really it s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice, and we shall overcome. reporter: president johnson s 1965 speech to congress, invoking the movement s anthem marked the peak of the civil rights struggle. for a brief moment, the promise of a nation united against racial injustice seemed within reach. but would it last? oh, manatees. aka the sea cow oh! there s one. manatees in novelty ts? surprising. what s come at me bro?
press basically ignored african-americans and not just episodes of violence against them, but achievements, anything to do with their daily life. basically flat out ignored them. they didn t even often use their names. the names of black people because that would be a sign of respect. it s galling now to look at the level of disregard and oblivion that was in the media at that time. so long as you sit in the back, you have a false sense of, inferiority, and so long as you let the white man sit in the front and push you back there, he has a false sense of superiority. montgomery bus boycott. unbelievably successful from the very first day, and it took weeks to get a national reporter in there. i think it was six weeks before a news magazine came in and then
the constant pressure of these stories, the pictures of the police dogs and the fire hoses and the kids being arrested, those were all powerful firecrackers, if you will, on policy in washington. you start to see the country as a whole saying, this is intolerable. this has got to stop. and that puts the pressure on. reporter: by now the mainstream press was covering all the horrible things in the movement and particularly what had happened in birmingham, and that s an important moment in time because it kind of opens up the door for lyndon johnson. it gets him the space needed to pick up the torch from president kennedy and push through the civil rights act of 1964.
no matter how much you describe it, how much you show a still, the words and that still picture do not have the impact of the motion and the viciousness of the attack. the whole idea behind direct action, particularly the sort of nonviolent gandhian tradition is to produce conflict in a disciplined fashion that reveals the opposition to be as morally bankrupt as it is. you want them to show themselves, and in selma, they showed themselves. i think the civil rights movement understood that you need to make people own their shame. you need to embarrass and humiliate people in order for them to stop doing the thing they thought they had a perfect right to do. reporter: in 1965, tom brokaw