In the two years after he became president, John F. Kennedy faced no more daunting domestic issue than the tension between African Americans demanding equal treatment under the Constitution and segregationists refusing to end the South’s system of apartheid. While Kennedy tried to ease the problem with executive actions that expanded black voting, job opportunities and access to public housing, he consistently refused to put a major civil rights bill before Congress.
He believed that a combination of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans would defeat any such measure and jeopardize the rest of his legislative agenda, which included a large tax cut, federal aid to elementary and secondary education, and medical insurance for the elderly. His restraint, however, did little to appease Southern legislators, who consistently helped block his other reforms.
When a civil rights crisis erupted in Birmingham, Ala., in the spring of 1963, Kennedy considered shifting ground and pressing for congressional action. In May, as black demonstrators, including many high school and some elementary school children, marched in defiance of a city ban, police and firemen attacked the marchers with police dogs that bit several demonstrators and high-pressure fire hoses that knocked marchers down and tore off their clothes. The TV images, broadcast across the country and around the world, graphically showed out-of-control racists abusing innocent young advocates of equal rights. Kennedy, looking at a picture on the front page of The New York Times of a dog lunging to bite a teenager on the stomach, said that the photo made him sick.
But Kennedy’s response was more than visceral. He saw an end to racial strife in the South as essential to America’s international standing in its competition with Moscow for influence in Third World countries. Moreover, Kennedy feared that as many as 30 Southern cities might explode in violence during the summer. The prospect of race wars across the South convinced him that he had to take bolder action. Burke Marshall, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, recalled that the president now saw Birmingham as representative of a pattern that ‘would recur in many other places.’ JFK, Marshall said, ‘wanted to know what he should do–not to deal with Birmingham, but to deal with what was clearly an explosion in the racial problem that could not, would not, go away, that he had not only to face up to himself, but somehow to bring the country to face up to and resolve.’
Kennedy concluded that he now had to ask Congress for a major civil rights bill that would offer a comprehensive response to the problem. Kennedy told aides: ‘The problem is [that] there is no other remedy for them [the black rioters]. This will give another remedy in law. Therefore, this is the right message. It will remove the [incentive] to mob action.’ On June 11, Kennedy made the decision to give a televised evening speech announcing his civil rights bill proposal. With only six hours to prepare, it was uncertain that his counselor and speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, would be able to deliver a polished text in time. The president and his attorney general brother, Bobby, discussed what he should say in an extemporaneous talk should no text be ready. Five minutes before Kennedy went on television, Sorensen gave him a final draft, which Kennedy spent about three minutes reviewing.
Although Kennedy delivered part of the talk extemporaneously, it was one of his best speeches–a heartfelt appeal in behalf of a moral cause that included several memorable lines calling upon the country to honor its finest traditions. ‘We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,’ he 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 … Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise … The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand … A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all … Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.’
The following week, on June 19, Kennedy requested the enactment of the most far-reaching civil rights bill in the country’s history. He presented it against the backdrop of the murder of Medgar Evers, a leading black activist in Mississippi and veteran of the D-Day invasion, who was assassinated a day after the president’s June 11 speech by a rifle shot in the back at the door to his house in front of his wife and children.
The proposed law would ensure that anyone with a sixth-grade education would have the right to vote. It also would eliminate discrimination in all places of public accommodation–hotels, restaurants, amusement facilities and retail establishments. Kennedy described the basis for such legislation as clearly consistent with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, the 15th Amendment’s right of citizens to vote regardless of race or color, and federal control of interstate commerce. In addition to expanded powers for the attorney general to enforce court-ordered school desegregation, he also asked for an end to job discrimination and expanded funds for job training, which could help African Americans better compete for good jobs, and the creation of a federal community relations service, which could work to improve race relations. But more than moral considerations were at work in Kennedy’s decision. Bobby and the president understood that unless they now acted boldly, African Americans would lose hope that the government would ever fully support their claims to equality and would increasingly engage in violent protest. The alternative to civil rights legislation was civil strife that would injure the national well-being, embarrass the country before the world and jeopardize the Kennedy presidency.
Yet Kennedy doubted that he could persuade Congress to act and believed that a planned march on the Capitol in August might do more harm than good. White House press leaks were already discouraging the idea when the National Urban League’s Whitney Young asked Kennedy at a meeting whether newspaper reports about the president’s opposition were accurate. Kennedy responded, ‘We want success in the Congress, not a big show at the Capitol.’ He acknowledged that civil rights demonstrations had pushed the administration and Congress into consideration of a major reform bill but said, ‘now we are in a new phase, the legislative phase, and results are essential. The wrong kind of demonstration at the wrong time will give those fellows [on the Hill] a chance to say that they have to prove their courage by voting against us. To get the votes we need we have, first, to oppose demonstrations which lead to violence, and, second, give Congress a fair chance to work its will.’
When other civil rights leaders at the meeting explained that the August 28 march would occur regardless of White House support, the Kennedys tried to ensure its success. Worried about an all-black demonstration, which would encourage assertions that whites had no serious interest in a comprehensive reform law, Kennedy asked Walter Reuther, head of the United Automobile Workers, to arrange substantial white participation by church and labor union members. Kennedy also worried that a small turnout would defeat march purposes, but black and white organizers answered this concern by mobilizing more than 250,000 demonstrators. To ensure that as little as possible went wrong, Bobby directed his Civil Rights Division assistant attorney general to work full time for five weeks guarding against potential mishaps such as insufficient food and toilet facilities, or the presence of police dogs, which would draw comparisons to the Birmingham demonstrations. Moreover, winning agreement for a route running from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial precluded the demonstration at the Capitol that the president feared would antagonize Congress.
The march marked a memorable moment in a century-long crusade for black equality. Its distinctive features were not violence or narrow partisanship on behalf of one group’s special interest, but rather a dignified display of faith on the part of blacks and whites that America remained the world’s last best hope of freedom and equality for all; that the fundamental promise of American life–the triumph of individualism over collectivism or racial or group identity–might yet be fulfilled. Nothing caught the spirit of the moment better, or did more to advance it, than Martin Luther King Jr.’s concluding speech in the shadow of Lincoln’s memorial. In his remarks to the massive audience, which was nearly exhausted by the long afternoon of oratory, King had spoken for five minutes from his prepared text when he extemporaneously began to preach in the familiar cadence that had helped make him so effective a voice in the movement. ‘I have a dream that on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood … I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low; the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together … And when this happens, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: `Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” As the marchers dispersed, many walked hand in hand singing the movement’s anthem:
We shall overcome, we shall overcome, We shall overcome, some day. Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, We shall overcome some day.
Despite the success of the march, Kennedy remained uncertain about prospects for a bill of any kind. But he was genuinely impressed and moved by King’s speech. ‘I have a dream,’ he greeted King at a White House meeting with march organizers that evening. (When King asked if the president had heard Walter Reuther’s excellent speech, which had indirectly chided Kennedy for doing more to defend freedom in Berlin than Birmingham, Kennedy replied, ‘Oh, I’ve heard him plenty of times.’) Almost euphoric over the size of the turnout and the well-behaved, dignified demeanor of the marchers, Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph and Reuther expressed confidence that the House would pass a far-reaching bill that would put unprecedented pressure on the Senate to act. Kennedy offered a two-pronged defense of continuing caution. First, while recognizing ‘this doesn’t have anything to do with what we have been talking about,’ he urged the organizers to exercise their substantial influence in the Negro community by putting an emphasis, ‘which I think the Jewish community has done, on educating their children, on making them study, making them stay in school and all the rest.’ The looks of uncertainty, if not disbelief, on the faces of the civil rights leaders, toward a proposal that, at best, would take a generation to implement, moved Kennedy to follow on with a practical explanation for restraint in dealing with Congress. He read from a list prepared by Special Assistant for Congressional Relations Larry O’Brien of likely votes in the House and Senate. The dominance of negative congressmen blunted suggestions that Kennedy could win passage of anything more than a limited measure, and even that was in doubt.
Kennedy’s analysis of congressional resistance moved Randolph to ask the president to mount ‘a crusade’ by going directly to the country for support. Kennedy countered by suggesting that the civil rights leaders pressure the Republican Party to back the fight for equal rights. He believed that the Republicans would turn a crusade by the administration into a political liability for the Democrats among white voters. And certainly bipartisan consensus would better serve a push for civil rights than a one-sided campaign by liberal Democrats. King asked if an appeal to former President Dwight D. Eisenhower might help enlist Republican backing generally, and the support of House Minority Leader Charlie Halleck in particular. Kennedy did not think that such an appeal would have any impact on Halleck, but he liked the idea of sending a secret delegation made up of religious clerics and businessmen to see Eisenhower. (Signaling his unaltered conviction that the ‘bomb throwers’–as Vice President Lyndon Johnson called uncompromising liberals–would do more to retard than advance a civil rights bill, Kennedy jokingly advised against including Reuther in the delegation that would see Ike.) Kennedy concluded the hour-and-10-minute meeting by promising nothing more than reports on likely votes in the House and the Senate. It was transparent to more than the civil rights leaders that Kennedy saw a compromise civil rights measure as his only chance for success.
Kennedy knew that it would take years and years to resolve race relations in the South, but he still believed that passage of a limited civil rights bill could be very helpful in buying time for the country to advance toward a peaceful solution of its greatest domestic social problem. But it was not to be. Between the end of September and the third week in November, House Democrats and Republicans–liberals and conservatives–entered into self-interested maneuvering over the administration’s civil rights proposals. He was so discouraged by late October over the bad news coming out of the House that he told Evelyn Lincoln, his secretary, that he felt like packing his bags and leaving. He also complained that the Republicans were tempted ‘to think that they’re never going to get very far with the Negroes anyway–so they might as well play the white game in the South.’ Still, because he believed that it would be ‘a great disaster for us to be beaten in the House,’ he made a substantial effort to arrange a legislative bargain. Kennedy’s intervention in a meeting with Democratic and Republican House leaders on October 23 produced a compromise bill that passed the Judiciary Committee by 20 to 14 on November 20. But the Rules Committee remained a problem. Larry O’Brien and Ted Sorensen asked the president how they could possibly get the bill past committee chairman Howard Smith, a Virginia segregationist who was determined to stop it from getting to the House floor in the 1963 session. Kennedy left for a political trip to Dallas on November 21, without providing an answer to their question.
The following day, the problem would be Lyndon Johnson’s.
This article was written by Robert Dallek and originally published in the August 2003 issue of American History Magazine.
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