An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (108 page)

The march marked a memorable moment in a century-long crusade for black equality, its distinctive features not violence or narrow partisanship on behalf of one group’s special interest but 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’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 one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood. . . . I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, 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, which received broad network TV coverage, 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, Wilkins, Randolph, and Reuther expressed confidence that the House would pass a far-reaching bill, which would put unprecedented pressure on the Senate to act. Kennedy offered a two-pronged defense of continuing caution. First, he said, though “this doesn’t have anything to do with what we have been talking about,” the group should exercise their substantial influence in the Negro community by doing something that “the Jewish community has done,” putting an emphasis 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 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 Eisenhower might help enlist Republican backing generally and the support of House minority leader Charlie Halleck in particular. Kennedy did not think that an appeal to Eisenhower 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 the former president. (Signaling his unaltered conviction that the “bomb throwers”—as Johnson called uncompromising liberals—would do more to retard than advance a civil rights bill, Kennedy jokingly advised against including Walter Reuther in the delegation seeing Ike.) In the end, Kennedy concluded the one-hour-and-ten-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 or bipartisan civil rights measure as his only chance for success.

On September 2, when he gave CBS anchor Walter Cronkite an interview at Hyannis Port, Kennedy did not blink at the likelihood that his support of major reforms, especially civil rights, would hurt him in the South. But he tried to blunt potential Republican gains and advance the civil rights bill by asking Republicans to “commit themselves to the same objective of equality of opportunity. I would be surprised,” he said, “if the Republican Party, which, after all, is the party of Lincoln and is proud of that fact, as it should be . . . if they did not also support the right of every citizen to have equal opportunities, equal chance under the Constitution.”

A bombing at a church in Birmingham on September 15, which killed four young black girls—two of them sisters—made the sense of urgency greater than ever. On the nineteenth, King and a group of black Birmingham leaders met with Kennedy at the White House to discuss ways to avert further violence against blacks and preserve the city’s tranquillity. King described the situation in Birmingham as so serious that it not only threatened the stability of the city “and Alabama but of the whole nation. . . . More bombings of churches and homes have taken place in Birmingham than any city in the United States and not a one of these bombings over the last fifteen to twenty years has been solved,” King told the president. “The Negro community is about to reach a breaking point. . . . There is a feeling of being alone and not being protected. . . . If something isn’t done to give the Negro a new sense of hope and a sense of protection,” King warned, “. . . then we will have the worst race rioting we have ever seen in this country.” The presence of state troopers was no help. To the contrary, their methods,” King said, were “just unbelievable and barbaric. . . . We feel that these troopers should be removed, and be replaced with federal troops, to protect the people.” Second, King urged the cancellation of federal government contracts with Birmingham businesses that continued to discriminate against blacks.

Kennedy resisted both suggestions. If conditions in Birmingham continued to deteriorate, he promised to consider dispatching troops, but he believed that once he sent in federal forces, he would have “an awful time getting them out” (as he feared would be the case in Vietnam). He thought it essential for the black community to avoid violence. “If the Negroes begin to respond, shoot at whites, you lose,” he said. “Because when everybody starts going for guns, they’ll shoot some innocent people, and they’ll be white and then that will just wipe away” any white goodwill toward blacks. “I can’t do very much,” Kennedy added. “Congress can’t do very much unless we keep the support of the white community throughout the country.” If that disappears, “then we’re pretty much down to a racial struggle, so that I think we’ve just got to tell the Negro community that this is a very hard price they have to pay to get this job done.” All Kennedy would commit to was sending former Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall and former West Point football coach Colonel Earl Blaik to mediate the crisis. Kennedy saw their national status as so high that they would be able to draw Birmingham’s white moderates into some kind of agreement with the city’s black leaders, which Governor Wallace would find difficult to challenge. He also met with Birmingham officials at the White House. He had no illusion, he told them, that the desire for segregation would disappear, and he predicted that a city with a 40 or 45 percent black population could not cling to traditional habits without increasing tensions and racial violence. He urged the hiring of some Negro policeman and clerks in department stores as a useful way to head off further agitation. The alternative was a city that would likely disintegrate as a viable community.

When the city fathers complained that these steps would probably lead to integration in places of public accommodation, Kennedy encouraged them to develop a sense of proportion about what they faced. Integrating the police force and department stores or even public accommodations like hotels and motels would be relatively painless, he said. There would be few black policemen and clerks; nor, he said with a slight condescending twinge, would many blacks have the financial wherewithal to stay at hotels and motels. The greatest difficulty he saw would be in integrating elementary and secondary schools, where classes would be almost evenly divided between blacks and whites. When the city fathers complained that outside agitators like King, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Young were a principal source of their problem, Kennedy replied that even without black activists from outside the state, Birmingham’s problem would not go away. In addition, if moderates like King stood aside, more radical groups like SNCC would take their place, and “they’re sons of bitches,” Kennedy emphasized. He ended by asking his visitors to support the Royall-Blaik initiative, which would allow the federal government to stay out of Birmingham and create some sense of progress and provide a breathing spell from more violence. As newcomers to the city’s government, the city officials pleaded for time to establish their administration before addressing so controversial an issue as civil rights .

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 would be “very helpful” in buying time for the country to advance toward a peaceful solution to 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. A lot of “these fellas would rather have an issue than a bill,” Kennedy said about liberals and conservatives. He was so discouraged by late October over the “bad news” coming out of the House that he told Evelyn Lincoln, “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, the 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 an answer to their question. If, as seemed most likely, Smith could keep the bill bottled up in his committee for just one month, it would go over to the 1964 session, when so controversial a measure would have little chance of surviving in an election year.

Yet the news on civil rights was not all bad for Kennedy. After a visit to Arkansas in October, where he spoke about the state, the South, and the country, the
Arkansas Gazette
declared his visit a “solid success,” that “suggests that the Republicans may be counting prematurely in adding up all those electoral votes for 1964 from a Solid Republican South.” The paper acknowledged that the president was “probably . . . beyond help in Mississippi and Alabama, but then Mississippi and Alabama weren’t even with him the last time around.” Southern moderates saw Kennedy as a voice of reason in the shrill debate over civil rights. The president “came to Arkansas as a friend and not to do battle with anyone,” the
Gazette
declared. “He said the state and national governments should be partners, not antagonists. His good humor was evident, along with a flashing wit, and his habit of mixing with the crowds stands him in good stead. There is not much question that the President, as they say, did himself some good on this venture into the South.”

If Kennedy’s political problems in the South were less than he feared, the racial divide in the region remained a problem that seemed certain to dog the country and his administration for the foreseeable future. Even in the unlikely event that the administration’s November 20 bill won House and Senate approval, it would not have satisfied civil rights advocates for long. The bill had eliminated retail stores and personal services from the public accommodations section, included no Fair Employment Practices Commission, sharply restricted EEOC enforcement powers and federally assisted programs that had to meet desegregation standards, and limited voting rights to federal elections. Constrained by fear of white resistance, including possible violence, to a comprehensive civil rights statute and by concerns about southern support in 1964, Kennedy had reached for compromise solutions that could buy time and allow him to address the issue again in a second term.

In doing so, Kennedy misread the situation, as he had in dealing with southern congressional Democrats in the Eighty-seventh and Eighty-eighth Congresses between 1961 and 1963. His hope that avoiding a confrontation with southern congressmen and senators over civil rights might help win passage of other administration priorities, like a tax cut, Medicare, and federal aid to education, proved false. Would a strong appeal for civil rights legislation from the first have better served Kennedy’s legislative agenda? Almost certainly not, but given congressional resistance to his initiatives, it wouldn’t have hurt it, either. And it would have put the administration in a stronger position to win passage of a comprehensive civil rights bill in 1963. If Kennedy had urged such a law from the start of his presidency, he could then have argued that his bill would have prevented the racial strife in Mississippi and Alabama in 1962 and 1963. It would have been a forceful justification for enactment of civil rights legislation in the summer of 1963.