This article is the seventh installment of an HPR series exploring President Kennedy’s legacy as we reflect on the 50th anniversary of his assassination.
This Thanksgiving, we remember that the majority of the United States’ African-American community is grateful for President John F. Kennedy. It is difficult to concisely synthesize the influence President Kennedy had on the black community, especially considering that any reflection made today is distracted by another man whose 2008 ascension to the office of president had an astronomical impression on the lives of black people around the world.
Still, there were the phone calls of 1960. A few weeks before the November election, Martin Luther King, Jr. was sentenced to hard labor and solitary confinement in a Georgia jail as a result of a sit-in that violated his probation; then-presidential candidate Senator John F. Kennedy called to offer his support to a six-months pregnant Coretta Scott King.
The conversation may have been construed as political finagling; a last ditch effort in a very close race. But the call is more appropriately labeled ‘reluctant’ as both campaigns toed the balance between courting black voters and losing southern white ones. Mrs. King was scared for her husband’s life and appealed to both Kennedy and Nixon’s camps for support. It was Kennedy aide and eventual White House civil rights special assistant Harris Wofford who spoke to Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, and Shriver who finally convinced the candidate that a phone call wouldn’t sink the election.
And while Shriver was right in that most white voters didn’t notice, he didn’t predict Mrs. King telling her friends about the kind Mr. Kennedy. Brother and campaign-handler, attorney Robert F. Kennedy, made calls to the judge that sentenced King, securing his almost immediate release, and African Americans took notice. King’s father, a lifelong registered Republican and a Baptist preacher with a congregation bloc to carry, flipped his endorsement of Richard Nixon to support the man he had previously discounted primarily due to his Catholic faith: “Because this man was willing to wipe the tears from my daughter[-in-law]’s eyes, I’ve got a suitcase full of votes, and I’m going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.”
John F. Kennedy should be remembered as the first president to actively envelop the African-American community into the general American constituency. Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election by the slimmest of margins in a race where 70 percent of the African-American electorate, many of whom voted in key swing states, went his way. In his autobiography, Martin Luther King, Jr. writes, in reflecting upon Kennedy’s phone call to his wife:
He did it because of his great concern and his humanitarian bent. I would like to feel that he made the call because he was concerned…So I think that he did something that expressed deep moral concern, but at the same time is was politically sound. It did take a little courage to do this; he didn’t know it was politically sound.
Efforts to integrate domains such as buses and universities during the first two years of the Kennedy presidency ignited tensions across the south, resulting in violent mobs of protestors that didn’t hesitate to taunt, injure, or spit on blacks attempting to enter a public school or sit at the front of a public bus. President Kennedy routinely sent federal marshals and mobilized the National Guard to protect the Freedom Riders and the James Merediths. Eventually, he realized the flimsiness of single-instance remedies and proposed the Civil Rights Act about five months before his assassination. Addressing the nation, he said, “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution” and simultaneously uplifted millions of black Americans who had never before believed that the man who inhabited the Oval Office could truly be for them.
There’s a belief that leans more towards the side of reality than old wives’ tale—the belief that most 20th century African Americans had three figures on the walls of their homes: Jesus Christ, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy. Those three were and are the “heroes.” The people that prepared the road for millions of black children; one of them named Barack Hussein Obama. It’s remarkable that one of the three was a person whose life—Irish-American male born to a government official and homemaker, raised in New England prep schools, and matured at Harvard—had little resemblance to the inhabitants of the homes in which his image resided. That he stumbled into role of civil rights hero yet didn’t run away from it is what I find perhaps most remarkable about his legacy.
There’s a reason Lyndon B. Johnson publicly declared the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to be the most fitting eulogy for our nation’s 35th President. And there’s a reason that President Kennedy remains a landmark in African-American history. I’ll argue that his relationship with African Americans and commitment to civil rights is a landmark in the history of President John F. Kennedy.
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