Like so many young Americans, in the early 1960s I was captivated by the Kennedys: their youth, the glamour. Intoxicating. The president was born in Boston; my mother was born in Boston; I was born in Boston. I had a small cousin I took to calling Caroline instead of Carolyn, after John F Kennedy's daughter. (Her mother was not amused.) In early adolescence, the notion of wit was beyond me, but Jack Kennedy was infinitely more appealing than that hangdog Richard Nixon, that old man Dwight D Eisenhower. He spoke of "vig-ah"; they seemed to have fun. So, the words coming over the school intercom on the afternoon of 22 November 1963 just didn't make sense. The president? Shot? Killed? Everyone in the gym was struck dumb and wobbly. Gravity had suddenly shifted. All were terrified.
It had been a scary time. Thirteen months before, during the Cuban missile crisis, we had clung to our parents as talking heads on black-and-white screens parsed the brinkmanship between Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and nuclear annihilation while barely suppressing their own anxiety. Though the crisis was experienced from the relative safety of suburban Connecticut, as a Negro child I had been rendered chronically, residually anxious by the beatings, bombings and dog attacks, the killings of Medgar Evers, the Four Little Girls and so many others, the screams of "Nigger!" and burning crosses – all that hideous, violent hate directed at Negroes (the term used by those, both us and them, who had graduated from the word "coloured") just because we wanted to do what any white person could do.
My mother had died suddenly less than two years before, so I understood "bad things" could happen; but a president was meant to be above such possibilities – not God, but invulnerable like a god, honoured and safe. If he wasn't safe – if those crazy, hating people out there could kill the president of the United States – then no one was safe. Adults didn't have answers. What followed was four days of television-saturated suspended animation, the nation a collective deer caught in the headlights.
For many of my white friends, the immediate fear and lasting sadness was in regards to a death of hope and the certainty of a bright future or, indeed, anything else – strong things, but amorphous. In my home, as in most African-American homes, the fear was far more specific: was the president killed by a racist angered by his support for civil rights, as we all suspected? And if so, what would this mean for our movement?
Foreign policy had been Kennedy's strong suit, his glamour and that of his wife enthralling the world. But, domestically, there had been all manner of vituperation clogging the air. Kennedy pushed for tax reform; Congress wasn't budging. East-west relations: "Shouldn't we just nuke the Russians?" Dr Strangelove was real. And what about the mafia's putative annoyance at interference in its affairs? That we'll never know for sure what motivated Lee Harvey Oswald is an unhealed wound in the American soul. But it was the civil rights movement and the increasingly violent response of many southerners to the inexorable African-American drive for equal rights that dominated the body politic in 1963, tainting perceptions of America both at home and abroad, and seemingly beyond the ability of the Kennedy administration to control to the satisfaction of any side.
Religious rather than racial bigotry had been the Kennedy interface with social inequity in their formative years. The stock of Catholic Irish immigrants, the family had not taken long to prosper, but despite Harvard attendance, and political and business success, they had found the upper reaches of Boston's Protestant society an unreachable Everest. My family can attest to the Negro presence in Boston. A mixture of old black Yanks and West Indians, we had essentially been bypassed by the great early-20th-century migration from the south, with its sometimes chaotic vitality. We were a fairly quiet lot, compelled to live in our own little enclave by custom and statute and easily overlooked, even more so from the splendid isolation of the various Wasp suburbs to which father Joseph Kennedy moved his family in order to deracinate his boys sufficiently that at least one of them could achieve, in defiance of anti-Catholic prejudice and with his untrammelled and sometimes unscrupulous assistance, the nation's ultimate prize.
As chronicled by any number of sources, including Taylor Branch's at once dynamic and exhaustive Parting the Waters and Howell Raines's compendium of oral witness My Soul is Rested, the Kennedys sought and came into office thinking of the Negro as little more than an exploitable Democratic resource and then always with an eye on the votes of the Dixiecrats – those southern Democrats opposed to any movement toward racial equality.
During the 1960 election, puzzled that African-American baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson, a Republican, refused to pose with him at a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) dinner, Jack consulted the already highly political singer Harry Belafonte for advice. Belafonte suggested that Kennedy forget celebrities such as Robinson and himself and cultivate Martin Luther King Jr instead. Though it was five years since King had taken over leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott initiated by Rosa Parks, three years since his establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (the SCLC) and despite King's involvement in ongoing sit-ins, Kennedy had no idea why King might be important. "What can he do?" he asked.
Five months later, urged and facilitated by advisors Harris Wofford and his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, a weary Kennedy spent an off-hand two minutes on the phone with Coretta King, expressing sympathy in regards to the recent, exceedingly dangerous incarceration of her husband in Atlanta. Kennedy's campaign manager, his younger brother Robert, was incandescent with rage. His diktat had been that under no circumstances should his brother's candidacy become fouled with any association with a man already achieving near-Antichrist status in southern eyes. But now, how to exploit this sympathy without antagonising the Dixiecrats?
Beneath the radar of the mainstream, ie white, press, millions of leaflets in plain blue covers detailing the Kennedy call were distributed in black communities in the days before the election, 500,000 in Chicago alone. The result: in Illinois, which was only carried by 9,000 votes, 250,000 black people were estimated to have voted for Kennedy. Michigan was carried by 67,000 votes, with 250,000 black people voting for Kennedy. South Carolina by 10,000 votes and, though black registration wasn't high, 40,000 voted for Kennedy. Overwhelming black support won those states, and thereby their electoral college votes, for Kennedy instead of Nixon in a contest that ended with just a 112,000 popular vote difference between the winning and losing candidates. Nixon, too, had been encouraged to make that phone call to King's wife, but he had refused.
It can, and has been, postulated that the African-American vote won the 1960 election, as Theodore White did in his book The Making of the President, 1960. But within the new administration there was no real sense of a debt to be repaid. Neither the president nor his now attorney-general brother had an appreciation for the different circumstances confronting African- as opposed to Irish-Americans, nor empathy for the degradations we faced. During one discussion on accommodations, Bobby is quoted as wondering why Negroes couldn't use toilets before we left home. Why wasn't just studying harder enough? In the face of international events such as the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the erection of the Berlin Wall, the efforts of individual Negroes to gain access to food, education and dignity seemed too trivial for presidential attention. No African-Americans were in the justice department's inner clique co-ordinating federal response to the escalating southern crisis to suggest an alternative view.
As one peruses contemporary government transcripts – as well as the reports in the mainstream press – one is aware that the blood in the streets is "Negro" rather than American blood. White insensitivity, if not outright racism, was hardly unusual at the time, yet one cannot help but wonder how much the gimlet-eyed but morally bereft assessments of business and political challenges that led Joseph Kennedy, when ambassador to Great Britain, to appease German militarism in the lead-up to the second world war skewed the interior compasses of his sons. "The Negro" was more a public relations problem then anything else, a continuing and blatant riposte to the inaugural vow "to pay any price, meet any hardship … to assure … the survival of liberty". In that legendary address Kennedy was, of course, referring to the communist threat, but in the cold war battle for African and Asian hearts and minds, this American paradox was a persistent disaster. So how to deal with the problem when the Negro refused to wait any longer, when taking risks for civil rights was considered political suicide and when J Edgar Hoover had become pathologically obsessed with the sexual lives of powerful men? (Hoover was bugging Martin Luther King Jr in search of communism and sin, but what didn't he know about Kennedy philanderings?)
Though continually furious at the refusal of civil rights leaders to slow the movement down – as though they could – and their perceived lack of appreciation for federal interventions, such as protecting Freedom Riders (black, and white, activists who rode the interstate buses to challenge segregation), by 1963 fears of Negro insurrection and the embarrassments of the Birmingham campaign had prompted the administration to propose first a toothless voting acts bill in February and something more far-reaching suggested in June and introduced to Congress in September: a Civil Rights Act with stronger teeth than that passed under the stewardship of then Senate majority leader, now vice-president, Lyndon Johnson in 1957.
While still refusing to meet King face-to-face within the boundaries of the Deep South, on 11 June Kennedy delivered a speech calling for action on civil rights that was eloquent enough to astound leaders who had despaired of any meaningful interventions on his part, earn his picture pride of place over the mantel of many a Negro hearth for decades to follow, and provoke the murder of Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field secretary of the NAACP, that very evening; but behind the show, very little had changed. While it may be said that both Kennedys were beginning to actually believe in the moral rectitude of civil rights, no aggressive manoeuvring was employed to get the legislation past southern opposition. Transcripts document the president's despair in the face of Dixiecrat intransigence, as well as just how much leeway both Governors Ross Barnett, during the bloody, burning rioting that accompanied the registration of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, and George Wallace, in the doorway of the University of Alabama, were given to maintain their public segregationist profiles in the defiance of federal law and at the cost of many lives. Such was the picture in November 1963.
Enter President Lyndon Johnson. A grandmaster of political manipulation when he was Senate majority leader, as vice-president Johnson had been sidelined and diminished for two and half years by Kennedy administration staffers to whom, according to his biographer Robert Caro, Johnson was "Rufus Cornpone", a non-intellectual and vulgar southern hick. With a Dixiecrat voting record on issues of civil rights, the new president was hardly looked upon by African-Americans as a safe pair of hands, but in his first address to Congress, Johnson vowed – for the nation, as a tribute to his slaughtered predecessor and undoubtedly for himself – to see Kennedy's civil rights bill through to law. And this he did by a combination of appeals to conscience, sweet talk, threats and by refusing to put anything else, at all, before Congress until the bill was passed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed on 2 July, after months of filibuster and bare-knuckle wrangling of a kind unknown in the Kennedy era. During the process, Johnson was continually warned that his strong-arm championship of the Civil Rights Act would send diehard Dixiecrats into Republican arms, which came to pass and remains the political reality to this day. Johnson countered that some things were just beyond politics.
Though Johnson and Robert Kennedy remained poisonous political rivals, the grief and existential soul-searching precipitated by his brother's assassination transformed a thuggish attorney-general and protector of the family crown into a champion of the underdog, regardless of colour and class, for the rest of his short life. Indeed, through the glacial prism of realpolitik – and with no wish for the consequent spiral of suffering endured by the Kennedy family and the collective spirit of the American people – it might be said that the most important thing John F Kennedy did for civil rights was to die for them.
Candace Allen is the author of Soul Music: The Pulse of Race and Music (Gibson Square, £11.99).
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion