by Scott Farris
Sixteen years later, while running for president in 1980, Reagan conceded the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “had worked” and he was satisfied with what it had accomplished in shaping a more just and equitable society.
Robert Kennedy said that while the Kennedys had been taught a “social responsibility” to help the poor, they had not been raised with any special concern for civil rights. As attorney general, RFK met with a group of civil rights activists that included the author James Baldwin. Trying to find common ground with Baldwin, Kennedy noted that his Irish ancestors had also once experienced the sting of discrimination. An angry Baldwin retorted, “Your family has been here for three generations and your brother’s on top. My family’s been here a lot longer than that and we’re on the bottom. That’s the heart of the problem, Mr. Kennedy.”
Neither did John Kennedy understand the daily struggles faced by African Americans. When Kennedy first ran for Congress, the black man who worked as his driver, George Taylor, helped organize a group of black college women to campaign for him. Taylor objected when the women were not invited to a luncheon the Kennedy sisters were hosting for white volunteers. Kennedy dismissed Taylor’s concerns, “George, you’re thin-skinned. That’s one of the things of the time.” While Kennedy campaigned for president in 1960, a black dentist in San Francisco asked him how many blacks he actually knew, and Kennedy replied, “Doctor, I don’t know five Negroes of your caliber well enough to call them by their first names. But I promise to do better.”
It was not that Kennedy was oblivious to racism. While campaigning for president, he once moved his entourage out of a hotel in Kentucky that would not let a room to a black reporter. While reviewing his inaugural parade, Kennedy noted the honor guard from the Coast Guard Academy did not include any black cadets and he ordered the commandant to never let it happen again. As a congressman, Kennedy supported some mild civil rights reforms, such as abolishing the poll tax.
But Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen acknowledged that until late in his presidency, Kennedy’s response to civil rights was “shaped primarily by political expedience instead of basic human principles.” When the Senate debated civil rights legislation in 1957, Kennedy supported strong provisions in the bill when he was sure they would be defeated, but otherwise he was happy to see the law amended into a virtually “toothless” voting rights bill that one advocate described as having as much substance as “soup made from the shadow of a crow which had starved to death.” The legislation was so weak that two years after the bill passed, not a single new Southern black had been added to the voting rolls.
Despite this extremely modest record on civil rights, Kennedy received nearly 70 percent of the African-American vote in the 1960 presidential election based primarily on a set of promises he made to the NAACP and on a single telephone call that he made to the wife of Martin Luther King Jr.
King had been arrested and sentenced to hard labor in Georgia for a minor traffic citation. Kennedy called Coretta Scott King to express his sympathy and concern. Robert Kennedy, initially livid that his brother had risked alienating white Southern voters, then called the judge in the case to press for King’s release, which occurred a few days later.
But generally Kennedy had little interest or time for civil rights. Once, while sharing a cab with his aide Harris Wofford, Kennedy said, “Now in five minutes, tick off the ten things a president ought to do to clean up this goddamn civil rights mess.”
As a candidate, Kennedy had promised to end segregation in public housing “with one stroke of the pen,” and he implied that he would appoint blacks as federal judges, since none of the two hundred federal judges on the bench in 1960 were black. Most importantly, he pledged to the NAACP that he would use the “immense moral authority of the White House” to provide leadership on civil rights.
In office, Kennedy’s performance fell far short of those promises. With Kennedy, King observed, “the moral passion is missing” when it came to civil rights. Kennedy made a few token appointments in the Foreign Service and established a commission tasked with promoting the hiring of African Americans by the federal government, an effort that even Kennedy admitted achieved minimal gains.
When Harry Belafonte and other civil rights activists pressed the president to do more, Kennedy complained, “Doesn’t he know I’ve done more for civil rights than any president in American history? How could any man have done more than I’ve done?”
Kennedy thought he was doing everything on civil rights that public opinion would allow. Polls consistently showed that a majority of Americans disapproved of segregation, but three-fifths of American thought segregation should be changed gradually, and less than one-quarter of Americans felt integration should be pushed so that it occurred quickly.
Taking his cue from the polls, Kennedy kept advising civil rights activists to be patient. King responded that blacks had learned from bitter experience that “wait means never.” Kennedy was baffled that civil rights proponents, black or white, did not understand he had more important issues to deal with. When University of Notre Dame President Father Theodore Hesburgh pressed Kennedy to move more quickly on integration, Kennedy replied, “Look, Father, I may have to send the Alabama National Guard to Berlin tomorrow, and I don’t want to do it in the middle of a revolution at home.”
But Kennedy had provided some leadership on civil rights, even if he was unaware of it. Saying they had been inspired by Kennedy’s inaugural message that the time for change had come, a group of ten men and three women—seven blacks and six whites—who called themselves “Freedom Riders” boarded a Greyhound bus together for a trip through the South to protest continued segregation in interstate transportation, which the Supreme Court had ruled the previous year was illegal. First in South Carolina and later in Alabama, the Freedom Riders were dragged from the bus and beaten by white mobs. Kennedy was furious—with the Freedom Riders.
Preoccupied with foreign policy problems in Cuba, Southeast Asia, and Berlin, Kennedy fumed that these were the types of incidents that Communists would turn into anti-American propaganda. Kennedy yelled at Wofford, whom he had made his liaison on civil rights, “Can’t you get your goddamned friends off those buses? Stop them.”
When a young woman named Diane Nash organized a second “Freedom Ride,” she resisted entreaties from White House staff that she call it off, saying, “We’re going to show those people in Alabama who think they can ignore the President of the United States.” Nash was warned that she and other riders might be killed the next time. “Then others will follow,” she replied.
While Nash may have believed Kennedy was on the side of civil rights activists, the problem was that Kennedy had not yet taken a clear stand. Based on Kennedy’s legislative past, segregationists were convinced that, deep down, Kennedy sympathized with them, and that his token efforts on civil rights represented only what he felt he had to do politically to appease Northern liberals.
Kennedy reinforced that feeling by usually explaining his actions on civil rights as the result of being compelled to do so by court order or by an obligation to enforce the law, rather than justifying it as the right thing to do.
By the end of 1962, a few months after rioting left two dead on the University of Mississippi campus when James Meredith became the first black student enrolled there, Kennedy had hopes that the civil rights movement was running out of steam. He hoped that African Americans were satisfied with the modest gains made during the previous two years, and there would now be a period of peaceful adjustment. He did not know that the civil rights movement was entering a new, and more violent, phase, and that it was spreading beyond the South.
Between May and September 1963, there were more than thirteen hundred civil rights demonstrations, several of them violent, in more than two hundred cities located in thirty-six different states. At a rally in Chicago in June 1963, King issued a direct challenge to the Kennedy White House: “We’re through w
ith tokenism and gradualism and see-how-far-you’ve-come-ism. We’re through with we’ve-done-more-for-your-people-than-anyone-else-ism. We can’t wait any longer.” King said the civil rights struggle had evolved from “Negro protest” to “Negro revolution,” while Edwin C. Berry of the National Urban League said, “The Negro is at war.” In Mississippi, after five hundred protestors were arrested and imprisoned in open pens surrounded by razor wire, local ministers announced that the time for preaching nonviolence was over. Robert Kennedy confirmed to his brother that blacks were “mad at everything;” his evidence, based on one of the few ways whites and blacks interacted, was, “My friends all say [even] the Negro maids and servants are getting antagonistic.”
It was a combination of nonviolent protest followed by violent riots that provided the impetus for Kennedy finally to take a stand. On April 3, 1963, a new round of protests began in Birmingham, Alabama, which was reputed to be the most segregated city in America. As weeks passed, the protests had minimal effect, so King and local organizers played the last card they felt that they had: They asked a thousand black schoolchildren, some as young as six years old, to lead the protests.
On May 3, Birmingham’s notorious commissioner of public safety, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, ordered the use of police dogs and fire hoses to keep the children from marching. Photographs of police dogs attacking young children and hoses at high pressure rolling little girls down the streets led the stories on the evening news and appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world. Kennedy said the images made him “sick.”
Yet Kennedy remained cautious. Buoyed by news that “moderates” within the white Birmingham business community were pledging reforms such as desegregating department store dressing rooms, and that they planned to address lunch counters and schools soon, Kennedy said at a news conference on May 8 that he still hoped “mediation and persuasion” would defuse the conflict. He again suggested that if only the right of blacks to vote in the segregated states could be secured, then eventually all racial barriers would come down. But matched against the images of brutality against children that shocked the world, such a mild response seemed “pitiful.”
On June 3, Kennedy finally consulted Lyndon Johnson about what he should do. While many liberals considered Johnson a conservative, primarily because he was from Texas, Johnson was in fact deeply committed to integration, having once taught Mexican-American children at a segregated school in south Texas. He told Kennedy that he needed to stop thinking about civil rights as a political problem. What African Americans wanted was a “moral commitment,” and once Kennedy gave that commitment, the “aura” of the presidency would change public opinion, which would change Congress, and Congress would then change the law.
A week later, on June 11, Alabama governor George Wallace failed in his attempt to block the integration of the University of Alabama. With this small civil rights victory in hand, Kennedy announced that he wanted to address the nation on civil rights that night. When Kennedy went live on television at eight o’clock Eastern Time, Sorensen and others were still working on the final pages of the speech. So Kennedy ad-libbed, noting that black children were half as likely to graduate from high school as white children and had only a third of the chance of graduating from college. Black men were twice as likely to be unemployed as whites, and a black man’s life expectancy was seven years shorter than a white man’s.
Then Kennedy said the words African Americans and other civil rights advocates had been waiting more than two years to hear, “We are confronted with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” He then announced he would soon send to Congress comprehensive civil rights legislation that would ban segregation in the schools, the workplace, and in all public accommodations, and which would ban discriminatory voter registration requirements. Kennedy had finally made clear which side he was on. And then four hours after Kennedy concluded his speech, Medgar Evers, the state NAACP secretary in Mississippi, was murdered on his driveway and bled to death in front of his wife and three small children.
Kennedy remained nervous. To prepare for the March on Washington scheduled for August 28, 1963, he placed nearly twenty thousand troops on alert in case things turned violent. Federal officials controlled the sound system, so if anyone became too radical, his or her microphone would be turned off. More than three hundred inmates were moved out of Washington, DC, jails to ensure there was room for the demonstrators whose arrests were expected. The sale of alcohol was banned in the district that day. Nearly a quarter-million demonstrators gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial. None were arrested.
The peaceful march was the pinnacle of the civil rights movement, its most vivid memory being King’s closing speech and his extemporaneous soliloquy that began, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” Less remembered, author Nick Bryant noted, is King’s earlier warning that everyone would be in for “a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as normal.” Kennedy, who had never seen King speak, watched on television and said, “He’s good. He’s damned good.” Aide Lee White said it appeared that Kennedy was more impressed by the power of King’s performance than the power of his message.
Yet, as impressive as King’s speech and the peacefulness of the assemblage were, it did not give Kennedy’s civil rights legislation the boost it needed. The bill remained stalled in Congress while Kennedy saw his job approval rating drop to 56 percent in September 1963, the lowest level of his presidency. It was below 50 percent in several Southern states, leading Kennedy to believe he was likely to lose the entire South in his 1964 reelection campaign.
But after Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, Johnson overruled advisors who thought the civil rights bill was a lost cause. On November 27, Johnson told Congress that the best way to honor Kennedy’s memory was to pass the civil rights bill. “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights,” Johnson said. “We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”
LBJ pried the bill out of the House Rules Committee and then sufficiently flattered Senate Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois to round up enough conservative Midwestern Republicans in support of the bill to counter the loss of Southern Democrats. It was the type of arm-twisting and backslapping that Kennedy disdained, but it worked: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law in July 1964.
Then, within weeks of the law’s passage, to the befuddlement of many who thought that African Americans would be appeased by the real progress that was being made, blacks rioted in Harlem. The rioting spread to other cities in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri before the summer’s last disturbance in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Nine people were left dead and 580 injured.
While campaigning for president in 1960, Kennedy had warned that striking down the Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation in the South was only part of the battle; there were also “the more subtle but equally vicious forms of discrimination that are found in the clubs and churches and neighborhoods of the rest of the country.” This discrimination remained after the laws were changed. As Goldwater observed of the rioting during his 1964 campaign, “No law can make one person like another if he doesn’t want to.”
Racial violence and the white backlash it caused were significant reasons Reagan defeated incumbent Pat Brown to win election as governor of California in 1966.
The August 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles, in which thirty-four people were killed and more than one thousand were injured, was a particular turning point in white attitudes toward civil rights. In the spring of 1965, polling found nearly three-quarters of Americans believed racial integration was being pushed at “about the right” pace or “not fast enough”; by the fall of 1966, a majority of Americans (52 percent) felt the country was moving
too fast on racial equality. As political scientist James L. Sundquist noted, “The image of the Negro in 1966 was no longer that of the praying, long-suffering nonviolent victim of southern sheriffs. It was a defiant young hoodlum shouting ‘black power,’ and hurling ‘Molotov cocktails’ in an urban slum.”
As the challenger in the 1966 election, Reagan used the riots (and fear of black crime) to his political advantage, but he had a moderately progressive record on race as governor. He made more minority appointments than any previous governor, and following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, Reagan held a series of listening sessions to learn the concerns and criticisms of African Americans.
Reagan agreed that blacks had “legitimate grievances” and deserved “an equal place on the starting line.” He supported efforts by businessmen to hire minorities and was a particularly enthusiastic booster of one project that claimed it had found eighteen thousand jobs for unemployed blacks in Los Angeles. As Reagan biographer Lou Cannon has said, “Reagan’s outreach toward minorities during his governorship was more purposeful and sustained than any similar effort during his presidency.”
By the time Reagan was elected president, attitudes about race had changed significantly. Large numbers of whites believed the goal of eliminating racial discrimination in law had been achieved, and it had since been superseded by policies promoting racial preferences. Surveys showed that whites overwhelming opposed affirmative action or minority set-aside programs, which they considered “reverse discrimination.”
When Democrats now used words like “opportunity” or “fairness,” increasing numbers of whites heard it as code for government programs that gave minorities advantages over whites, or which advocated a redistribution of income. Whites worried that black economic gains would come at their expense, and this anxiety was exacerbated by an economy in which many blue-collar jobs were being lost as factories closed or moved overseas. For these workers, “the period from 1978 through 1982 represented a second Great Depression.”