Luci: Obama Makes Good on Daddy's Dreams

LBJ's daughter Luci reflects on the legacy of her father's work for civil rights, in an essay on the CNN website. Here's an excerpt:

My father's dream was to open the doors of opportunity to all Americans regardless of the color of their skin or the quantity of their pocketbook.

On November 4, Barack Obama made good on those dreams. He walked through the doors of opportunity -- flung open by Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the millions of men and women who supported the Great Society -- and succeeded because of the "content of his character, not the color of his skin."

When Daddy signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act into law, he said he feared he was handing his beloved South over to the Republican Party for a generation, but if that was the price he had to pay for social justice he gladly did it. Sadly it's been more than a generation since he said those prophetic words.

I never got the chance to vote for my father. But when I cast my vote for Barack Obama, I was casting a vote to support the same causes of social justice and equal opportunity to quality education, decent health care and a clean environment for all Americans that Daddy and the supporters of the "Great Society" worked so hard on and achieved so much for. . . .

I thank God for all who helped Daddy's dreams for social justice become law. I thank the millions of Americans who helped President-elect Obama make those dreams come true.

And I pray that Americans will continue to stand together with our new president as he wrestles with the greatest problems of our time so he can make the dreams of a new generation come true too.