How the Kennedys came to back civil rights: a 1960 jail call to a 1963 national address

When Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Georgia in October 1960, the Kennedy campaign phoned the governor and the judge to help get him released, and John F. Kennedy went on to win seventy percent of the Black vote, which the Park Service calls key to his victory. This is the opening of the story the Park Service tells of how Kennedy, and his brother Robert, were pushed from caution to asking Congress for civil rights legislation.

President Kennedy meeting with the leaders of the March on Washington in the Oval Office on August 28, 1963. White House photograph, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

A time of change

The 1950s and 1960s were a period of continued struggle for civil rights. Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, made segregation in public schools unconstitutional, but many states refused to comply. In 1957 nine children, known today as the Little Rock Nine, enrolled at Little Rock Central High, a segregated white school, and federal troops were sent to protect them from an angry mob. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 allowed prosecution of anyone who denied another person’s right to vote. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. became nationally known to white Americans through the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Even so, subjective literacy tests kept Black Americans from voting, and education and employment were unequal.

1960: a campaign phone call

On October 19, 1960, King was jailed for trespassing while protesting local segregation ordinances in Georgia, and then sentenced to six months of hard labor for violating probation on an earlier misdemeanor. Senator Kennedy and his brother called Georgia’s governor to ask for King’s release, and Kennedy called King’s wife to offer help, while Robert Kennedy called the judge and persuaded him to release King. The Kennedys’ role spread quickly through the Black community.

Cautious at first

In his first days in office President Kennedy told cabinet secretaries to hire more Black federal employees and asked for an audit of diversity in federal employment and pay grades. But he was reluctant to propose major civil rights legislation in his first term, for fear of losing the Southern Democrats, many of whom supported segregation and whose votes he needed for his economic and foreign policy agendas and for reelection.

Pressure from events

• The Freedom Riders, May 1961. Two groups of young activists left Washington, D.C., to test a Supreme Court ruling that segregation in interstate transportation was illegal. In South Carolina some, including John Lewis, were attacked and beaten. In Alabama a bus was fire-bombed and riders were beaten with iron bars as they fled a white mob. Attorney General Robert Kennedy deployed 400 federal marshals and the Justice Department petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission, which ruled in favor by September.
• Birmingham, April 1963. Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Shuttlesworth organized protests against the city’s discriminatory practices. The city’s commissioner ordered police to use dogs and high-pressure fire hoses on peaceful protesters, and the images were broadcast across the country. Kennedy was shocked and began to rethink the federal role. Robert Kennedy sent an assistant attorney general to mediate, and in May an agreement desegregated lunch counters and other businesses. Segregationists answered with violence, including a bombing of a hotel housing campaign leaders, and Kennedy readied 3,000 federal troops outside the city.
• A hard meeting, May 24, 1963. In New York, Robert Kennedy met writer James Baldwin and a small group of Black writers and activists. A former Freedom Rider said he would never serve a country that had denied his people their rights, and Kennedy, who prized military service, was upset. His attempt to compare his family’s experience as Irish Catholics with racial injustice alienated the group, who felt it minimized centuries of hardship. The Park Service calls the meeting crucial in shaping his views: the more he listened, the more he believed Congress had to act.
• School integration. In 1962 Kennedy sent the National Guard and federal troops to protect James Meredith, who had been repeatedly refused admission to the University of Mississippi, as student riots followed his arrival. In June 1963, when Vivian Malone and James Hood tried to integrate the University of Alabama, Governor Wallace blocked the door; Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard to make him comply.

The national address

President Kennedy delivers a radio and television address to the nation on desegregation at the University of Alabama, June 11, 1963. White House photograph, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

On June 11, 1963, the day Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door, Kennedy spoke to the nation, calling civil rights not only a constitutional issue but a “moral issue,” and proposed legislation to protect every American’s right to vote, end segregation in public facilities and require schools to integrate. He met with civil rights leaders, businessmen and religious leaders to build bipartisan support. The bill stalled; leaders organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that August, but by November 1963 it was still stuck in debate.

After Kennedy

After Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson urged passage of the bill in his honor and used his Senate experience to win support, signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2, 1964, which made discrimination in public facilities and federally funded programs illegal. Robert Kennedy, elected a U.S. senator from New York, backed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and traveled the country broadening his views on race and poverty.

President Johnson hands Senator Robert F. Kennedy a pen from the signing of the Voting Rights Act, August 6, 1965. LBJ Library photo.

In 1968 Robert Kennedy ran for president and drew overwhelming support from Black and other minority communities. On the evening of April 4, 1968, he was due to speak in Indianapolis to a mostly Black crowd when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; he told them the news, expressed his sympathy and urged peaceful, productive ways to channel sorrow. Indianapolis stayed peaceful while violence broke out in many cities. John Lewis later said Kennedy was the one man who could soothe the pain that swept through the city. Two months later Robert Kennedy was assassinated. In 1995 President Clinton dedicated the “Landmark for Peace” memorial at the Indianapolis park where Kennedy had spoken.

Sources

• National Park Service, John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site, “The Kennedys and the Civil Rights Movement,” https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-kennedys-and-civil-rights.htm; rewritten in hubnx’s own words. A portrait credited to a private photographer is left out.