome."
Johnson's speech came eight days after Alabama troopers attacked voting rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., an anniversary commemorated by President Obama and others last weekend.
The actual Selma-to-Montgomery march of 1965 began less than a week after Johnson's voting rights speech to Congress.
"At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom," Johnson said that night. "So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama."
