When the Pen Became a Voice for the Voiceless

On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson sat in the President's Room of the U. S. Capitol, the same ornate chamber where Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves conscripted into the Confederate Army over a century before. Television cameras hummed as Johnson picked up the first of dozens of pens. Martin Luther King Jr. stood just behind him, watching the ink meet paper.…