Sixty years ago today, Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act on a small wooden desk which he had brought to the White House explicitly for this ceremony.

The historical significance was that this desk had been once used by Supreme Court Justice Robert C. Grier (1846-1870). Johnson chose to use this desk as a way sending a message and of trying to finally set right an historical wrong. Associate-Justice Grier was one of the Justices who wrote a concurring opinion in the now infamous Dred Scott case where the court ruled that Scott, a Black African slave, could not bring suit in court because he was not only a non-citizen, he was not, under the terms of the Constitution, even a 'person', but was rather, property. It took the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865 and 14th Amendment in 1868 to finally overturn the Dred Scott decision.

The desk is now on display at the Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, TX.

Thank God this desk is at the Johnson Library and NOT the Smithsonian. With the current attempt by Trump to remove all historical references to events which do not put America in it's best light, it might have soon been disappeared.

OCU