On the morning of Tuesday, October 6, 1964, the Lady Bird Special, a 19-car train carrying First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, her supporters, members of the press, and a security detail, departed Union Station in Washington, DC, for an ambitious 1,682-mile whistle-stop campaign tour of Southern States. In four days, Lady Bird gave 47 speeches to over 200,000 people, demonstrating that despite the growing resentment of white Southern Democrats to President Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, neither LBJ nor Lady Bird were giving up on the South. Joining me in this episode is returning guest Shannon McKenna Schmidt, author of You Can't Catch Us: Lady Bird Johnson's Trailblazing 1964 Campaign Train and the Women Who Rode with Her.

Our theme song is “Frogs Legs Rag,” composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode audio is “Lady Bird's Whistle Stop: Ahoskie, NC: 10/6/64, 4:22 PM,” from the LBJ Library; the audio is in the public domain. The episode image is Lady Bird Johnson posing with group of women aboard the Lady Bird Special, LBJ Library photo by Unknown #33317.

Related Episodes:

• The Southern Strategy
• The 1968 White House Fashion Show
• The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago
• The Student Right in the late 1960s

Additional Sources:

• “Claudia 'Lady Bird' Johnson, 1912-2007,” Edited by Arlisha R. Norwood, National Women’s History Museum.
• “Obituary: Lady Bird Johnson, 94, former U.S. first lady,” by Enid Nemy, The New York Times, July 12, 2007.
• “The filibuster that almost killed the Civil Rights Act,” by NCC Staff, National Constitution Center, April 11, 2016.
• “‘We may have lost the south’: what LBJ really said about Democrats in 1964,” by Charles Kaiser, The Guardian, January 23, 2023.
• “Lady Bird Special: The first First Lady to hit the campaign trail without her husband,” by Meredith Hindley, HUMANITIES: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, May/June 2013, Volume 34, Number 3.
• “Mapping Lady Bird Johnson's Whistle-Stop Tour,” by Katie Peter, The White House Historical Association, August 18, 2023.
• “Lady Bird Johnson, At the Epicenter, 1963, 1965, The Whistle-Stop Tour (section III),” PBS.
• “50th Anniversary of Lady Bird Johnson’s 1964 Whistle Stop Tour of the South,” LBJ Library, October 1, 2014.

Enslaved Africans were forcibly shipped to Virginia starting in 1619 in response to a severe labor shortage. From the beginning, enslaved laborers resisted by fleeing and through violence, and white enslavers reacted by creating a racialized system of brutal policing, granting themselves authority based on skin color and a sense of superiority. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Gautham Rao, Associate Professor of History at American University in Washington, D.C., and author of White Power: Policing American Slavery.

Our theme song is “Frogs Legs Rag,” composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Good News,” performed by Tuskegee Institute Singers on August 31, 1914; the audio is in the public domain and is available through the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is “The Effects of the Proclamation,” Harper's Weekly. Vol. 7, no. 321. February 21, 1863. p. 116; the image is in the public domain and is available via Wikimedia Commons.

Additional Sources:

• Proceedings and Acts of the [Maryland] General Assembly January 1637/8-September 1664, Volume 1, Page 107.
• Proceedings and Acts of the [Maryland] General Assembly, April 1666-June 1676, Volume 2, Page 224.
• “An act for preventing Negroes Insurrections” (1680),” Virginia General Assembly, " Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, December 7, 2020.
• “The Stono Rebellion of 1739: Where Did It Begin?” by Nic Butler, Charleston County Public Library, September 9, 2022.
• “South Carolina Slave Code (1740),” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
• “The Emancipation Proclamation,” The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
• “Thirteenth Amendment,” Constitution of the United States, Constitution Annotated, United States Congress.
• “On this day - Feb 24, 1865: Kentucky Refuses to Ratify Abolition of Slavery,” A History of Racial Injustice, Equal Justice Initiative.

In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner advanced his now-famous Frontier Theory, arguing that the American identity was forged through the process of exploring and adapting to new environments in the frontier west. Key to both Turner’s theory and the myth of the frontier that pre-dated it was the idea that brave white American men conquered a previously empty land through their grit in a relentless march west, but the land was populated long before white Americans arrived, and the people who lived, explored, and settled there were a far more diverse population than the myth acknowledges. Joining me in this episode is returning guest Dr. Megan Kate Nelson, author of The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier.

Our theme song is “Frogs Legs Rag,” composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “The west, a nest and you,” composed by Billy Hill with lyrics by Larry Yoell and sung by Lewis James on November 16, 1923, in Camden, New Jersey; the performance is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is the American Progress, painted by John Gast in 1872; the image is in the public domain and is available via Wikimedia Commons.

Additional Sources:

• “Brief History of the AHA,” American Historical Association.
• “Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893),” by Frederick Jackson Turner, The American Yawp Reader.
• “How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start,” by Colin Woodard, Smithsonian Magazine, January/February 2023.
• “Sacagawea, c. 1788 - c. 1812/1884?” by Teresa Potter and Mariana Brandman, National Women’s History Museum.
• “Sacagawea: Intrepid Indigenous Explorer [video],” The New York Historical.
• “Lewis & Clark Expedition,” National Archives.
• “Indian Treaties and the Removal Act of 1830,” Office of the Historian, United States Department of State.
• “Indian Territory,” Library of Congress.
• “Indian Territory,” by Dianna Everett, The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, January 15, 2010.
• “Cheyenne Sanctuary: The Northern Cheyennes’ Exodus, Mari Sandoz, and Lost Chokecherry Lake,” by Emily Levine, The Nebraska Sandhills, October 23, 2024.
• Northern Cheyenne Tribe.
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