March 15 · This Day in America
Eight days earlier, marchers had been clubbed and gassed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma for the crime of asking to vote. Now President Lyndon Johnson stands before a joint session of Congress, on national television, a Southerner with a Texas drawl, and does not flinch. He calls the denial of the vote what it is: wrong. He says the cause of the marchers in Selma is the cause of all Americans. And then he borrows the anthem of the movement he is championing and lets it ring in the Capitol: "And we shall overcome." Members of Congress sit stunned; civil rights leaders watching on television weep. Five months later he signs the Voting Rights Act. It is the rare moment when the most powerful man in the country uses every ounce of that power to make the promise true.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1783
The war is nearly won, but the unpaid officers at Newburgh are talking mutiny — even of marching on Congress. Washington appears unannounced and pleads with them. It is not working. Then he fumbles for a letter, pauses, and reaches for his glasses: "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service of my country." The room breaks. Officers weep. The conspiracy dissolves on the spot.
Source: www.battlefields.org
“Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service of my country.”George Washington, Newburgh, 1783