A year teaching poor Texas children shaped Lyndon Johnson's education laws
At twenty, Lyndon Johnson took a break from college to teach Mexican-American pupils at a segregated school in Cotulla, Texas. Decades later, after signing the Higher Education Act of 1965 as president, he said he had never forgotten those children, nearly all shut out of college by poverty.
Johnson was born in 1908 in a farmhouse on the Pedernales River near Stonewall, Texas, the eldest of five children. His parents argued so long over what to call him that he went unnamed for three months. The family was poor after his father lost heavily, and the biographer Robert Caro describes the region as rocky, unelectrified country where scratching a living was hard. A talkative student, he finished high school at 15, drifted to California for odd jobs, then worked as a labourer before enrolling at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in 1926.
There he edited the campus paper and honed a talent for persuasion. From 1928 to 1929 he taught at the Welhausen School in Cotulla, about 140 kilometres south of San Antonio, to pay his way. After graduating in 1930 he taught public speaking in Houston, then went to Washington as secretary to Congressman Richard Kleberg, who left most of his daily work to his young aide. As Texas director of the National Youth Administration from 1935, Johnson put 18,000 young Texans to work on roads, parks and schools within six months. He was a notoriously demanding boss, and Caro judged his ambition unusually free of ideology.
Elected to the House in 1937 and to the Senate after a disputed 1948 primary, he became majority leader in 1954. John F. Kennedy beat him for the 1960 nomination but chose him as running mate. Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963 made Johnson president, and he won a landslide the next year.
His Great Society programme produced Medicare and Medicaid, federally insured student loans and a new immigration law, while the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the next year's Voting Rights Act became the core of his civil rights legacy. Frustration over the Vietnam War, riots and a widening credibility gap eroded his support, and after a weak New Hampshire primary he abandoned his 1968 campaign. He retired to his Texas ranch and died in 1973.
Source: Lyndon B. Johnson
