Johnson acknowledged in 1965 that racial disparities grew even amid civil rights progress

Evidence

On June 4, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave the commencement address at Howard University. “It is a tribute to America that, once aroused, the courts and the Congress, the President and most of the people, have been the allies of progress,” he said. But he also showed why decades of racial progress rhetoric had been shortsighted. Progress has primarily come for “a growing middle class minority,” while for poor Black people “the walls are rising and the gulf is widening,” Johnson pointed out. “Thirty-five years ago the rate of unemployment for Negroes and whites was about the same,” he noted. “Tonight the Negro rate is twice as high.” In recent decades, Johnson added, income disparities, disparities in poverty rates, disparities in infant mortality, and urban segregation were all increasing. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1281

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth verifying independently: what data underlay Johnson’s ‘walls are rising and the gulf is widening’ remarks, and how robust were the 1930-1965 unemployment comparisons.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s task of separating contested empirical claims (disparity numbers) from the reframing thesis (progress rhetoric obscures failure).