A warning from Lyndon B. Johnson that resonates today

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By Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Fifty years ago this week, former President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969) gave what would end up being his final speech during a civil rights symposium at his presidential library in Austin, Texas. The address has a timely lesson for today, as Mark Updegrove, former TIME Canada President and President & CEO of the LBJ Foundation, writes for TIME’s Ideas section. “We haven’t done nearly enough,” Johnson said back then. “I’m kind of ashamed of myself that I had six years and couldn’t do more than I did.” While programs that Johnson championed—Medicare, Medicare, Head Start, food stamps, federal housing programs, affirmative action—helped lift many Americans, especially Black Americans, out of poverty, the programs remain in danger of cuts. Updegrove argues that progressives can do more on the economic issues essential for racial equity. Click here to read the full story.

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FROM THE TIME VAULT This week in 1954: Novelist Ernest Hemingway “This week, ‘for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration,’ the Nobel Prize for Literature will be awarded to Ernest Miller Hemingway, originally of Oak Park, III, and later of most of the world's grand and adventurous places. Few would deny that Ernest Hemingway deserves the trumpets of fame. As an artist he broke the bounds of American writing, enriched U.S. literature with the century's hardest-hitting prose, and showed new ways to new generations of writers. He was imitated not only by other writers but by uncounted young men who, in fact or fancy, sought to live as dashingly as he. From Paris bistros to Chicago saloons, he is known as a character—not the sallow, writing type with an indoor soul, but a literary he-man.” (Dec. 13, 1954) Read More » This week in 1961: Christmas shopping “In the major department stores, Christmas planning starts just about the time that the kids are breaking their first Christmas toys—the day after Christmas past. The long preparations begin with studies of sales slips, to determine what sold well, what proved a bomb. After that come committee meetings, buyers' meetings, salesgirl meetings. By mid-January, buyers are packed and jetting off around the U.S. and to faraway countries to find merchandise and to place orders. When shipments arrive, some stores slip a few new items on the counters to see how they sell; if customers pick them up, the items are reordered in quantity; decorators get to work designing store-window displays and interior dècor, order mechanized window spectacles that cost as much as $80,000. Christmas-card makers send instructions to their artists. The word this year: go easy on the kooky wisecracks and stick to religious sentiments with 'direct clean statements.'" (Dec. 15, 1961) Read More » This week in 1986: Playwright Neil Simon “Now Simon is back on Broadway, where he is the only living playwright to have had a theater named for him. He rounds out his autobiographical trilogy with Broadway Bound, a tough and unsettling recollection of the breakup of his parents' marriage and of how he walked out on that wreckage to launch his own career. The play's central image, its emotional climax, is that long-contemplated connection of mother and son, talking and dancing and—for just a moment—spiritually touching. ‘Until I wrote it,’ says Simon, ‘I had not fully resolved how I truly felt about my mother. I had no idea I had been so dependent on her. That is an erotic, truly intimate love scene.’” (Dec. 15, 1986) Read More »

HIGHLIGHTS FROM AROUND THE WEB Education: A new investigation from the New York Times’ Mike Baker and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs looks at the slanted view of American history in textbooks for junior R.O.T.C. members (short for the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps), such as promoting Confederate General Robert E. Lee as an example of leadership worth emulating. Hollywood: For the New Yorker, actor Molly Ringwald (The Breakfast Club) recalls working with legendary French director Jean Luc-Godard. Theater: On NPR’s All Things Considered, Bob Mondello talks about how the journalist Paul Salsini discovered a recording of a college musical written and performed by the late playwright Stephen Sondheim. Research: Wall Street Journal reporter Adolfo Flores detailed recent findings from an archaeological excavation, which argues that the U.S. Army may have played a larger role than previously thought in a little-known Porvenir massacre, the shooting of 15 Mexican boys in the Texas border town on Jan. 28, 1918. Museums: Associated Press correspondent Karel Janicek reports that a Czech museum is returning a musical manuscript handwritten by Beethoven to the heirs of a family that originally owned the document and had to flee the country during World War II.

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