Kennedy and Civil Rights

The Kennedy Administration and Civil Rights

The Civil Rights activism of the 1950s continued to gain momentum and advances during the 1960s. The 1960s which opened with such promise and optimism after the election of youthful John F. Kennedy would see extraordinary amounts of violence as well as the assassination of four significant individuals. John F. Kennedy campaigned on promises he termed the “New Frontier” which would end discrimination, provide federal aid for education and medical care for the elderly, and to win the cold war. With the benefit of his youth, performance in the nation’s first televised presidential debate, and the problems facing Nixon (uncomfortable appearance in the debate, Eisenhower’s record on Civil Rights, stalemate in the Cold War and the U-2 incident), JFK squeaked his way into the White House. For the most part he was unable to deliver on his campaign promises. Despite inspiring a huge swell in activism among young Americans, Kennedy lacked the experience necessary to persuade Congress to back his initiatives. In the realm of Civil Rights he drug his feet for a time in order to avoid alienating Southern Democrats who resisted equality for African Americans.

Organizations had been established among the black community to work for equality. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sprang from the Sit-in movement and helped organize others. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) based in Atlanta and eventually headed by Dr. Martin Luther King was very active throughout the South. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial group, formed and organized “Freedom Rides” to integrate bus terminals throughout the South. Despite the early hesitance of the Kennedy’s, the Civil Rights movement made strides throughout the sixties and by 1963 JFK and his brother, Robert, had begun taking a more proactive role in securing the Civil Rights of all American citizens.

Martin Luther King became the central figure in the push for equality. Born in 1929 in Atlanta, King entered Morehouse College at age 15. In 1948 he elected to follow his father and enter the ministry, leaving Atlanta to attend seminary in Pennsylvania. He then attended Boston University on a fellowship where he earned a PhD, met and married his wife Coretta Scott. The Kings decided to pass on lucrative employment offers in the North and return to the South because, as King put it, “for all its problems its home.”

From there Martin Luther King embarked on a life that put him at the top of the battle for racial equality, a dangerous position. King, with a strong faith in God, refused to be afraid, addressing supporters during the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott he stated: “I’m aware of the fact that the Ku Klux Klan is riding in Montgomery. I’m aware of the fact that a week never passes that somebody’s not telling me to get out of town…But I don’t have any guns in my pockets. I don’t have any guards on my side…I can walk the streets of Montgomery without fear. I don’t worry about a thing. They can bomb my house. They can kill my body. But they can never kill the spirit of freedom that is in my people.”

In May 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality’s freedom rides began. The organization sought to integrate all bus terminal facilities in the South (lunch counters, waiting rooms, restrooms, etc.) by riding the busses from Washington, DC to New Orleans. Everywhere the Freedom Riders went they were met with violence. The negative publicity prompted Attorney General Robert Kennedy to request the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) ban segregation in terminals that catered to interstate transportation. The federal government had taken a step towards increased involvement in the Civil Rights issue.

In 1962 James Merideth became the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi. John F. Kennedy sent US Marshals to protect Merideth. Then came the tumultuous year of 1963. Alabama had a long history of hostility towards Civil Rights, particularly Birmingham, so much so that many referred to that city as “Bombingham”. That attitude was personified in the person of Governor George Wallace, who in his inaugural speech that year exclaimed: “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” In April the SCLC began operations in the city to break down segregation there. The reasoning was that if Birmingham could be broken then the rest of the nation would be easy. King went to Birmingham to help lead the fight but was quickly jailed for marching on Good Friday. While in prison King read a statement by members of the white clergy of the city who supported limited civil rights reforms that urged African Americans to wait for equality. King responded in a letter in which he pointed out why they couldn’t wait. He wrote:

When you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown you sisters and brothers at whim…when you suddenly find yourself tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the pubic amusement park that was just advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness towards white people…when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued by inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

More and more people volunteered in Birmingham to protest discrimination and segregation there. Schoolchildren in increasing numbers, as young as 6, joined the protests. Sheriff “Bull” Conner used dogs and fire-hoses to disperse protesters in May. The increasing tensions in Birmingham prompted the Kennedy brothers to announce they sought a compromise, which was reached on May 7, 1963. Birmingham was to be desegregated and employment opportunities improved for African Americans. In exchange for these concessions the SCLC agreed to accept gradual integration. Violence and white resistance would persist in the city.

Following the Birmingham “quasi-victory” King began discussing a 100,000-man march on Washington. On June 11 Governor Wallace attempted to block the integration of the University of Alabama by standing in the doorway to the institution. The attempt failed. The next day NAACP leader for Mississippi, Medgar Evars, was assassinated in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi. Also in June President Kennedy asked Congress for legislation outlawing segregation in public housing and discrimination in employment.

With August came King’s planned march on Washington. Over 250,000 people from all across the nation gathered in Washington to demonstrate for equal rights. One man even roller-skated from Chicago to the nation’s capital. There, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. The event left the black community charged and hopeful. These hopes would be tempered on September 15 when a bomb exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four black girls ages 11 to 14.

In November, the president went to Dallas to get a head start on his 1964 reelection campaign. On November 21, as he sat in the window of his hotel looking over the city, Kennedy remarked to a secret service agent that if someone wanted to kill him there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. The words proved prophetic. On November 22 as the president’s motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza shots rang out the country stopped and Kennedy slumped over in the back of his car. The president was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital where attempts were made to save him in vain. Later that day, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested at a movie theatre. Oswald had been in the military for a short time. He went to the Soviet Union where he renounced his US citizenship, married and then returned home. Oswald protested the Kennedy involvement in Cuba (the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis). He was an employee at the Dallas School Book Depository Building where a Manlicher Carcano rifle he owned had been found with three expended shells. Oswald was only in custody a short time and never made a statement as to his guilt or innocence. On November 24, a Dallas nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, shot Oswald on national television as he was being transferred from his cell through a parking garage. Ruby would be tried and sentenced to prison where he died of cancer in 1967.

A commission was convened, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, to investigate the assassination. The results of its investigation, The Warren Commission Report, had several weaknesses. They claimed there was no conspiracy, Oswald was a lone deranged gunman and Ruby was a distraught citizen bent on revenge. Problem: military sharpshooters could not fire, load, aim, fire, load, aim, and fire again in the time span Oswald would have had to in order to be the lone gunman. Several witnesses were never called to testify. Some people have argued that the bullets found in Oswald’s gun were full-metal jacket while the one that struck Kennedy’s head had to have been a hollow-point to explain the damage. So why was it accepted? People wanted to close the book, they wanted justice, and they trusted the government in those pre-Watergate days.

As a tribute, President Johnson pushed Congress to pass Kennedy’s “New Frontier” legislation and virtually all of it was done. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin in public accommodations and employment. Johnson followed this by passing Medicare and Medicaid legislation, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act which provided funding for public schools, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which authorized the Attorney General to supervise registration of voters where less than 50% of the minority electorate had registered.

Despite such gains, African Americans were growing increasingly willing to resort to violence. The civil disobedience approach of Martin Luther King was losing its shine. Northern African Americans responded to prolonged poverty and limited opportunities with violence and riots caused by both black and white would break out across the nation from 1964 onward. Malcolm X, the former Malcolm Little, urged blacks to use violence to protect themselves. He did not advocate the use of violence to gain equality, but for defense. Hooded Klansmen in Lansing, Michigan burned down Malcolm’s home. His father died under mysterious circumstances, welfare agents divided the children, and his mother placed in a mental institution. His life took him to prison where he was exposed to the Muslim religion and became a member of the Nation of Islam. Malcolm eventually broke from the Nation of Islam and went his own way, beginning to acknowledge that not all whites were devils and realizing the virtues of passive resistance. On February 21, 1965 African Americans associated with the Nation of Islam who were angered over his break with the organization and mellowing views assassinated him.

1968 was another tumultuous year. More and more Americans were coming home in body bags from Vietnam and racial violence was still a persistent problem. On April 4, while in Memphis to help the city’s black sanitation workers gain recognition of their union, King was shot on the balcony of his hotel. Flags across the country were lowered to half-staff while King’s widow and children conducted the march he had planned to lead. In June the nation lost another leader. Robert Kennedy was leading the pack to secure the Democratic nomination for president that year. In June he won the California primary and after addressing a crowd of supporters he took a shortcut through the kitchen of his hotel. There Palestinian Nationalist Sirhan Sirhan who was angry over Kennedy’s support of Israel shot him in the head.

The sixties that had begun with the promise of Kennedy’s New Frontier and continued gains in Civil Rights ended in violence and turmoil. Those conditions would persist longer as Vietnam drug on and then Nixon plunged the nation into one of its largest political scandals: Watergate.