ABSTRACT
By the time of his death in 1963 many black Americans had come to see John F. Kennedy as the ‘white knight of the modern civil rights movement’, a movie star president with a deep moral commitment to equality which allowed him to bridge the racial chasm in American society.1 As early as the first year of his term in the White House, Kennedy himself claimed, ‘I’ve done more for civil rights than any other president in American history.’2 Kennedy is the slain hero of the New Frontier whose violent death signalled the descent into the bloody turmoil of the 1960s when US society itself seemed to be disintegrating. The man in the Oval Office during this tumult was Lyndon Johnson. It was during his presidency that the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s was passed. The dominant images of those years, however, are flaming cities and burning Vietnamese villagers. The sunlit promise of Johnson’s Great Society was increasingly clouded by the national trauma wrought by the conflict in South East Asia. Even before the war in Vietnam took its toll on the Johnson pre-
sidency it was evident that he was not admired in the same way Kennedy was. One commentator said of Johnson, ‘the sacerdotal, priestly, almost mystic quality of the Presidency eluded him’.3 Kennedy mastered the power of symbol in the politics of civil rights. The slow moral commitment to the cause he showed, however, helped exacerbate a rising tide of frustration and disillusionment that could not be stemmed by the legislative achievements of LBJ. Kennedy’s popular appeal increased in potency following his death and this has shaped perceptions of civil rights and the presidency in the 1960s. Many of my own students, before studying the issues in any depth, regularly assert that JFK was a great champion of African-American rights. When asked to explain where this view comes from they vaguely allude to the subconsciously absorbed representations of popular culture – a testament to the success of the politics of symbolism that
characterised Kennedy’s civil rights policy. This chapter seeks to examine the attitudes, aims and policies of Kennedy in relation to the struggle for black equality and briefly explore the impact this had on the Johnson administration and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Historians were quick to question the achievements of Kennedy’s
presidency in a revisionism which initially flourished in the 1970s. Critics argued that Kennedy was too conscious of the problems posed by the southern Democrats and was too timid in his support for civil rights legislation. He offered limited moral leadership on the civil rights issue.4 Jim Heath tackled the image of JFK as a heroic supporter of black freedom by stating, ‘Kennedy was not the gigantic figure in civil rights that some of his admirers claimed.’5 Recognition of the limited tangible achievements of the Kennedy administration in the legislative arena is important. We must, however, attempt to understand the President’s relationship with black America in a broader sense if we are to fully grasp his impact on the modern civil rights movement and the presidency of Johnson. John F. Kennedy was born into a wealthy middle-class family and had
little if any experience of the problems which afflicted both workingclass blacks and whites. He did not visit any of the deep southern states before he was forty and he had little interest in or understanding of white southern society. In his younger years he was stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, for a four-month period at the naval shipyards, but his private correspondence reveals no interest in racial matters. The experience had little impact on his attitudes towards civil rights. Indeed even into adulthood Kennedy was not exposed to blatant acts of racism. He had no black friends and his closest black acquaintance was his valet, George Taylor.6 JFK did not share some of the bigotry of the Boston Irish Catholic community he grew up in and he was not a racist. Such was Kennedy’s ignorance of black America, however, that his brother, Robert, hired Harris Wofford, a white southern liberal whose friends included Martin Luther King, to advise the Kennedy presidential campaign in 1959.7
Although he was not acquainted with the deep problems of AfricanAmericans, JFK’s roll call history on civil rights issues in the House was as good as that of any other northern congressman. He supported fair-employment legislation, abolition of the poll tax and launched a one-man campaign against southern committee chairmen who opposed Home Rule for Washington DC.8 Kennedy was motivated by a realisation that racial discrimination and impediments to legislation aimed at improving the economic life of black citizens was an embarrassment in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union. As president,
Kennedy realised that pursuing victory in the Cold War entailed eliciting support from black and white Americans.9 It was from this common sense reading of the racial problems facing mid-century America that Kennedy’s early pro-civil rights voting record emerged. He believed that foreign affairs were absolutely crucial to the nation’s future and he devoted much of his energies in preparing for the 1952 Senate campaign learning about the issues.10
