Lyndon Baines Johnson was born on the 27th of August 1908 in a small farmhouse on the Pedernales River near Stonewall, Texas, in a land that biographer Robert Caro described as having soil so rocky it was hard to earn a living from it. He was the eldest of five children born to Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr. and Rebekah Baines, and his parents could not agree on a name for him until he was three months old, finally settling on Lyndon after a county lawyer named W. C. Linden whom his father admired. Growing up poor and without electricity, Johnson developed a positive attitude toward Jews through the religious beliefs shared by his family, particularly his grandfather, and he graduated from Johnson City High School in 1924 as the youngest in his class. He enrolled at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in 1926, working his way through school while editing the school newspaper and refining his skills of persuasion, but he paused his studies for nine months from 1928 to 1929 to teach Mexican-American children at the segregated Welhausen School in Cotulla, Texas. This teaching job helped him save money to complete his education, and he graduated in 1930 with a Bachelor of Science in history and a certificate of qualification as a high school teacher before briefly teaching at Pearsall High School and then taking a position teaching public speaking at Sam Houston High School in Houston.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was born on the 27th of August 1908 in a small farmhouse on the Pedernales River near Stonewall, Texas, in a land that biographer Robert Caro described as having soil so rocky it was hard to earn a living from it. He was the eldest of five children born to Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr. and Rebekah Baines, and his parents could not agree on a name for him until he was three months old, finally settling on Lyndon after a county lawyer named W. C. Linden whom his father admired. Growing up poor and without electricity, Johnson developed a positive attitude toward Jews through the religious beliefs shared by his family, particularly his grandfather, and he graduated from Johnson City High School in 1924 as the youngest in his class. He enrolled at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in 1926, working his way through school while editing the school newspaper and refining his skills of persuasion, but he paused his studies for nine months from 1928 to 1929 to teach Mexican-American children at the segregated Welhausen School in Cotulla, Texas. This teaching job helped him save money to complete his education, and he graduated in 1930 with a Bachelor of Science in history and a certificate of qualification as a high school teacher before briefly teaching at Pearsall High School and then taking a position teaching public speaking at Sam Houston High School in Houston.