Statement by the President in Response to Final Report of White House Conference "To Fulfill These Rights."
IT IS important that the recommendations of the Council and the Conference receive serious attention by local, State, and Federal government officials. And much more than official action is involved here. Many of the recommendations in this report deal with the role of the private sector in fulfilling the rights of Negro Americans. Organized labor, the business community, foundations, religious, educational, and civic organizations have a vital role to play in that crucial effort.
The recommendations of this Conference should be studied and discussed by every thoughtful and responsible American, and wherever practicable they should be implemented without delay.
There may be recommendations on which it is not possible to secure agreement among men of good will. That is to be expected with a subject of this gravity and complexity. But the report gives us an agenda for debate and action for years to come. Thus it more than justifies the months of painstaking effort that went into its preparation.
Note: "The Report of the White House Conference 'To Fulfill These Rights'" is dated June 1-2, 1966 (Government Printing Office, 177 pp.).
The statement was made public as part of a White House release which stated that the report was presented to the President at a Cabinet meeting that day by A. Philip Randolph, international president, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who served as Honorary Chairman of the Conference, and by Ben W. Heineman, chairman, Chicago & Northwestern Railway Co., who served as Chairman. Mr. Heineman also headed the 29-member Conference Council (see Item 407 and note).
The release stated that the President had instructed former Governor Farris Bryant to see that copies of the report were forwarded to every Governor and that he had asked the Vice President to convey copies to the mayors of more than 500 cities. Copies also would be sent, the release noted, to George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, and to W. Beverley Murphy, head of the Business Council.
The release announced that Harry C. McPherson, Jr., Special Counsel to the President, and Clifford L. Alexander, Jr., Deputy Special Counsel, would serve as chairmen of an interdepartmental committee of senior officials to examine the Conference recommendations. These officials, the release added, would "(a) examine the recommendations in the report that bear on their departments, (b) make an interim report to the President within 30 days for possible utility of the recommendations for departmental action or legislation, (c) reply to the report's criticisms of present programs, (d) describe the efforts their departments will make to keep the report under consideration in the future, (e) examine the full 5,000-page verbatim transcript of the Conference for recommendations or suggestions made by the conferees."
Lyndon B. Johnson, Statement by the President in Response to Final Report of White House Conference "To Fulfill These Rights." Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238992