Too Bad Bush Does Not Know History18:48 Jun 27 2007
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Historians have tended to believe that little more than political cynicism ever animated John Kennedy's response to civil rights—before and during his abbreviated presidency. As a rebellion among African Americans against Southern racism was mounting, J.F.K. saw the issue as less a moral crusade for the soul of America, as many white liberals believed it to be, than a potential barrier to his presidential nomination. He was mindful of the injustices of segregation but was more interested in making sure he secured white voters across the South. Kennedy's coolness toward the 1957 civil rights bill, the first major attempt to advance black equality since post-Civil War Reconstruction, provoked black civil rights leader Roy Wilkins to berate Kennedy publicly for "rubbing political elbows" with Southern segregationists.
But the Kennedys—John and his younger brother Robert, who served as J.F.K.'s Attorney General—have been given too little credit for progress on resolving America's oldest and greatest social divide. Even if J.F.K.'s passion for the cause came late, it made it possible for his successor, Lyndon Johnson, a white Texan, to become the architect of desegregation.
Although more a civil rights opportunist than a passionate convert to the cause, Kennedy sent repeated messages that if elected, he would use presidential power to promote equality for African Americans. He backed a strong civil rights plank in the Democratic Party's 1960 platform and refused to abandon that position when Southern Senators pressed him to do so. He argued that desegregation of public housing could be accomplished with one stroke of the pen as part of Executive action "on a bold and large scale." When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was unjustly jailed in Georgia, ostensibly for a minor traffic infraction but actually for trying to integrate a department store, Kennedy made a well-publicized call to King's wife offering to help arrange his release.
But once elected, Kennedy was reluctant to give in to demands for prompt and forceful action on civil rights. And his attention was elsewhere: he devoted his Inaugural Address almost exclusively to foreign affairs. Part of his restraint was simple political calculation: he and his brother knew any change would have to come from their branch, not Congress, which was dominated by conservative Southern Democrats serving as chairmen of key committees.
So Kennedy's actions were modest at first. To unify Congress and the nation behind an effective anticommunist foreign policy and win passage of other reform measures—a large tax cut to spur the economy, federal aid for education and health insurance for seniors—Kennedy confined his civil rights actions to setting up the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity in 1961. It was invented to eliminate discrimination in hiring federal employees and give federal contracts to businesses pledged to fair hiring practices. His caution allowed him to persuade Southern Senators to mute their opposition to the selection of Robert C. Weaver, a black expert on housing, as administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency. Kennedy also
appointed Harris Wofford, a law professor and prominent liberal advocate of black equality, as a special presidential assistant for civil rights and told him it was time "to make substantial headway against... the nonsense of racial discrimination," although with "minimum civil rights legislation [and] maximum Executive action."
With such small steps, Kennedy won no applause from the country's civil rights advocates during the opening months of his presidency. "I'm convinced that he has the understanding and the political skill, but so far I'm afraid that the moral passion is missing," King said. When Kennedy wouldn't sign a controversial Executive Order desegregating federally financed housing, as he had promised, he received thousands of pens in the mail.
J.F.K.'s judicial appointments underscored his initial timidity on civil rights. Although he nominated Thurgood Marshall, a prominent figure at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a leading black advocate in Brown v. Board of Education, for appointment to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Kennedy also selected five Southern conservatives for federal judgeships, which reinforced the likelihood of continuing rulings on behalf of school segregation and black disenfranchisement across the South.
In 1962, when black and white activists met violent resistance to their antisegregation campaign in Albany, Ga., the President responded by endorsing Bobby Kennedy's rhetorical pleas for reasoned discussion by both sides. King reacted angrily by sending J.F.K. a telegram "asking for Federal action against anti-Negro terrorism in the South." Kennedy did federalize the Mississippi National Guard in September 1962 and made it possible to enroll James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, but his action came too late. By then, the bloodshed had left one Oxford, Miss., resident dead and 160 federal Marshals injured. A year later, in the spring of 1963, he hesitated to ask Congress to enact a comprehensive bill that would ban segregation in all places of public accommodation.
But a crisis in Birmingham, Ala., changed his mind about the imperative of civil rights, and thus was born Kennedy's real legacy on this front. In May, police and firemen attacked black demonstrators with snarling police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses that knocked marchers down and tore off their clothes. TV images of the police violence reached around the world and embarrassed the country. A picture on the front page of the New York Times and TV-news coverage of a dog lunging to bite a teenager on the stomach incensed Kennedy, who said the photo made him sick.
Kennedy wanted to find a compromise that could end the crisis. King, who had been in a Birmingham jail since April, had already put renewed pressure on the White House by publishing a letter of complaint to white clergymen who were counseling patience and an end to civil disobedience. "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion," King wrote, "that the Negro's greatest stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice... who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom."
Segregationists gave King even greater leverage in his demand for federal action when they bombed the home of King's brother and a Birmingham motel where King usually stayed. A riot in the city's black ghetto that left nine blocks of it a smoldering ruin raised fears of similar riots all over the South. Dealings with Alabama Governor George Wallace, who had publicly promised "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," deepened Kennedy's sense of hopelessness about finding Southern moderates who would alter regional conditions without federal intervention.
The President now told his brother Bobby that the South will "never reform. The people in the South haven't done anything about integration for a hundred years, and when an outsider intervenes, they tell him to get out, they'll take care of it themselves, which they won't." The only solution Kennedy saw was a major federal civil rights statute that outlawed segregation in all places of public accommodation—parks, buses, swimming pools, theaters, hotels and restaurants. He believed such a law would give African Americans hope and remove the incentive to mob violence, not only across the South but also in ghettos all over the country.
In June, Kennedy gave a nationally televised address that was largely extemporaneous, since a formal speech had been handed to him only five minutes before he went on the air. A heartfelt appeal on behalf of a moral cause now trumped any self-serving political calculations. "We are confronted primarily with a moral issue," Kennedy said. "It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities... One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free... A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all." He followed his speech by asking Congress to enact a bill that removed race from consideration "in American life or law."
Although Kennedy's assassination five months later deprived him of the chance to sign the civil rights bill into law, he had finally done the right thing. That its passage in 1964 came under Johnson's Administration should not exclude Kennedy from the credit for a landmark measure that decisively improved American society forever. Although J.F.K. had been slow to rise to the challenge, he did ultimately meet it. That gives him a place in the pantheon of American Presidents who, in his own words, were profiles in courage.
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JFK was from the North and was a wealthy individual all of his life. He admitted that he learned about the Great Depression which he lived through at Havard. He was not one to say he experienced something that he did not.
To get elected, he needed the support of white Southern Democrats who at the time were rampant racists. They needed to be that way to get into office themselves. While I tend to believe they were able to be true to their true nature and get elected, they surely were not going to admit that what went on in the South was wrong. Telling a Southerner they are wrong is a good way to start a fight. The fight will be more brutal if you come from outside the South. I am sure Kennedy was aware of that fact. Lyndon B Johnson was on Kennedy's presidental ticket not because he was adored by the Kennedys . (In fact, it was common knowledge that there was never any love loss between him and Bobby. Read my profile and you will know whose side I am on there. ) Johnson was from Texas and the Kennedys needed the electoral votes from that state to win. They also needed Johnson to secure the Democratic nomination. I am sure Johnson knew that and used it to his advantage every chance he got. You would expect nothing less from a political protege of Sam Rayburn.
Kennedy knew that to go off half-cocked about civil rights would make him very unpopular with his party and could lead to a lame duck presidency. What president wants to find themselves in a position where they can do nothing? Martin Luther King Jr had every right to be angry. People in his home region refused to see him as a man based on the color of his skin. Neither John or Bobby could say they knew what that felt like. They had never went through that and would not. Their family had been on the shores of America less time than Martin's , but they were in the White House. I am sure that was enough there to send many African Americans over the edge.
Kennedy thought that maybe I will give the Southern Democrats time to see that what is going on is wrong. The segregationists were clueless and had no idea that they had a man with tact and finesse that was trying to bring about a peaceful end to a great social and moral wrong. They wanted to show their monkey behinds and eventually Kennedy grew tired of their behavior. He knew that the federal government would have to force change by legal means . When you get what your actions, ask for, you blame nobody but yourself. Never mind what your words said. You did it. They made their bed and had to wallow in it.
They gave Martin Luther King Jr the moral authority he should have had in the first place. If the white Southerners at the time did not like that , then they should not have helped bring that about. Many would later get mad when Martin's birthday became a holiday. They wanted to celebrate Robert E Lee's birthday as well. Lee was a brillant general who fought for the wrong side. He did not have Grant or Lincoln give him moral authority by their behavior. It was the South that seceded. They gave the moral authority to the North by many of their actions.
Because Kennedy did not act like a rabid dog and was able to carefully reason what was going on, Johnson was able to pass the civil rights act. If Kennedy had acted like the typical ugly American, nothing would have been done in the way of civil rights. Did things change overnight? No. Do we still have problems in this country regarding race? Yes. Laws may prevent someone from doing something to another who is different, but it does not change their mindset. That will take some time with some people and others who are not worth our collective effort will never change.
If Bush knew history, maybe he would have seen that going off half-cocked about anything causes bigger problems. Maybe he would have attempted tact and finesse in dealing with some of the more difficult people in this country and around the globe. No matter what political party you belong to, you can learn quite alot from an Irishman people nicknamed Jack and his brother Bobby.
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