Widening Economic Gap

In Lyndon B. Johnson’s Commencement Address at Howard University, he said, “In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope.” All of these things he uses as proof of the widening economic gap that has been growing between black and white Americans. He also said that freedom is “the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others,” which had not been the case in the United States at the time. He said that thirty-five years prior to his speech the unemployment rate was about the same for blacks and whites, but that at the time it was twice as high for African Americans compared to whites. Also, he said that the rate of African American earnings when compared to the white man declined steadily all around the country. Another example he gave was that the infant mortality rate of nonwhites in 1940 was 70 percent higher than that of whites.
The President gives two main reasons for this gaps existence. The first that he gives is that “Negroes are trapped--as many whites are trapped--in inherited, gateless poverty.” He said that they are going to try and address these issues with bills and policies to enhance their living situations, education systems, and working atmosphere. As his second and biggest reason, Johnson said that it “is the devastating heritage of long years of slavery; and a century of oppression, hatred, and injustice,” and this problem cannot simply be fixed with a policy or forgotten with money.
The cartoon simply shows the results of slavery. It shows the beginning, with a black man enslaved and the white man free. The white man uses the black man to get above him, and when the black man finally gets free refuses to help him. This is exactly what had happened in America. Although the law said that they were free, African Americans were being shown none of the civil liberties they should have been. They were still highly discriminated against and shown a very cold shoulder from most white people they came across. President Johnson said in his address that it is mainly the job of the African Americans to make progress, but there is no way they can do it alone.