John F. Kennedy’s Civil Rights Speech of June 11, 1963 (Part 2 of 6 – JFK’s Record on Civil Rights Before President)
When James Hood and Vivian Malone were admitted into the University of Alabama, Americans could feel fairly certain of two things: First, they could be certain that Alabama Governor George Wallace would stand in front of the schoolhouse door to bar their entrance, since his highly publicized promise to do so had been credited with winning him the Governorship. Second, Americans could be certain that President Kennedy would put his efforts into carrying out the court order and securing the admission of the two students. The uncertainties were all about degrees. Would Governor Wallace be satisfied with a face-saving show of resistance, or would he use his considerable oratorical skills to inflame the local populace? As for Kennedy, the question was whether or not he would finally come out on behalf of integration, not just because the law required it, but because it was the proper and moral course to take?
When “the Little Rock nine” had been admitted to Central High School in 1957, President Eisenhower had made it clear that he was merely carrying out a duty that was required of him, and that he had little sympathy with the black students. He adamantly refused to make any statement on behalf of the students or the cause of civil rights. This position infuriated his more liberal personal secretary, Ann Whitman, who argued with him about civil rights on several occasions. Eisenhower would just say, “Ann, you would feel differently if you had been raised in the South.”[1]
It was now 1963 and six years had passed, but President Kennedy seemed to be no more eager than Ike had been to speak out on behalf of civil rights. When asked about the oncoming crisis in Alabama at a press conference on May 22nd, the President said, “The courts have made a final judgment on this matter. I am obligated to carry out the court order. That is part of our Constitutional system. There is no choice in the matter. It must be carried out, and laws which we do not like must be carried out, and laws which we like. This is not a matter of choice.”[2] It was hardly the ringing endorsement of civil rights that leaders such as Martin Luther King and Roy Wilkins had been requesting. As author Richard Reeves would put it: “Wallace was in the schoolhouse door, but no one was sure yet where the President stood.”[3]
Just where did John Kennedy stand on the issue of civil rights? According to his chief speechwriter and alter-ego, Ted Sorensen, Kennedy had been “mildly and quietly” in favor of civil rights as senator. When Kennedy had run for President in 1960, his main opponent, Hubert Humphrey, was neither mild nor quiet when it came to the subject. Hubert Humphrey had made his first step into national prominence with a speech at the 1948 Convention that all of the party stalwarts, including President Truman, had considered wildly ill-advised. But the speech exhilarated the delegates: “To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights – I say to them, we are one hundred and seventy two years late!”[4]
At the 1960 Convention, Humphrey was no longer a viable threat, but once again there was Adlai Stevenson, waiting in the wings and seemingly ready to accept a third successive nomination for the presidency. Eleanor Roosevelt was at the convention and was throwing her support behind Stevenson. Kennedy, she said, was someone “who understands what courage is and admires it, but has not quite the independence to have it.”[5] When Kennedy met with Mrs. Roosevelt to try to gain her backing, she loudly chastised him, in a room full of people, over his failure to stand up against his family’s friend, Joe McCarthy.[6]
Kennedy received the nomination, but it was not long before he came to the realization that the black vote was not going to be delivered to him like the morning mail. He had dissatisfied many with his choice of Lyndon Johnson as the Vice Presidential nominee, and his opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, had a strong record on civil rights and was unwilling to cede the vote to the Democrats. When baseball star Jackie Robinson publicly endorsed Nixon after meeting with both of them – he said that Kennedy had failed to look him in the face – Kennedy was in serious jeopardy of losing the black vote in a race that was looking to be one of the closest ever. “I have consistently taken a strong position on civil rights,” Nixon wrote in his thank you letter to Robinson, “not only for the clear-cut moral considerations involved, but for other reasons which reach beyond our nation’s borders.”[7] 
African Americans had historically supported the Republican Party of Lincoln. In his 1932 landslide victory against Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt had received a mere 23% of the black vote. He was able to wrest the vote away from the Republicans by a combination of symbolic actions, such as the creation of a “black cabinet” to advise him on issues of civil rights; and his enforcement of policies that tended to help poorer Americans. Roosevelt never came out in favor of anti-lynching laws or voting rights legislation, but received residual credit for his wife’s obvious sympathy and support of such issue.
In 1960, once again, the vote seemed up for grabs. 
Kennedy had been aware for some time that he had a lot of convincing to do in order to attract the African-American vote. One morning Harry Belafonte had been surprised to find John Kennedy waiting for him outside his apartment with a driver but no advisors. He asked Belafonte how it was that Robinson could endorse Nixon, and wanted to know if the singer would be willing to organize black “stars” on behalf of Kennedy. Belafonte told him that the person Kennedy needed to get to know was Martin Luther King. “Why do you see him as so important?” Kennedy asked. “What can he do?” Belafonte tried to explain that civil rights was more than an issue, but that it was turning into a religious cause, and that King had a special hold on its community. “Forget me,” he said. “Forget Jackie Robinson and everybody else we’ve been talking about. If you can join the cause of King, and be counseled by him, then you’ll have an alliance that will make the difference.”[8]
Kennedy also spoke to Harris Wofford, who would, along with Louis Martin, run the civil rights division of his campaign. “[John Kennedy] had been warned that he was doing very badly with black voters and needed to do something, so he called me in and he said, ‘I understand that this is part of your past and it needs to be part of my present, because I don’t know many Negroes,” Wofford recalled. “I never have gotten to immerse myself in that question in our society. I’ve been interested in foreign policy, mainly. I don’t know much about it. What should I know and who should I see?”[9] Wofford told him, among other things, that he should declare that he would end housing discrimination with “one stroke of the pen,” i.e., a presidential decree, and Kennedy did so.
When, just three weeks before the election, Martin Luther King was arrested for taking part in a demonstration against a segregated establishment in Atlanta and sentenced to four months of hard labor, civil rights was again pushed into the forefront. Wofford received a phone call from King’s wife, Corretta Scott King, who was six months pregnant and “almost in hysteria.” After the phone call, it occurred to Wofford that it would help if John Kennedy gave her a call. Wofford shared the idea with Sargent Shriver, Kennedy’s brother-in-law and a chief aide, and Shriver thought that it was a wonderful idea but would never happen if they shared the idea with any of the other strategists. So Wofford and Shriver waited in a hotel room with Kennedy until the others had left and then Shriver said, “Why don’t you call Mrs. King? She’s pregnant, she’s terribly upset, just give her a call and say you’re concerned.” Kennedy thought about it for a moment. “What the hell,” he said. “That’s a decent thing to do. Why not? Get her on the phone.” Shriver dialed the number. “I know this must be very hard for you,” Kennedy told Mrs. King. “I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.”[10]
When Bobby Kennedy, who was the campaign manager, found out about the call, he was furious. “Do you know three Southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khruschev, or Martin Luther King, they would throw their states to Nixon? Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us?”[11]
“Well, one reason we did it,” Louis Martin interjected as soon as he was able to interrupt Kennedy’s torrent of abuse, “was that they took Dr. King out of Atlanta on an old traffic charge of driving without a license. Then they sentenced him to four months on the chain gang, denied bail, and took him off in the middle of the night to the state prison. All in one day.”
Robert Kennedy looked momentarily perplexed. “How could they do that? Who’s the judge? You can’t deny bail on a misdemeanor.”
Martin found it almost comical that Robert Kennedy thought that a Georgia judge would feel bound by laws when dealing with a black citizen. “Well, they just did,” he said. “They wanted to make an example of him as an uppity Negro. That’s why it’s so dangerous to us in the campaign. I’ve heard that Jackie Robinson is trying to get Nixon to hold a press conference and blame the whole thing on the Democrats.” Martin was now making things up, although, he reasoned, this concurrence of events was certainly plausible. “Those are all Democrats running things down there.”
Robert Kennedy, exhausted and near the end of the rigorous campaign, could only moan, “Uh, goddammit.”[12]
Driving to the airport the next day with John Seigenthaler, Robert Kennedy wondered out loud if he should call the judge in order to draw some of the fire away from his brother and toward him. “I said, you know, I don’t think you ought to get into it. It will make news and it will only exacerbate the political liability,” Seigenthaler said, and he believed that he had talked Kennedy out of making the phone call. He would find out that later in the day, however, Robert Kennedy had called the judge. “It was just upsetting to me,” Robert Kennedy told Seigenthaler, “and the longer I thought about it the angrier I got and I couldn’t concentrate on the speech so I went to the telephone and called him.”[13] Robert Kennedy had told Wofford much the same thing, that the more he thought about “this son of a bitch of a Georgia judge putting a decent American in jail,” the angrier he got, and that he got on the phone and told him “that if he were a good American he’d get King out of jail.” Wofford would later speak to the judge, who had a different description of the phone call. “The judge said what Bob actually said was, look, you’re a good Democrat and I’m a Democrat and my brother’s a Democrat, and unless you do something to get Martin Luther King out of jail my brother may not even carry the state of Massachusetts, so if you’re a good Democrat, help us get King out of jail.” [14]
On Robert Kennedy’s part it was a combination of moral outrage and political calculation. By calling the judge he not only got King released, but he did indeed draw the fire from his brother. Whether or not the Kennedys consciously drew inspiration from the way that Eleanor Roosevelt became a lightning rod on liberal issues, drawing the fire and getting credit for the Administration while allowing her husband to take relatively little action, is unknown, but it is certainly the manner in which they conducted things once Robert became Attorney-General.
In any event, the phone calls seemed to be an example of exactly the kind of human response that blacks felt lacking in Eisenhower. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” Martin Luther King’s father had said. “But now he can be my President, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I’ve got all my votes and I’ve got a suitcase, and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”[15]
John Kennedy won the election, which was one of the closest in history. During the transition, he met with no civil rights leaders. When Harris Wofford read Kennedy’s Inaugural Address on the day before the Inauguration, he was shocked. “You can’t do this,” he told the President-Elect. There was not a single word regarding civil rights. “There’s an equal rights struggle here at home, too,” Wofford said. “You have to say something about it. You have to.”
“Okay,” Kennedy said. And he added to the phrase “…unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed and to which we are committed today and around the world,” the words at home, so that it read “at home and around the world.”[16]
Two words. It was a start.
[1] Ann Whitman Papers, The Dwight Eisenhower Presidential Library, Interview of Ann Whitman by Matt Teasley.
[2] Public Papers of the Presidents, The American Presidency Project (www.presidency.ucsb.edu/) Press Conference, May 22, 1963.
[3] Reeves, Richard. President Kennedy: Profile of Power. (Simon and Schuster, New York) 1993, p. 499.
[4] Caro, Robert. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York) 2002, p. 442.
[5] Schlesinger, Arthur. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. (Houghton, Mifflin Company, Boston) 1965, p. 14.
[6] Sorensen, Ted. Kennedy. (Harper and Rowe, New York) 1965, p. 86.
[7] Ambrose, Stephen. Nixon: The Education of a Politician 1913-1962. (Simon and Schuster, New York) 1987, p. 538.
[8] Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63. (Simon and Schuster, New York), 1988, p. 306.
[9] Interview with author.
[10] Interview with author. Also Branch at 362.
[11] Wofford, Harris. Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties. (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York) 1980, p. 17.
[12] Branch at 365.
[13] Interview with author.
[14] Interview with author.
[15] Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954 – 63. (Simon and Schuster, New York) 1988, p. 366.
[16] Reeves at 38-39.
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