Professor Looks at "We Shall Overcome" Speech

December 14, 2006 == MEDIA ADVISORY

A Calvin College communication professor has a new book coming out next month
on the history of voting rights in the U.S., the civil rights demonstrations in
Selma, Alabama, and the efforts of President Lyndon B. Johnson to create a more
just society.

Texas A&M University Press will publish Garth Pauley's "LBJ's American
Promise" sometime in January 2007, but Pauley received his first copies of the
book this week.

The book focuses on Johnson's famous "We Shall Overcome" speech of March 15,
1965, in which he urged passage of
legislation that ultimately became the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The book is
grounded in primary research conducted at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential
Library and interviews with members of Johnson's staff.

Says Pauley: "At a crucial moment in civil rights history, Johnson delivered
an address to Congress that moved Martin Luther King Jr. to tears and earned
praise from the media as the best presidential speech in American history."

Pauley's book begins with an examination of Johnson's speech as connected to
the escalating protests in Selma, tracing the development of the speech in
light of the question of whether or not Johnson would have made the speech
without Selma. He also carefully analyzes the text itself and also gauges the
effectiveness of the speech, including responses in the media, among civil
rights leader and in the general population.

The topic of civil rights and the U.S. presidency is one that Pauley has
studied for over a decade.

Just three years ago he won one of the top awards in his field - the Karl R.
Wallace Memorial Award - for his work on civil rights rhetoric. Pauley won the
Wallace Award for his ongoing work on the March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom, a pivotal point in the Civil Rights movement that was held on August
28, 1963.

Pauley's primary research interest is the civil rights movement and its
rhetoric.

He wrote an award-winning dissertation called "The Modern Presidency and Civil
Rights: Discourse on Race from Roosevelt to Nixon," now a book, and has written
such articles as "W.E.B. Du Bois on Woman Suffrage: A Critical Analysis of His
Crisis Writings" and "Harry Truman and the NAACP: A Case Study in Presidential
Persuasion on Civil Rights."

Contact Pauley at 616-526-6294 or gpauley@calvin.edu
See and hear the speech at
http://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/lbjweshallovercome.htm

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Received on Thu Dec 14 10:01:19 2006