by Thomas Maier
For nearly four hours, the group assembled before the attorney general told them of their deep frustration. In the South, school children were blocked from public schools, and the Northern cities seemed ready to boil over in violence. Bobby Kennedy still viewed civil rights for Negroes in the same polite vein as progressive reforms of immigration laws that discriminated. Both defensive and at times clueless, Kennedy’s performance was maddening to his guests. “My brother is President of the United States, the grandson of immigrants,” he insisted. “You should understand this is possible.”
Baldwin scoffed at this contention. They lived in a world where a black man was “still required to supplicate and beg you for justice,” he intoned. Baldwin and other guests said the president and the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer should treat civil rights as a “moral issue” rather than a vexing political demand by another interest group who appeared, in Bobby Kennedy’s term, “insatiable.” They suggested that President Kennedy, as a sign of his commitment, escort a black child into a school in the Deep South, a request that Bobby dismissed out of hand as an empty gesture.
During the meeting, one young invitee, Jerome Smith—who had been beaten and jailed during the Freedom Ride protests in Mississippi—bitterly surveyed the racially motivated confrontations around the nation and suggested that he could not conceive of “fighting for my country” under such conditions. Bobby Kennedy was outraged, his face turning redder by the moment, as if he didn’t understand the young man’s estrangement at all. One of the Kennedy brothers had been killed in World War II, and the president nearly lost his own life. Whatever their resentments about bigotry or institutional barriers in Boston, Irish Catholic immigrant families never expressed such brazen anti-American feelings. As newcomers, the Irish were determined to appear as superpatriots, eager to fight for the cause of their adopted homeland. Kennedy attacked the young man’s audacity, bringing the others to Smith’s defense. They were disappointed that Bobby just didn’t get it.
Eventually, in deep frustration, the guests, led by Lorraine Hansberry, stood up, coolly thanked the attorney general and walked out the door.
“Bobby Kennedy was a little surprised at the depth of Negro feeling,” Baldwin explained afterward.“We were all a bit shocked at the extent of his naïveté.”
DURING THEIR FORMATIVE years, John and Robert Kennedy had spent little time wondering about the plight of African-Americans. They knew only a handful of Negroes, the common term during their youth, usually people working for the family as valets or in other menial jobs. In many ways, the Kennedy brothers’ lack of interaction with Negroes reflected the experience of fellow Catholics from the Boston area. While growing up, as Bobby later admitted, he “didn’t lie awake at nights worrying about the Negro in this country.” The Kennedys were too engrossed in their own tribal struggles, particularly the Irish grab for power and social acceptance from the Brahmins, to consider a population found predominantly in the Deep South. “As far as separating the Negroes for having a more difficult time than the white people, that was not a particular issue in our house,” Bobby later acknowledged in the mid-1960s. Joe Kennedy didn’t throw around epithets about Negroes as he did about the Jews, but one suspects he might have done so if he had known more. Because Negroes in Boston were few and were predominantly Protestants, many Irish Catholics paid them little attention until after World War II. As more Negroes moved north, however, the racial dynamic changed dramatically in Boston. Thousands of whites, regardless of religion or ethnicity, fled their old neighborhoods, a pattern that was mirrored in cities such as New York and Chicago.
The Irish, once confined to the ghetto, were now found solidly within the ranks of the middle class. Because many Irish now perpetrated bigotry, several violent white-black confrontations occurred in the 1960s. Cardinal Cushing, in the ecumenical spirit of Vatican II, warned that the church would not tolerate racism and segregation. Despite the ugliness of some Irish, national opinion polls showed that Irish Catholics were among the most liberal-minded whites in America on the matter of race. Nationally, the Roman Catholic Church advocated the desegregation of schools and public facilities throughout the 1940s and early 1950s—well before the U.S. Supreme Court cases striking down Jim Crow laws and racially segregated schools. In some dioceses in the South, local Catholics were threatened with excommunication for bigoted actions against blacks. Despite the uneasiness of its flock on racial matters, many members of the Catholic clergy often proved to be among the most progressive voices for civil rights around the nation.
The Kennedys, however, were slow to understand or embrace the political causes of African-Americans. In the Senate, Jack Kennedy appeared to be a feckless supporter of civil rights when he forged an uneasy alliance with Southern conservative Democratic senators such as James Eastland of Mississippi and the Texan, Lyndon Johnson, solely for his own political gain. JFK’s willingness to compromise on a watered-down 1957 Civil Rights Bill, which many Northern Democrats such as Hubert Humphrey opposed on principle as too weak, was described by one critic as “a profile in cowardice.” The first time Kennedy met the nation’s most prominent civil rights leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King, he failed to impress. “He didn’t know too many Negroes personally,” King recalled. On civil rights issues, there seemed little difference between Kennedy and his likely Republican rival, Richard Nixon. King worried about Kennedy’s lackluster civil rights voting record and his family’s previous alliance with Joe McCarthy. Jack Kennedy, like his brother, seemed to view Negroes through the prism of his family’s own immigrant experience. In A Nation of Immigrants, John Kennedy cast Negroes as an unassimilated immigrant group rather than a subjugated people who had arrived on these shores against their will.“Only in the case of the Negro has the melting pot failed to bring a minority into the full stream of American life,” he contended.“Today we are belatedly, but resolutely, engaged in ending this condition of national exclusion and shame and abolishing forever the concept of second-class citizenship in the United States.”
Blacks were not without their own stereotypes of Kennedy. In his 1960 presidential run, Kennedy courted several African-American leaders but failed to engender much support, at least initially. Many in the predominantly Protestant Negro religious community expressed severe reservations about voting for a Catholic, often showing overt religious bias. Negro leaders showed little sympathy or identification with Kennedy as a minority facing bigotry in America. Rather, Kennedy appeared as a wealthy white man with a strange and unfamiliar religion, perhaps more unlikely to help their cause than a white politician from their own denomination. A Jet magazine survey in 1959 showed that “many Negro ministers opposed his candidacy on the religious basis alone.” Several Southern Baptists favored Nixon over Kennedy, a sentiment shared by King’s father, the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. As his son remembered, the senior King and other Negro ministers were wary of Kennedy, sharing “this holdback, a feeling that a Catholic should not be president for religious reasons.” When word reached him about King’s father, Kennedy seemed shocked.
“That was a hell of an intolerant statement wasn’t it?” he exclaimed to his aides.“Who could have thought Martin Luther King could have a bigot for a father?”
Then, Kennedy paused and smiled at the rich irony of the moment.
“Oh well,” he sighed,“we all have our fathers, don’t we?”
FOR MUCH OF THE campaign, Kennedy tried to attract black voters without alienating more Southern white voters. At times, this strategy appeared to fail at both ends. Kennedy’s overtures to well-known black politicians, such as New York’s Representative Adam Clayton Powell, were rebuffed. Two months before the 1960 Democratic Convention, Kennedy gave a speech before some African diplomats at a Washington luncheon in which he likened America’s race problem to a scene in a popular movie calledThe Defiant Ones in which a white man and a black man—bound together— get out of a pit only by h
elping each other.“The movie’s theme had a personal meaning for the late President,” Simeon Booker later wrote in Ebony. “As a member of a minority, both in heritage and religion, he knew and had felt the sting of discrimination.”Yet fearful of losing crucial support in traditionally Democratic Southern states already inflamed by the religion issue,Kennedy’s commitment to civil rights often seemed thin and insincere.
Aware of his difficult balancing act, Kennedy asked Sargent Shriver to put his own budding political career in Chicago on hold to work full time for his presidential campaign. Shriver soon became the chief contact with liberals and Negro leaders. His own liberal Catholicism served Shriver well in this new role. As a founder of the national Catholic interracial movement, Shriver was the first to introduce Martin Luther King Jr. to a public audience in Chicago. During the campaign, Shriver worked closely with civil rights expert Harris Wofford, recruited from Notre Dame Law School by Joe Kennedy with the help of his old friend, former university president Father John Cavanaugh. Wofford remembers the skepticism at Notre Dame about Kennedy’s chances, and the resentment about his strict promise to keep religion out of constitutional duties.“I found only one Catholic member of the faculty who was openly and actively for the Senator,”Wofford said. “The priests were particularly dubious.” But the Kennedys persuaded Wofford to join their effort, and as a former counsel to the National Civil Rights Commission, he brought along many close alliances with key Negro leaders, including Dr. King. For weeks,Wofford and Shriver pushed hard to gain some public signal, if not an outright endorsement, from the nation’s best-known and most revered Negro leader. “We thought it [King’s approval] would add important momentum to the campaign, and help counteract the anti-Catholic mood of many deeply Protestant Negro clergymen,” Wofford wrote in a memoir of the era.
The turning point was Martin Luther King Jr.’s arrest in Atlanta that October. Police took the civil rights leader into custody along with dozens of others during a sit-in protest. They objected to the blatant discrimination at one of the South’s largest department stores, which routinely refused luncheon service to Negroes. King sat in jail for four days, refusing on principle to post bail, while his pregnant wife, Coretta Scott King, remained at home worried about his safety. In the streets, the Ku Klux Klan made threatening noises. During the middle of the night, King was shackled and transported from the county jail to a state prison more than two hundred miles from Atlanta—raising even greater concerns for his safety.
Behind the scenes,Wofford helped arrange for King’s release on the trespass charge. At the last moment, though, a local judge declared that King had violated his probation from an earlier incident and sentenced him to four months of hard labor. Southern Democrats already resented the Kennedy camp’s efforts to free King. Conversely, many Negroes worried that the Democratic presidential candidate would do nothing. At a crucial point, Wofford suggested to Shriver that he convince Kennedy to call Coretta King, simply as a sign of his personal concern for her husband. Shriver rushed to the Chicago airport hotel where Kennedy and his aides were staying that night. He waited until he was alone for a moment with his brother-in-law to broach the idea. “Negroes don’t expect everything will change tomorrow, no matter who’s elected,” Shriver argued.“But they do want to know that you care.” Kennedy thought about it briefly.“What the hell,” he replied, almost reflexively, “That’s a decent thing to do. Why not?” Kennedy placed the call without telling any of his chief political aides, including his brother Bobby, the campaign manager.
In conversation with Mrs. King that night,Kennedy offered any help his family could provide. News of the late-night telephone call soon leaked out. When Bobby discovered what had gone on behind his back, he was furious. He inflicted a vigorous tongue lashing to Wofford, swearing that his politically dangerous advice to Jack had probably cost them the election. As he stewed about King’s plight in jail, however, Bobby Kennedy took it upon himself to call the local judge. He argued strenuously over the telephone until the judge agreed to allow King to post bond. In the middle of the night, Bobby called Louis Martin, another Kennedy aide admonished that day along with Wofford. Martin heard Bobby describe what he’d accomplished. “You are now an honorary Brother,” joked Martin, a Negro, in irreverent delight.
Within the next few days, the Kennedys’ intervention rallied Negroes around the country. On Election Day, African-Americans would vote by a margin of about 80 percent for Kennedy, a pivotal margin in several large states around the nation. The senior King immediately dropped his support for Nixon and promised a swell of Negro votes for the Democrats. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” admitted Daddy King. “But now he can be my President, Catholic or whatever he is.” As Martin Luther King Jr. later observed, Kennedy’s telephone call required some courage—“a risk because he was already grappling with the religious issue in the South.” Returning home to Atlanta, King gave a rousing sermon, praising Kennedy’s actions and speaking out against any who might shun the candidate as a Catholic. “I never intend to be a religious bigot,” King preached to his many followers.“I never intend to reject a man running for President of the United States just because he is a Catholic. Religious bigotry is as immoral, undemocratic, un-American and un- Christian as racial bigotry.”
King’s healing, spiritual words suggested a common thread in the struggles of all minority groups in America. Even if their origins were very different, King suggested the shared pain of discrimination could be ultimately unifying for minority groups. Jail became for him another test of this faith. “We must master the art of creative suffering,” King implored. To the Kennedy brothers, however, Negroes remained another minority group striving for their place in the American establishment. The Kennedys were learning, but still quite defensive about race. It would take many months, and several more crises, for them to realize how intractable problems were for black Americans.
THE WHITE HOUSE became considerably less white under the new president. Without any fanfare, several Negroes, including Louis Martin, were appointed to high-ranking positions, and all-white bastions in the government were integrated for the first time. At the inaugural, for example, Kennedy was perturbed to find that the Coast Guard unit assigned to the celebration was without any Negroes, a point he later mentioned to his wife. As first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy changed the social dynamic of the White House so that blacks were not merely entertainers for invited white politicians, but distinguished guests themselves. In her conversations and gestures, Jackie never appeared phony or patronizing.
On the subject of race, however, the most surprising Kennedy proved to be Bobby, who became the nation’s top law-enforcement officer at his father’s urging. Bobby had favored Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, who turned down the job. “He [Ribicoff] didn’t think a Jew should be putting Negro children in white Protestant schools in the South—that wasn’t the way to handle it—at the instructions of a Catholic,” RFK later recalled. In retrospect, Bobby would insist that the religious discrimination of the 1960 election—the barrage of hate mail and threats from the Klan—made it inevitable that civil rights would be a priority in his brother’s administration. “If the campaign meant anything, if what Jack Kennedy had always stood for meant anything, it meant doing something in this field,” Bobby said about civil rights.“It was never a question of sitting around and thinking, ‘Well, should we do it or should we not do it’ because it was always quite clear that we would do it. And had to do it.”
Not everyone was convinced. Notre Dame University president, the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh—who did not hold the same unabashed admiration for the Kennedys as his predecessor, Father Cavanaugh—felt that JFK acted slowly to alleviate racism in the South. As an Eisenhower appointee to the national Civil Rights Commission, Hesburgh met Kennedy twice in private and was heartened by his words and intended actions. But then nothing happened, certainly not enough for Hesburgh’s liking. “During the Kennedy Admi
nistration, the civil rights issue really imposed itself upon them, rather than they imposing themselves on civil rights,” he observed. Initially,Kennedy issued executive decisions to prevent discrimination in housing and other areas, but his major goals had yet to be addressed by the third year of his presidency. Frustrated with the pace, Wofford asked to work with Shriver at the Peace Corps.
Before leaving, Wofford urged Kennedy to replace him with Louis Martin as special assistant for civil rights “for we are heading into stormy weather with Negro leadership in view of the rising disappointment over our current slower strategy.” Martin, a former executive with the Chicago Defender Publications, emerged as an important bridge between the Kennedys and the Negro community. Shriver, who liked and trusted Martin, invited him to join the transition team after the election. Martin pushed for progress, carefully and steadily, with clear objectives in mind. When Kennedy selected Robert Weaver as the first black to a cabinet-level post, some Negroes grumbled that Weaver was too deferential to whites. Without hurting his own credibility, Martin took the long view.“This guy, whatever you think of his militancy or whether you call him an Uncle Tom or whatnot, has a chance to make history,” Martin urged.“Let’s make some history.” On the matter of civil rights, his overall message to Kennedy remained a moral argument, logically and persuasively put.