AG Robert Kennedy-James Baldwin Meeting: Kennedy Gets Earful
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the noted author James Baldwin agreed to convene a private, off-the-record meeting on this night where Kennedy could meet and talk with a small group of noted African Americans to discuss the state American race relations. The result was a disaster as several of the African Americans spoke candidly and sometimes in anger. Kennedy left angry and disillusioned.
James Baldwin immediately leaked an account of the meeting to the New York Times, and the Times’ stories further embarrassed the attorney general and the Kennedy administration.
The idea for a meeting arose in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama. News photographs of the Birmingham police using police dogs and fire hoses on civil rights demonstrators caused immediate outrage around the country and around the world. Kennedy’s goal was to have a “quiet, off-the-record, unpublicized get-together of prominent Negroes” so they could discuss the state of race relations. The meeting was held on a Friday night at an apartment on Central Park in New York City owned by Kennedy’s father.
Baldwin brought ten people to the meeting, including his brother David Baldwin, the noted psychologist Kenneth C. Clark, playwright Lorraine Hansberry (who wrote Raisin in the Sun), singer-actor Harry Belafonte, singer Lena Horne, Clarence Jones (Martin Luther King’s personal attorney), Jerome Smith (who had participated in the famous 1961 Freedom Ride), and others.
Kennedy began the meeting by telling everyone about all the things the administration had been doing for civil rights. This angered Jerome Smith, who like other civil rights activists had a very different view of what the Kennedy administration had done. In an angry exchange with Kennedy, Smith declared that he would “never, never, never” join the U.. military to fight against Cuba. Kennedy was deeply offended. Smith then said he would not pick up a gun to fight a war (meaning Vietnam) and telling Kennedy, “that’s your war, that’ unjust [and] unfair.”
Lorraine Hansberry then told Kennedy “Look, if you can’t understand what this young man is saying, then we are without any hope at all . . . . ”
At this point, the meeting was completely polarized and it ended with bad feelings all around. It was clear (at least to most of the African Americans present) that Robert Kennedy and his brother, with their elite backgrounds, had never been confronted by front-line civil rights activists and had no sense whatsoever of the depth of the anger and dispair among ordinary African Americans.
Read the essential book on the famous meeting: Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like: RFK, James Baldwin, and our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America (2018)
Learn about Robert Kennedy as Attorney General: Victor S. Navasky, Kennedy Justice (1972)
Read a biography of James Baldwin: James Leeming, James Baldwin: A Life (2015)
And more about Kennedy’s life: Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life (2002)
And more about James Baldwin’s life: James Campbell, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (2021)
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here