On June 4, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson was scheduled to deliver a speech at Howard University....[The speech was] going to make the President who had completed the civil rights legislation call that achievement inadequate.... The right to eat at an integrated lunch counter, buy a home in an integrated neighborhood, go to an integrated school, join an integrated work force--all these things had been vindicated without giving men the money to buy hamburgers or a home....

The civil rights laws had been based on a concept of equal opportunity.... President Johnson... was going to move blacks straight from stage one (equal rights) past stage two (equal opportunity) to stage three (equal results): "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.'

'Not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and a result.'

from Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes. ÿ