Cotulla: Where LBJ Learned What Poverty Looked Like

Cotulla is a small ranching city in La Salle County, named for Joseph Cotulla, a Polish immigrant who arrived in the region in eighteen sixty-eight and built a cattle operation on the harsh south Texas brush country. When the International-Great Northern Railroad pushed through around eighteen eighty-one and eighteen eighty-two, Cotulla donated a hundred and twenty acres of land to secure the depot, and the town that bore his name was made county seat the following year. Decades later, a twenty-year-old college student named Lyndon Baines Johnson arrived to teach fifth, sixth, and seventh graders at the segregated Welhausen School in nineteen twenty-eight.

He saw children picking through garbage for food. He spent his own salary on sports equipment. The year shaped him.

When Johnson pushed the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty-five before Congress, he cited Cotulla by name in the speech. A small brush-country railroad stop had helped make a president.