What was it worth to me, those many years ago, as a young teenager watching President Johnson give his memorable speech in support of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to a joint session to Congress?  When U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke Tuesday at the LBJ Library on the very matter that made Lyndon B. Johnson a hero in American history, my mind went back through time, and I was left pondering the void of leadership that has formed since.

On the family’s black and white television set, I remember sitting on the floor, the 14-year-old boy who slipped into a bookstore after school to steal a quick read of the daily newspaper that I could not afford.  I would read it quickly before the owner of the store would gaze my way.  He got used to me coming by to keep abreast of the events sweeping the country.  I would then rush home to watch Walter Cronkite.

The nation was in the grip of the civil rights movement and all attention was focused on the violence in the South.  I was gripped as well listening to LBJ’s dramatic speech that evening.  Having roused the nation on behalf of the “Negro” population for most of his speech with a stirring appeal to conscience and fairness, LBJ talked about his first job out of college.  In the small South Texas town of Cotulla, he said, he would see in the eyes of his Mexican-American students the pain of the result of prejudice and economic deprivation.  He equated the Mexican-American experience to the “Negro” population of that same day.  In three minutes, LBJ made sense of my surroundings and set my life’s course, animating me immediately.

Years later, I stood in the cold of winter as an honor guard took Johnson into his indomitable presidential library in Austin for one last time to rest in repose.  Later still, I would walk or drive by the National City Christian Church in Washington where his funeral was held.  Anytime I am in Washington it is hardly possible to miss that church off Thomas Circle on Mass Avenue.  LBJ has been present all of my life, brought back in full two days ago when the nation’s top law enforcement officer went to the same library to denounce the wrongs that LBJ risked his political life to eliminate.

Holder in his talk at the library was not as forcefully courageous as Johnson was in his time.  Johnson took on the very weight of history to undo two hundred years of injustice.  Holder and his Department of Justice have only crass political avarice to confront.  But the men and women who wrote and rewrote the legislation that Johnson supported knew that racism would long afflict and plague the nation, and so they inserted a visionary and critical provision:  Section 5 that requires the Department of Justice to “preclear” any changes in election laws or political districts in states with a history of discrimination.

How visionary indeed.  Section 5 remains the blunt instrument that the federal government can use to beat back intentional discrimination against minorities that exists today.

The times might have changed, but enough men and women in America have not, leaving it necessary for the federal government to continue to safeguard those at the mercy of political supermajorities today trying to hold back the wave of change that demography now ordains.  The fact of the matter is that a significant part of the non-HispanicLatino white population has declared war on HispanicLatinos and on the new demography remaking America.

In his filings trying to uphold a preposterously unfair and unconstitutional congressional redistricting plan for Texas, its attorney general is hoping the Supreme Court takes aim at Section 5.  But nothing vindicates its need more than the curse being revived nationwide by Republican-dominated legislatures: New, restrictive laws on voting that strike at the very soul of America by reestablishing barriers to voting that target minority voters to still their voices.

Johnson was on the right side of history.  Perhaps he knew that the nation would not always be as strong on race as it should.  And so, indeed, years from now, after men like the Texas attorney general are swept from the scene and long forgotten, Lyndon Johnson will remain, one of the great presidents of our time, vindicated by events.

Would that we had just one – just one – Lyndon Johnson today in Washington or Austin.  We have his legacy at least, and it, like his library, remains a strong fortress for the future.

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