Senator John F. Kennedy Praises Sit-Ins
On this day, Senator John F. Kennedy, candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, praised the sit-ins challenging segregation in the South, which began on February 1, 1960. Kennedy declared that “the American spirit is coming alive again.” He added that the inevitable unrest, turmoil, and tension were “part of the process of change.”
Once he became president, however, Kennedy disappointed civil rights leaders by initially failing to push for civil rights legislation or support civil rights in other ways. He did not, for example, support the Freedom Rides that began on May 4, 1961. On May 20, 1961, for example, he made a statement on the Freedom Ride that included a moral equivalence between the Freedom Riders and the racists who were committing violence against them. He delayed for almost two years a limited ban on discrimination in federally-assisted housing, which he had promised to sign during the 1960 campaign. He finally signed the order on November 20, 1962.
Kennedy did an about-face on civil rights in the spring of 1963 but only in response to the massive and highly publicized demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama. The president and his aides were worried that massive civil rights demonstrations would spread across the country (which in fact happened), that some of them would involve violence, and that he might lose the support of African American voters in the 1964 presidential election. In response, on the evening of June 11, 1963, when he gave a nationally televised speech calling for a federal civil rights bill. The speech was the first nationally televised civil rights speech by a sitting American president and it transformed his image among African Americans. After the speech, however, he tried to talk civil rights leaders out of organizing what became the famous March on Washington on August 28, 1963. Finally, in response to pressure from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized wiretaps on Martin Luther King on October 10, 1963 because he allegedly had communists or pro-communists on his staff.
After Kennedy’s assassination, the bill eventually was passed under President Lyndon Johnson as the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Learn more about Kennedy and civil rights: Nick Bryant, The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality (2006)
Watch the 1960s sit-ins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbbcjn4d1cE
Learn more about SNCC: Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981)
And more about President Kennedy’s record on civil rights and civil liberties: Samuel Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties From Wilson to Obama (2012)
Learn more: Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960 – 1972 (1990)
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here