The Lady Bird Special

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.