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Part 3: The Kennedys Tear Down Jim Crow

John F. Kennedy “literally shook his head with incredulity” when he learned that Prince Edward County abandoned public education.

~ Brian E. Lee, A Matter of National Concern

In speaking of the years 1961-64, there can be little doubt that the major impetus for the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964—which eliminated Jim Crow laws in the South—was President Kennedy at the White House, and Robert Kennedy and his assistant Burke Marshall at Justice. In close support was a group of individuals who—like Philip Randolph and Charles Houston—almost never get the recognition they deserve. These were the judges of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That court encompassed six former states of the Confederacy: Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. They worked in concert with RFK and Marshall to overturn lower court rulings that went against the attorney general, and to cite individuals—including governors—for contempt when they disobeyed court orders. The men on that circuit are so important that at least four books have been written about them. It is a measure of the historical value of the four volumes under review that I could find no reference to that court in any of them. Yet it was their cooperation with and support of the attorney general that kept the pressure on until 1963 when the tactics of Sheriff Bull Connor ignited the issue into national consciousness in Birmingham. By that time, May of 1963, JFK already had a civil rights bill in process.

I

Eisenhower tried to persuade Earl Warren not to decide in favor of Brown

Harris Wofford was an assistant to the Civil Rights Commission set up by the Johnson/Eisenhower bill of 1957. As he writes in his book, Of Kennedys and Kings, President Eisenhower resisted enacting every recommendation that the commission suggested. (p. 21) As we have also seen, both Eisenhower and Nixon failed to back the Brown v Board decision of 1954. In fact, Eisenhower actually tried to discourage Chief Justice Earl Warren from deciding in favor of the plaintiffs in the Brown case. As we have seen, the only time that Eisenhower acted to apply the decision was in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. In that case, Eisenhower had to be asked to join the case. And he waited three weeks to send in troops to protect the students after being badgered by the mayor to do so. (Brauer, p. 4) In the Autherine Lucy case at the University of Alabama in 1956, Eisenhower failed to back the NAACP court order that allowed Lucy to continue her education in graduate school. The college and the student body literally ran her off the campus. Eisenhower did not send in marshals to escort her to class, nor did he federalize the National Guard to maintain order on campus. (Bernstein, p. 97; Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes, p. 64)

This nod and wink by Eisenhower to the South encouraged their power brokers to find ways to dodge the court order or scheme around its objective. And this was something they were primed and ready to do. For example, in 1955, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi stated that the Brown decision wrecked the Constitution because it disregarded the law in deciding integration was right. He then closed with, “You are not required to obey any court which passes out such a ruling. In fact, you are obligated to defy it.” (Bass, p. 17) That kind of plea was made viable because Eisenhower had never stood up for the issue. For a Republican, Eisenhower had done well in the South in the 1952 election, and even better in 1956. As Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall were closing in on Plessy v Ferguson, the Southern solution had been to build newer, nicer, separate schools for African American students. But when the Supreme Court restated the 1954 decision in 1955, it stressed that public schools should be integrated and there was no point in building new schools and arguing that these schools were equal.

As we have seen, President Kennedy was already on record as supporting the Brown decision. After he was inaugurated, there were two specific cases that Eisenhower had dawdled on which fell to him. One was in New Orleans, the other in Prince Edward County, Virginia. As we shall see, the contrast with Eisenhower—who called these issues a local problem—could not have been more dramatic. Even in 1956—after the Brown restatement—when the governor of Texas called out Texas Rangers to stop African American children from registering at court-ordered integrated Mansfield High School, Eisenhower failed to act. (Bass, p. 122)

Led by Senator Harry Byrd and columnist James Kilpatrick, Virginia was urged to abandon public education altogether. The state now passed laws decreeing any district that obeyed Brown would have funding ceased. (Nancy McLean, Democracy in Chains, p. 25) In January of 1959, higher courts overturned this action. (p. 65) The state schemed again, this time by using state vouchers for a segregated private system. This ultimately failed due to another court challenge. But in the meantime, 1,800 African American children in Prince Edward County had no schools to attend. What made this most notable was that Prince Edward was one of the five counties that Charles Houston had targeted to overturn Plessy v Ferguson. As Brian Lee wrote in his Ph. D. thesis, A Matter of National Concern, Eisenhower actually encouraged this scheme by saying that states were not required to maintain a system of public education, and therefore the president was “powerless to take any action.” (Lee, p. 50)

The Kennedys disagreed. The attorney general called Prince Edward “a blight on Virginia” and “a disgrace to our educational system and to our country”. (Lee, p. 22) President Kennedy now began to remake the 4^th Circuit Court of Appeals, governing Virginia and nearby states, altering Eisenhower’s composition in order to strike down these schemes. (Lee, p. 6) In the meantime the White House did something that is probably unprecedented. While the president altered the court, the attorney general asked William Vanden Heuvel to raise money to build a free school system to educate the Prince Edward African American students left behind. Further, Burke Marshall attempted to join the NAACP legal action in Virginia, not as a friend of the court, but as a plaintiff. This had never been done by Eisenhower in six years. (Lee, pp. 145-150)

New Orleans: Ruby Bridges was the only student left at the school

This unprecedented action in Virginia was paralleled by what the administration immediately did in New Orleans. That school district, after a successful lawsuit to integrate schools, at first stalled and then schemed. Finally, federal Judge J. Skelly Wright ordered integration to proceed in September of 1960. The state legislature now passed laws circumventing Wright’s order. The Eisenhower administration asked Wright to delay issuing his new order declaring the state laws unconstitutional until after the November elections. They did not want to deal with another Little Rock. (Bass, p. 132)

Across from the school: this is what she was being protected from

The pathology sanctioned by the White House continued. The state legislature passed laws to oust school board members and to even fire teachers who agreed to work with black students. (New Orleans Magazine, “The Struggle for Education”, January 2016) Wright again struck them down. The judge then asked for federal marshals to escort the students of color to their new schools. Louisiana now took up a scheme inspired by Orval Faubus in Arkansas. The schools ended up being largely empty, since the white students boycotted them and their parents picketed them. (Bass, p. 129)

As in Virginia, the legislature threatened to close down schools by withholding funds. Wright now called RFK’s assistant Burke Marshall. Marshall advised Bobby Kennedy of the situation. The attorney general replied, “We’ll have to do whatever is necessary.” (Bass, p. 131)

Burke Marshall & RFK

The Kennedy administration again did something unprecedented. In February of 1961, Burke Marshall filed charges against the state secretary of education, Shelby Jackson. Marshall’s aim was to block the attempt by the governor to cut off funding for integrated schools. (Bass, p. 135) Wright set a trial date to begin proceedings against the secretary for contempt of court. Jackson backed off and said he would not interfere. He avoided a prison sentence by pleading he had a weak heart.

Steven Levingston does not mention Shelby Jackson. Nor does he note the New Orleans schools case or Judge Wright. You will also not see the Prince Edward Free Schools listed in his index. But I should also note, these two cases were done without any consultation with King, though he would have endorsed them both, as other civil rights leaders did. Thus Levingston’s twin themes—that somehow King was the only focus of the race issue, and the Kennedys were denying his requests and did not understand his message—are simply not substantiated by the record. And this is in early 1961!

The administration also began to finish up Charles Houston’s work that, again, Eisenhower had abandoned. Bobby Kennedy made it a point to speak at the University of Georgia Law Day on May 6, 1961. As historian Carl Brauer wrote, this was the first time in memory that an attorney general had directly addressed the civil rights issue in the South. (Brauer, p. 95) He did this partly in order to congratulate the university for its efforts in integrating the college with relatively little violence in January of that year; partly to aid the efforts of the Fifth Circuit, for they had completed the process of integration at that university. (Bass, p. 136) In that address, the attorney general said that he planned on abiding by and enforcing the Brown decision. He spent half the speech talking about civil rights. The Kennedys would also make good on the Charles Houston goal of completing integration of higher education—a goal Eisenhower abandoned with the Lucy case—and this address was part of achieving that goal.

Senator Kennedy compared his civil rights record to Nixon’s

In a larger sense, these were the first steps toward fulfilling a campaign promise that Senator Kennedy made on November 1, 1960 in Los Angeles. Neither Levingston nor Margolick deal with this speech, so we are left with the impression that civil rights were not an issue in that race. That is not accurate. In that speech, Senator Kennedy compared his congressional record with Richard Nixon’s on civil rights. He also compared his stand on the minimum wage, which when boosted would help many African Americans. He concluded by saying that although not everyone can have equal abilities, “everyone should have the same chance to develop their talent.” Which was something he was trying to do with education.

II

In Part 2, we discussed the Freedom Rides of May, 1961. The end result of all this was that two lawyers from the attorney general’s office filed a petition to the Interstate Commerce Commission. In the latter part of May, a request went up to issue regulations eliminating segregation at bus terminals. Under pressure from Burke Marshall, the ICC issued these in September. Marshall convinced Senator John Stennis to get the last three towns in Mississippi to remove their discriminatory signs. (Brauer, p. 109) By the end of 1962, Jim Crow was eliminated in interstate transportation. (Bernstein, p. 68)

In Wofford’s memo of December 1960, he wrote, “Ending discrimination in voting is the point of which there would be the greatest areas of agreement and the greatest progress could be made.” (Bernstein, p. 68) This was a primary goal of candidate Kennedy as opposed to Richard Nixon. In October of 1960, JFK proposed to his civil rights advisory group that they use access to voting records that the Civil Rights Commission had gained to file lawsuits in court based on voting discrimination. On the day Bobby Kennedy was confirmed as attorney general, the judiciary chairman, James Eastland of Mississippi, commented that his predecessor had never filed a civil rights case in Mississippi. This was true. It was also an understatement. During Eisenhower’s two terms, his administration had filed a total of ten civil rights lawsuits. Two of those were posted on his last day. (Golden, pp. 100, 104) The day after RFK’s confirmation, his brother sent him a note saying, “Get the road maps—and go!” Which meant: start sending your men into the backwoods of the South to secure those records and file cases.

In one year RFK doubled the amount of lawyers in the civil rights section. During that same year he doubled the amount of cases that Eisenhower had filed in two full terms. By 1963, the number of attorneys in that section had quintupled. (Golden, p. 105) RFK then hired 18 legal interns to search microfilm records in suspect districts. That opened 61 new investigations—in just a year. Prior to the Kennedy administration, it is clear that neither the Brown decision nor the strictures of the Civil Rights Commission were being obeyed. To increase the tempo, Bobby Kennedy went from suing districts to filing against a whole state, e.g., Mississippi. Although the president got regular reports on this tactic, he memorably scrawled across the bottom of the Justice Department report for 1962, “Keep pushing the cases.” (Golden, p. 111)

John Doar

The weight of the residue of the previous administrations was staggering. When attorney John Doar attempted to interview people in Tennessee, he found that in 13 counties, none had registered. (Bernstein, p. 68) To show just how intent southerners were to stop this effort, some of the people who talked to the Justice Department were then evicted from their lands as tenant farmers. The White House then organized an effort to send aid to those who were evicted. (Brauer, p. 72)

Useful in the voter registration regard was another mission that the Eisenhower administration never attempted. This was the voter registration drive. This presented a huge challenge. For example, in 1960, in the parish of East Carroll in northeast Louisiana, there were more African Americans of voting age than whites. But there were 2,845 whites registered to vote, and no African Americans. In the northwest parish of Bienville, almost every white voter was registered. Of the over 4,000 African Americans, only 25 were registered. (Golden, 136) The emerging problem was that these kinds of field projects are expensive, since one must send workers out with canvassing lists to knock on doors and get both information and documentation. The government itself could not supply the funds. So Marshall and Wofford went to various foundations in the north to get the money. (Bernstein, p. 72) They then parceled it out to the various civil rights groups like the NAACP, SCLC and CORE. The overall title given to the drive was the Voter Education Project (VEP). It cost $870,000, or about 7 million today. The VEP lasted until 1964. As one commentator noted, it gained an increase in its short duration that would have taken ten years to achieve under normal conditions. But more important, “It moved Negro registration off dead center, where it had been for most of the previous decade, and reestablished momentum.” (Bernstein, p. 73)

Judge Frank Johnson

In this regard, Kennedy and Marshall did something that most people would have found next to impossible. They actually got the FBI to help investigate cases of voting rights violations. This appears to be some kind of milestone for J. Edgar Hoover. (Brauer, p. 117) Extensive research in voting rights abuses were then presented to the judges of the Fifth Circuit Court. In Louisiana, with the help of Judge Minor Wisdom, the attorney general got the voting test requiring an interpretation of the Constitution thrown out in 21 parishes. That figure made up a third of the state. (Golden, p. 137) It was the Fifth Circuit’s Frank Johnson—who had worked with Robert Kennedy during the Freedom Riders crisis—who gave the attorney general his first win in a voting rights case. With Johnson’s help, the number of registered African American voters went from 13% to 42% in Macon County, Alabama. (Brauer, p. 118, 120) As Judge Johnson later said to his biographer:

The Macon County case would be the one that began to erode Southern voting discrimination … The Middle District of Alabama federal court took the lead in voting rights and the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court consistently upheld those rulings. When the Selma demonstrations started in 1965, the black citizens in my section of the state of Alabama had already won the right to vote. (Frank Sikora, The Judge, e-book, chapter 12)

Utilizing the Fifth Circuit, with judges like Johnson and Wisdom, plus the evolving Fourth Circuit in the upper South, and the Supreme Court sustaining their decisions, Bobby Kennedy thought he would be done securing voting rights in the South by 1968. (Golden, p. 131) The Selma demonstration, which caused the Voting Rights Act, hurried that up by three years. But as Johnson points out above, it was already happening. Clearly, this was a deliberate strategy by the attorney general. In his book on the Fifth Circuit, Jack Bass wrote that Bobby Kennedy urged civil rights groups to use the judicial process as a way to get them to their ultimate goal. (Bass, Unlikely Heroes, p. 25)

That Levingston never mentions this crucial Fifth Circuit aspect shows the worthlessness of his book. As Judge Johnson later said, no one in Washington was doing anything substantial on civil rights in the fifties, including Eisenhower. He added that when Kennedy came in, “there was almost an immediate and dramatic change. He was like electricity compared to Eisenhower … [He] put the nation on notice that there were changes that were long overdue.” (Sikora, chapter 6)

III

Related to this, the administration tried to get a voting rights bill through Congress in 1962. Eisenhower called a press conference and labeled this modest proposal for voting rights “unconstitutional”. (Brauer, p. 135) As with Johnson in 1960, there were problems with the Southern bloc in the Senate. Due to their filibuster, the effort failed. (Edwin Guthman & Jeff Shulman, eds., Robert Kennedy in His Own Words, p. 149) But this did help inspire the 1962 congressional proposal to do away with the poll tax by amendment. The 24^th amendment outlawing the poll tax was ratified in January of 1964. (Brauer, p. 132)

In one of his lesser-known achievements, it was President Kennedy who began the idea of affirmative action. And it started on inauguration day. Kennedy noticed that, during the parade, there were no black faces in the Coast Guard detachment. That night he called Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon and asked that something be done about it. (Bernstein, p. 52) Two days after Kennedy’s phone call, the academy began an all-out effort to recruit African Americans. One year later, the streak was broken and an African American student entered the academy. (Bernstein, p. 52) In 1963, the Coast Guard made it a point to visit 199 high schools, addressing 11,000 students and then interviewing 561 African American candidates. (Golden, p. 114)

That was just the beginning. At his first cabinet meeting, Kennedy brought up the incident and told each member that he wanted the figures on the racial balance in his respective department. He did not like the results. For instance: at the Department of Justice, only 19 of nearly 1700 lawyers were African American. Kennedy also discovered that most of the people of color were at the lower rungs of the hierarchy. The president now told everyone that he wanted the situation remedied and he also wanted regular reports on their progress. (Bernstein, p. 53) Kennedy got so involved in the process that his administration became the first to appoint an African American ambassador, Clifton Wharton, to a European country. As Roy Wilkins later said, “Kennedy was so hot on the Department heads … that everyone was scrambling around trying to find himself a Negro in order to keep the president off his neck.” (Bernstein, p. 53) In fact, Kennedy assigned a civil rights officer to manage hiring and complaints for each department. He then advised the Civil Service Commission to begin a recruiting program to target historically black colleges and universities. (Brauer, p. 72, 84)

The president then set up two interagency groups in order to monitor and push the issue forward. One was headed by Harris Wofford and it oversaw the entire federal government; Fred Dutton’s concentrated on the cabinet positions. On March 6, 1961—45 days after his inauguration—Kennedy issued an executive order outlawing discrimination in the workplace and making sure that affirmative action employment practices were followed.

Galbraith & JFK

This concept of seeking out qualified people of color to serve in the government was complemented by another action. Together with his longtime friend, John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy decided to protest the color barrier at two posh clubs in the Washington, DC area, namely the Metropolitan and Cosmos clubs. (Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, p. 387) At the Metropolitan, Galbraith sponsored Kennedy as a member. But Kennedy refused to join when they declined service to a visiting African diplomat. At the Cosmos Club, Kennedy withdrew his application when the club refused to admit federal employee Carl Rowan. Kennedy got other government members and friends to follow suit and resign membership. Due to the bad publicity, both clubs later reversed policy. The notable thing about these episodes is that both were private clubs. (Washington Daily News, January 15, 1962, p, 21; Wofford, pp. 149-50) Kennedy then announced that neither he nor any member of his administration would attend functions at segregated facilities. (Bernstein, p. 53) To top it off, some of the members who resigned in protest then banded together to form a non-discriminatory club called the Federal City Club. (Brauer, p. 70)

But Kennedy wanted to go beyond just the direct reach of government employment and the upper classes of Washington, DC. As noted previously, President Truman could not sustain the Fair Employment Practices Committee that Philip Randolph had pressed on Franklin Roosevelt. So first Truman, and then Eisenhower, set up advisory committees on the issue. The aim was to make the companies that won federal contracts adhere to non-discriminatory employment practices. In reality, if, say, the army contracted out to a textile company to manufacture rolls of cloth to make uniforms, that company would have to show that it hired some people of color. Kennedy established the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (CEEO) as part of his March 6, 1961 Executive Order on affirmative action. (Golden, p. 59)

Under Eisenhower, Nixon had run their employment program, so President Kennedy put Lyndon Johnson in charge of the CEEO. Again, the contrast in activity is startling. In seven years, Nixon filed six suits. In a bit over two years, the CEEO heard almost four times as many complaints—1700—as Eisenhower and Nixon did in seven years, and acted favorably on over 70% of them. For example, there was a desegregation lawsuit filed against Socony in Texas. (Golden, p. 60; Bernstein, p. 59) Kennedy’s plans for retaliatory action went beyond Eisenhower and Truman. The CEEO allowed for the publication of the names of those who were violators, lawsuits by the attorney general, cancellation of the contract, and the foreclosure of future contracts. (Bernstein, p. 56) As a result, by 1963, you had people of color working alongside whites in the carding rooms of textile mills in the South. As a mill supervisor explained, “We work together for the simple reason we must if we want the government contracts. Without those contracts, we close down.” (Golden, p. 61) Its greatest achievement under Johnson was a settlement with Lockheed to integrate all of its facilities and begin a program of affirmative action in hiring. This was important since Lockheed was a large employer in Georgia. (Bernstein, p. 58)

Kennedy’s stricter program also extended to funds given to institutions of higher learning. As Melissa Kean noted in her 2008 book:

With the election of John F. Kennedy, the reach of federal nondiscrimination requirements in contracting finally extended into the admissions policies of private southern universities. Failure to comply meant ineligibility for the federal grants and contracts that were the life-blood of the advanced programs at these schools. (Kean, Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South, p. 237)

As a result of Kennedy’s more rigorous policies, large private universities like Duke and Tulane chose to quietly and peacefully admit African Americans.

The CEEO also developed a parallel program for non-discrimination in labor unions. This was called the Programs for Fair Practices. The AFL-CIO, covering about 11 million members, chartered it. (Bernstein, p. 60)

Since Johnson ran the program, the sternest critic of the CEEO was Robert Kennedy. He thought Johnson was not aggressive enough. For instance, RFK filed a lawsuit in December of 1961 against hospitals who received federal funds but discriminated against doctors or patients. (Golden, p. 113) President Kennedy felt so strongly about this issue that in June of 1963 he issued another executive order that both strengthened and extended the mandate of the CEEO. This agency later became a permanent part of the government and was renamed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Kennedy had achieved what Truman could not and what Eisenhower and Nixon simply were not interested in.

IV

At this point we should address an issue that some professional writers on the Left, like Paul Street, have brought up: the idea of federal protection for those struggling for rights. This was obviously an issue in the 1963 RFK/Marshall meeting with James Baldwin and Jerome Smith. In addition to the violence during the Freedom Riders demonstrations, there was also the riot at Ole Miss in 1962, which we shall discuss, and the nationally televised tactics used by Sheriff Bull Connor in 1963 at Birmingham which Baldwin mentioned in one of his telegrams to Robert Kennedy before the meeting. (Dyson, p. 25) As Robert Kennedy later said, in addition to Jerome Smith throwing the meeting off subject, the other problem was how little Baldwin and the others knew what the law was. (Guthman and Schulman, pp. 224-25)

Burke Marshall had studied this entire field and examined the legislation that was on the books and how it fit into the system of federalism. In 1964, he wrote a brief book on the subject called Federalism and Civil Rights. To indicate his quality of scholarship, Michael Eric Dyson never mentions it anywhere in his book. Neither does Levingston. Professional historians Arthur Schlesinger and Carl Brauer do more than mention it: they spend several pages explaining Marshall’s book.

No one can deny that the Birmingham images of youngsters being attacked by rabid dogs and bounced around by fire hoses were shocking to behold. Yet no one can deny that RFK and Marshall were on the protesters’ side. So the question then became: Why didn’t they do anything to preempt it?

The answer that Marshall got sick and tired of giving was simple: America does not have a national police force. The police function is a local function. With very rare exceptions, the FBI is an investigative force, one that is supposed to help and support local and state police. Marshall then added, “There is no substitute under the federal system for the failure of the local law enforcement responsibility.” (Letter from Marshall to R. H .Barrett, 1/3/64) None other than Thurgood Marshall backed him in that judgment. The man who argued Brown v Board said that the police authority does not lie with the federal government, but within the states. That was a point that he, as a civil rights lawyer, could understand, “but the average layman cannot understand it.” (Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 318)

What both men were saying amounts to this: Robert Kennedy could not go in and arrest Bull Connor and the entire Birmingham police force. There simply was no federal mechanism that allowed him to do so. But beyond that problem, there was also the matter that, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, Connor was abiding by the state and local laws. In that regard, we must recall Part 1 of this series, where the author explained how the Supreme Court had neutered the Reconstruction laws and amendments. In addition to that, each locality has municipal laws guiding the administration of demonstrations. Fred Shuttlesworth, father of the Birmingham demonstrations, knew he was violating them. That was his point: to use civil disobedience and moral suasion to defeat misguided power.

There was an exception in the law. And this allowed the White House ultimately to send in federal marshals and troops to Oxford, Mississippi and also to Alabama during the Freedom Rides. Sections 332-334 of Title 10 of the US Code allows the president to send in troops in instances of a large scale failure of law and order. Burke Marshall was hesitant to use Title 10. As the famous legal scholar Alexander Bickel once wrote, “As a regular and more or less permanent device, it is something from which we recoil, deeming it destructive of a free society.” John Doar also found that route to be a dangerous one: the federal government should not be a police state. (Schlesinger, p. 318-319)

A good point of comparison would be the famous incident when Robert Kennedy heard that local police had arrested a Chicano demonstrator in Delano, California before he broke any laws. This was during the time that Cesar Chavez was trying to organize fruit pickers in the central valley area. Kennedy had flown there for a hearing on their organizational rights. When he heard that, RFK advised the police officer to read the Constitution during the lunch break. (Schlesinger, p. 826) As Attorney General Kennedy had said to Anthony Lewis, the investment of dictatorial powers in the executive branch might seem convenient or expedient during times of stress. But it should be resisted, since it would boomerang later. (Schlesinger, pp. 319-20)

Today, living in the shadow of Dick Cheney, water boarding, drones, Edward Snowden and Guantanamo, I think we all understand what the attorney general meant. But the meeting with Baldwin and Smith was not the most appropriate time for Burke Marshall to take out a chalkboard and play law professor.

V

In addition to attempting to pass a voting rights act in 1962, the Kennedy administration was also working with the NAACP and the Fifth Circuit to complete the integration of colleges and universities in the South. As noted above, President Kennedy used restrictions on grants to private universities to shoehorn integration. With public universities, Burke Marshall decided to work with the NAACP to attain court orders from the Fifth Circuit. In 1963, Clemson and South Carolina integrated peacefully. Such was not the case with Ole Miss and Alabama.

The day after JFK was inaugurated, James Meredith decided to become the first African American student at Oxford. Both the NAACP and Burke Marshall decided to take part in his attempt. (Brauer, pp. 180-81) Governor Ross Barnett now invoked a policy that southern universities had used many times before. He offered to pay for Meredith to go elsewhere. When that did not work, he started shouting “states rights” and John Calhoun’s specious claims about interposition.

Robert Kennedy formally entered the Justice Department into the legal proceedings. President Kennedy began to lobby business leaders in the state. (Brauer, pp. 182-83) When the university tried to deny Meredith’s application, the Fifth Circuit, in an opinion written by Minor Wisdom, overruled the denial. (Bernstein, p. 77)

But now, the trustees of the college transferred power over to Barnett. The Fifth Circuit first charged the trustees, then Barnett, with contempt. (Brauer, p. 184) At Millington air base in Memphis, the president now began to build up a force of federal marshals and draw up a military contingency plan which would eventually include 20,000 troops. (Bernstein, p. 81)

James Meredith & John Doar

Ross Barnett ended up double-crossing the White House. And his stalling tactics had allowed General Edwin Walker to build up an angry crowd estimated at anywhere from two to three thousand rabid segregationists, including Klansmen. On the Sunday evening of September 30^th, Deputy Attorney General Nicolas Katzenbach headed the escort to prepare for Meredith’s next day registration. Just before that was to occur, Barnett pulled the state troopers who were supposed to maintain order until Meredith was processed. (Bernstein, p. 83) A riot ensued and Walker’s crowd outnumbered the federal marshals. What made it worse was that Katzenbach’s communications network went down, and the troops that were supposed to arrive in a contingency failed to arrive when they were scheduled. Two bystanders were killed, scores of marshals were injured and 13 men were indicted. President Kennedy had marshals escort Meredith constantly until he graduated. (Brauer, pp. 195-97)

The next year, at the University of Alabama, things went smoother. This was part of perhaps the most groundbreaking three days any president has had since FDR. On June 9^th, President Kennedy had made a strong speech for civil rights at a mayor’s conference in Hawaii. (Andrew Cohen, Two Days in June, pp. 18-19) Coming back from Hawaii, on June 10^th, the president announced his plans for détente with the Russians in his speech at American University.

The next day, President Kennedy had his showdown with Governor George Wallace in Tuscaloosa. Robert Kennedy had tried to talk to Wallace in order to prevent anything like Ole Miss from happening. (Cohen, p. 235) Again, an associate of Frank Johnson, Judge Seybourn Lynne, had written the order for two African American students to enter the university. (Cohen, p. 236) Wallace had arranged for a combined force of 895 state troopers and police to back him. The White House brought in 3000 troops; this time they were only minutes away. (Cohen, pp. 243-47)

Wallace confronted by Katzenbach

Contrary to what MSM hacks like Evan Thomas claim, no one knew what Wallace was going to do that day. The proof of this is that in the documentary film made of this event, Robert Drew’s Crisis, Bobby Kennedy is suggesting that they may have to shove the students through the furthest door at the main entry. That discussion went on as Katzenbach was preparing to confront Wallace. Andrew Cohen, who has written one of the longest and most detailed studies of the event, agrees with that view. According to Cohen, the plan was only finalized that morning. (Cohen, pp. 247-49) When Wallace refused to leave, President Kennedy nationalized the state guard. General Henry Graham threatened to arrest Wallace, so he stepped aside. The other point that had an impact on Wallace’s decision was that Lynne had promised to cite Wallace for contempt if he obstructed the students’ entry. (Bernstein, p. 97)

That evening, President Kennedy gave what many believe was the finest speech given on the race issue since Abraham Lincoln. As Cohen writes, what makes that speech even more impressive is that it was written in two hours. (Cohen, p. 321) After King heard it, he told the person he was watching it with, Walter Fauntroy, “Walter, you believe that white man not only stepped up to the plate, he hit it over the fence.” (Cohen, p. 339)

But Wallace was not finished. On July 22, 1963, Judge Johnson signed an order for 13 African American students to attend Tuskegee High School in Macon County, Alabama. In addition, the same would happen in Mobile and Birmingham. (Sikora, chapter 22) On the day those 13 students were supposed to be in attendance, there was a large force of state troopers awaiting them. Wallace also sent an order to the superintendent that the school would not open.

Bobby Kennedy now convened a five-man panel of the Fifth Circuit to issue a restraining order enjoining Wallace from interfering with the integration of the three schools. Wallace tried to get around that by now sending the National Guard in to stop the students from entering. That afternoon President Kennedy ordered the guard to be nationalized, that is, placed under his control. (Sikora, chapter 23)

VI

At the end of 1962, President Kennedy issued his executive order to integrate housing. It inserted nondiscrimination clauses for all new public housing developments and urban renewal projects, and took action against housing contractors who practiced discrimination. Because it was an executive order, its scope was limited. (Brauer, p. 210) This relates to a criticism made by several writers, such as King biographer Taylor Branch, and which Levingston continues. (pp. 205-06, 213, 226) King wanted Kennedy to issue an executive order in 1963 as a new Emancipation Proclamation to strike down segregation in the South. Kennedy did not and writers like Branch and Levingston imply that this was some kind of missed opportunity that King offered the president.

This author decided to get into contact with the Dean of the law school at Cal Berkeley, Professor Erwin Chemerinsky. I queried him, since he is one of America’s most illustrious constitutional scholars and has a liberal reputation. He replied that if Kennedy had done that, it would have only applied to the executive branch of government, not to private businesses and not even to state and local governments. (email communication, October 15, 2018) Since, as we have seen, Kennedy was already integrating the executive branch by other means, the Levingston/Branch implication is baseless.

As noted previously, President Kennedy submitted a civil rights bill to Congress on February 28, 1963. (Risen, p. 36) He accompanied this with an address. That address, like other statements he had made on the subject—going all the way back to when he was a senator, and during the 1960 campaign—had a moral dimension to it. Which counters the idea of playwright Levingston: that JFK only understood the moral dimension in his June 1963 televised address. (Levingston, p. 405) The February bill was significantly revised as the year went on due to media pressures which finally made civil rights a continuing front page/TV news lead story.

Birmingham, May 1963

As the conflict in Birmingham took hold and the media began to report on it, the opportunity presented itself to make the bill even stronger. The masterstroke at Birmingham was using schoolchildren in illegal demonstrations, knowing that Bull Connor would overreact. Which he did, using powerful fire hoses and attack dogs. It was those newspaper and TV images that altered the consciousness of this issue in the north. It also made John Kennedy understand the sick pathology of many of the power brokers in the South, and that he had been wrong in his characterization of Thaddeus Stevens in Profiles in Courage. (Brauer, p. 240)

It was James Bevel who organized Birmingham school children

That maneuver was not proposed or executed by King. In fact, at this point, on his own, King could not get enough demonstrators in the streets. It was James Bevel who went on local radio and gathered scores of school kids in a church on April 24^th, a move that King actually opposed at the time. (McWhorter, p. 361) Then, with King out of town, Bevel began to work with and organize the students. He told them to listen to a secret code word he would use on the radio. And on May 2^nd, with King still mulling the idea over, Bevel launched his first student wave. Six hundred kids went to jail. But Bevel continued it a second day, with even more students involved. (McWhorter, pp. 368-71) The ugly media exposure was a body blow to the power structure in Birmingham. Vincent Townsend, CEO of the local newspaper, got someone in the sheriff’s office to call Burke Marshall. He flew down and that was the beginning of the city-wide settlement. (McWhorter, pp. 380-81)

Both the president and Bobby Kennedy now realized that this was the time to stamp out Jim Crow in the South. In 2003, in an interview with Dick Gregory on the Joe Madison show, he said that President Kennedy had called him after he had visited Birmingham. After Gregory described just how bad it was, Kennedy replied: “We got those bastards now!” Consequently, the February bill was overhauled by the Justice Department to focus on public accommodations. (Risen, pp. 45-49) Once that was decided, the president now began an unprecedented, massive lobbying effort. He brought to Washington dozens of groups of people: lawyers, mayors, governors, business leaders and, most important of all, the clergy. This effort lasted from May 29 through June 22^nd: in other words, right up until when the bill was presented to Congress. (Risen, p. 63) From those meetings, which were attended by 1,558 persons, spin-off groups back home were created. And those groups now traveled to Washington to lobby Congress during the long debate on the bill. Senator Richard Russell later noted it was this impact that won in the end. What JFK had done was something King could not do. He got a wide array of church leaders to back his bill. (Risen, pp. 96-97, 148-49) As Russell put it, “We had been able to hold the line until all the churches joined the civil rights lobby in 1964.” (Risen, p. 5) As Risen notes, King had little or nothing to do with the passage of the bill. (pp. 83-84)

The even bigger myth is that it was LBJ who got the bill passed. This was a deception first advanced by Kay Graham and the Washington Post in order to aggrandize her friend and mentor President Johnson. It was then furthered by Robert Caro in The Passage of Power. Caro pretty much followed what his subject Johnson had written. (The New Republic, “The Shrinking of Lyndon Johnson”, February 9, 2014) The people who really got the bill passed were Hubert Humphrey, Bobby Kennedy and his Justice Department team, and Senator Thomas Kuchel. This is why RFK did not resign as attorney general until the bill was passed.

Bayard Rustin & Philip Randolph

King made a charge at this time that was simply wrong. He said that President Kennedy wanted to call off the proposed March on Washington. (Risen, p. 83) Levingston’s lousy book takes a little lighter approach and tries to insinuate that JFK had nothing to do with the march. (Levingston, p. 423) First, as several books have pointed out, the March on Washington was not King’s idea or a product of the SCLC. It was the proposal of Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. (Charles Euchner, Nobody Turn Me Around, pp. 17-18; Patrick Henry Bass, Like a Might Stream, p. 107; Bernstein, pp. 112-13) It was meant as a fulfillment of what Randolph had negotiated away to FDR and Truman. Kennedy was not opposed to the idea. He was opposed to the first draft design. Rustin’s concept was to have a two-day mass demonstration aimed at Capitol Hill. Arthur Schlesinger was at the early meetings where it was presented to President Kennedy. (Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, pp. 969-972) Kennedy’s objection was that this was the wrong approach, it was too confrontational. Both Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins agreed with JFK. (Euchner, p. 77) So after the president got some of his own people on the organizing committee, like Walter Reuther, it was scaled back to a one-day event, and centered in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Rustin insisted he could live with these revisions since the important factors were the size of the live audience and the scope of the televised audience. (Euchner, pp. 77-78) Once that was done, President Kennedy became the first white politician in Washington to endorse the march. He then had his brother Robert assign men from the Justice Department to assist with the logistics and to arrange security. It is doubtful that the event could have come off as well as it did without that help. (Bernstein, pp. 114-16)

The March on Washington

One last point on this event. Some have questioned why President Kennedy did not speak that day. The answer is simple: the principal organizer, Bayard Rustin, did not want him there. Not because he did not like Kennedy—he did. But because he thought it would detract from it being their moment, that is, the civil rights leaders’ time in the sun. So he and Wilkins made up an excuse that his life would be endangered, and they would see him afterwards instead. (Euchner, pp. 79-80)

Kennedy realized his presidency was on the line with the civil rights bill. He had now become hated in the South. The joke after his showdown with Wallace was: Why does Alabama have so many Negroes and Massachusetts so many Kennedys? Because Alabama had first choice. (McWhorter, p. 380) By June of 1963, his approval rating there had plummeted from 60 to 33%. He was losing votes on his other programs because of his stand for civil rights. But as Kennedy told Luther Hodges, “There comes a time when a man has to take a stand and history will record that he has to meet these tough situations and ultimately make a decision.” (Brauer, pp. 247, 263-64)

When the bill first went up, Humphrey had 42 votes, well short of the 67 he needed to force a cloture on the filibuster. (Brauer, p. 269) It was the full court press done by the president and then by the Department of Justice that finally turned it around through pressure on conservative Midwest Republicans. (Risen, p. 97) It is hard to exaggerate the impact of this bill. “It reached deep into the social fabric of the nation to refashion structures of racial order and domination that had held for almost a century—and it worked.” (Risen, p. 12)

As the reader can see, no president before Kennedy ever confronted the civil rights issue as he did. No one was even close.  It was the preceding century of near inertia that created the immense problem that President Kennedy faced in 1961. But to his credit, Kennedy pressed the issue from the outset. Finally, the pressure from his administration, and the inspiration and support he gave the civil rights movement, provided the opportunity to pass what Clay Risen has called the “bill of the century”. What JFK achieved in three years is remarkable, especially when compared to his predecessors. As historian Carl Brauer wrote, what President Kennedy did was to pick up the narrow trail that Truman attempted and widen it into broad avenues. (Brauer, p. 315) And those avenues are still being traversed today. Yesterday (November 2, 2018), Kristen Clarke, the president of the Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, announced a victory for the Democrats in Georgia. Agreeing with Clarke, the court made a ruling weakening the state’s attempt to limit voting among the poor and minority groups. Clarke’s activist committee was founded in 1963 by President Kennedy for the express purpose of counteracting attempts at discrimination in the Deep South. (On the list of achievements following this essay, the reader can see it at number 20.)

When the news of President Kennedy’s assassination reached Atlanta, King grew very quiet, thinking that a similar fate awaited him. During the funeral his six-year-old son asked him, “Daddy, President Kennedy was your best friend wasn’t he?” Coretta King replied, “In a way, he was.” (Wofford, p. 175)

Four Presidents: A Comparison of Civil Rights Actions and Achievements

So much for the received wisdom that the Kennedy administration “moved cautiously on civil rights” until they were pushed into it.

Go to Part 1

Go to Part 2

Go to Part 4

Part 2: The Media Spin-Dries JFK on Civil Rights

I. The MSM Vitiates the Record on JFK

As I said in my introduction to Part 1, from the work of Larry Sabato in 2013, I suspected the MSM would attempt a preemptive strike against President Kennedy’s civil rights achievements at the 50^th anniversary of the MLK/RFK assassinations, for the obvious reason that both of those men were strongly involved in that struggle. Steven Levingston, of the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, led it off. I would like to give Levingston some career advice. He missed his calling. He should have been a playwright. His 2017 book Kennedy and King is such a carefully crafted confection it would have done Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee proud. As history, it is worthless; but that is not what Levingston is interested in. At the outset, he sets up an external dramatic agon between Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, declaring that “King had to overcome White House mistrust, disregard, and stonewalling before his message sank in.” (Levingston, p. xi)

Steve Levingston: Missed his calling

This is utterly false. As opposed to Eisenhower, the Kennedys began working on the racial issue quite quickly—without King. And they did not stop until they did something that neither Eisenhower nor Truman came close to doing—they got an omnibus civil rights bill into Congress and worked hard to see it through. (As we shall see, the idea that Lyndon Johnson got the milestone Civil Rights Bill of 1964 passed is a myth.)

In Part 1, I described the terrible conditions that existed in the South due to the failure of Reconstruction. This created a huge obstacle in trying to correct the immense problem, since the power structure of the South was built upon it. How does Levingston assess this horrendous record that confronted the Kennedy administration? About all the horrible things done in the South from Reconstruction onward, Levingston is rather dismissive. He writes, “So far from being modernized, in many ways the Southern Mind has actually always marched away from the present toward the past.” (p. 16) Well, that is one way of dealing with the torture murder of Sam Hose, the massacre at Rosewood, and the destruction of a whole section of Tulsa. But as far as establishing a historical backdrop, it means zilch. On top of that, there is next to nothing about the paltry record of FDR, Truman and Eisenhower.

Another part of the plan is to make Kennedy out to be rather timid on a number of issues, not just race. Like every other cheapjack writer on the scene, Levingston does what he can to make the worst of the Joe McCarthy episode for Senator Kennedy. He tries to say that somehow Kennedy’s failure to show up and vote during the censure roll call against Joe McCarthy in December of 1954 exhibits this character flaw. But he also acknowledges that Kennedy was in the hospital at the time, seriously ill, lapsing in and out of consciousness. (Levingston, pp. 22-23) As Harris Wofford relates in his book, Of Kennedys and Kings, Senator Kennedy had been through a near-death experience—he was given last rites—due to a back operation at this time. (Wofford, p. 35) Should he have been wheeled onto the Senate floor, with his doctor next to him? The vote was overwhelming for censure anyway; the final tally was 67-22. This makes the idea that somehow Kennedy should have called in and “paired” his vote with someone who was against censure silly. Why? In order to add one more vote to the landslide? But further, in his weakened state, his assistant Ted Sorenson had written a speech for him to give in favor of the censure vote. So there is no doubt where he stood on the issue.

A key point Levingston completely leaves out is that it was the senator’s brother, Robert Kennedy, who had started the movement to censure McCarthy in the first place. Bobby Kennedy had been on McCarthy’s committee. He resigned since he did not like the direction in which Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, was taking that body. The Democratic minority later asked him back to be their chief counsel. In the summer of 1954, after both McCarthy and Cohn imploded during the Army-McCarthy hearings, Bobby Kennedy essentially took over that committee. He retired the cases against Irving Peress and Annie Lee Moss, dismissed the accusations of mass infiltration of defense plants, and then authored a report that was so critical of McCarthy and Cohn that some Democrats would not sign on to it. It recommended the Senate take action for their abuses. It was this report that led to the censure vote against McCarthy in December of 1954. (Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, pp. 118-19)

But that’s not enough for Levingston. He now does something worse. He says that Senator Kennedy wrote his book Profiles in Courage to somehow apologize for not showing up on a gurney to mark the 68^th vote to censure McCarthy. (Levingston, p. 25) Even for a reporter who worked for the Wall Street Journal, this is really out there. Profiles in Courage is about men in politics who did things that had no political advantage for them; they did them anyway since they thought they were right. Now, since 1951, John Kennedy had been out there by himself—in both the House of Representatives and the Senate—harping away against the Truman/Eisenhower approaches to communism in the Third World. In other words, he was, in part, criticizing his own party. It may have been crowd-pleasing and popular to suggest that the communist threat was the monolithic monster that the domino theory suggested, but Kennedy said that was not true. The force of nationalism, the desire to be free from European colonialism, was really responsible for much tumult in the Third World. (See my Destiny Betrayed, pp. 17-25) Senator Kennedy made speeches on this subject, gave radio interviews, and wrote letters to his electorate about it. But he had no Capitol Hill or White House followers in this crusade at the time. Would it not therefore be logical to assume that this is what motivated him to write the book? I mean, was he not doing something that garnered him little if any political favor simply because he felt it was the right thing to do?

But Levingston can’t go there. He can’t even mention it. First, it would illustrate the political and moral courage that Levingston wants to strip away from Kennedy. Second, it would also show that, from early in his political career, Kennedy had some understanding of the conditions of colonialism and imperialism that were imposed on people of color in places like Africa.

In keeping with his preplanned construct, Levingston does not begin to address Kennedy’s actual involvement with the whole race issue until 1959 and his preparations to campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. This eliminates a rather important fact: namely, that, unlike Eisenhower or Nixon, neither of whom endorsed the epochal Brown decision, Senator Kennedy did so in 1956:

The Democratic Party must not weasel on the issue … President Truman was returned to the White House in 1948 despite a firm stand on civil rights that led to a third party in the South … We might alienate Southern support but the Supreme Court decision is the law of the land. (NY Times, 2/8/56, p. 1)

That speech was made in New York, a liberal city and state. But in 1957, Kennedy went south to Jackson, Mississippi. He said the same thing: the Brown decision must be upheld. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, p. 95) The fact he did this in the Deep South would seem to denote the courage Levingston said Kennedy lacked. For, as author Harry Golden notes, it was at this point that Kennedy began to lose support in the South and even get angry letters about his advocacy of the Brown decision. But by not mentioning these incidents, Levingston can say that Kennedy exhibited little courage or morality on the issue. What makes it worse is that when one turns to his bibliography, Levingston lists Harry Golden’s book, which noted the incident way back in 1964. This is what I mean about being a playwright.

In passing, the author mentions Senator Kennedy’s vote on the bill constructing the 1957 civil rights commission. Levingston writes that Kennedy sided with the segregationists on a complicated procedural matter that watered down that bill. (p. 58) Even for Levingston, this is sorry. What watered down the bill was the removal of something that Kennedy voted for. This was called Title III. It allowed the attorney general to sue cities in civil court over voting rights and school integration. Kennedy backed that part of the bill. So how does being for that aspect jibe with siding with the segregationists? That part of the bill was voted down. (Golden, p. 94) And as anyone who has read anything about that vote understands, the man who engineered its defeat was Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson.

The bill originally sent up by Eisenhower’s attorney general was completely commandeered by Johnson, to the point that, when it was completed, it was really Johnson’s bill. He planned it that way because he observed the fate of his mentor, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. Due to his segregationist stance, Russell could not advance his presidential ambitions on the national scene. Noting this, Johnson was intent on broadening his profile beyond the South; he did not want to be pigeonholed as a regional candidate. (Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power, pp 122-25) So he took over this bill, made it his own, and made sure it would pass the Senate. How did this occur?

Strom Thurmond and Richard Russell

Johnson made a deal with Russell and Senator Strom Thurmond: if he defanged the bill, they would not filibuster it. One way he did so was eliminating Title III. The other way was by adding a jury trial amendment. This meant that if there was an obstruction of voting rights, the accused would be tried by a jury. Which at that time in the South meant the defendant would very likely be acquitted. Johnson had specifically targeted Kennedy as a northern vote and he sent two people to convince him to vote for it. When Kennedy resisted, LBJ himself went to his office to lobby him. The issue was presented as follows: the amendment must be added or the bill would fail. Kennedy then consulted with some Ivy League lawyers and they told him that having some kind of a Civil Rights Commission—which was largely what was left of the bill—was at least a step in the right direction. (Evans and Novak, pp. 136-37)

In contradistinction to what Levingston claims, what happened was not Kennedy siding with segregationists; it was a first term senator siding with the majority leader in order to get half a loaf instead of none. It should be added: even with Johnson’s severe alterations, Senator Strom Thurmond broke his agreement with him. He enacted a one-man record-setting filibuster. This was meant as a warning to LBJ: this was a one-time exception; don’t try it again.

Abraham Ribicoff, JFK’s first choice for attorney general

One of the silliest contentions in Levingston’s volume is that as president JFK appointed his brother Robert as attorney general because of his habit of turning to his older brother Joe in childhood tussles. In other words, he depended on his brothers to fight his battles for him. (p. 7, p. 168) Again, this fruitiness can only survive by not consulting the record. Bobby Kennedy was not JFK’s first choice for attorney general. Kennedy’s first choice was Senator Abraham Ribicoff. (Schlesinger, p. 237) So what would have become of Levingston’s argument if Ribicoff had accepted the position? And to show what a careful playwright the author is, Ribicoff is not mentioned in his book.

Burke Marshall

But even more damaging to Levingston’s attempt at pop-psychology is the following. President Kennedy’s first civil rights advisor, Harris Wofford, had written a long memo to him before the inauguration. That memo stated that since the upcoming civil rights battles would largely take place in court, the Department of Justice should be the focal point of the conflict. He therefore pointed out that the key spots in the administration on civil rights would be the attorney general, and his civil rights deputy. This prediction by Wofford ended up being correct. From this standpoint, Kennedy may be said to have been following Wofford’s memo, which turned out to be farsighted, especially when RFK made the fine choice of Burke Marshall as his deputy on civil rights. (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, pp. 40-41)

The main body of Levingston’s confection relies on a thesis he borrows from one of the most bizarre, eccentric books on the Kennedy administration ever published. This is BBC reporter Nick Bryant’s 2006 volume entitled The Bystander. Both Levingston and Bryant argue that Kennedy should have moved for a civil rights bill faster then he did. Which would mean in 1961 or 1962. (Levingston, pp. 120-21)

The problem with this idea is that there is simply no empirical evidence to sustain it. From the 1870’s to the late 1950’s, no civil rights bill had ever gotten through the southern bloc in Congress. (Evans and Novak, p. 121) And just from 1917 forward, there had been nine different attempts to do so. They all failed. (Bernstein, p. 39) As noted in Part 1, the Truman administration had tried in 1949. They were routed. As also noted, the only reason the 1957 bill got through was because Johnson had pretty much denuded it and told the southern Senate leadership—made up of Russell, Thurmond, and Sam Ervin of North Carolina—that he would do so in advance. But in 1960, when the administration tried to add to that bill to strengthen voting rights, Johnson could not defeat the filibuster. He did not even come close. (Evans and Novak, p. 221) If Johnson, the man who was the maestro, the Toscanini of the Senate, could not come close to breaking the filibuster in 1960, how could Kennedy in 1961?

On top of that, Kennedy was assured this was indeed the unfortunate state of affairs by his advisors. In his long memo planning a civil rights strategy submitted in late December of 1960, Harris Wofford did not even mention passing a bill as a possibility. (Bernstein, p. 48) Joe Clark of Pennsylvania, one of the most liberal senators in the body and a strong advocate for the issue, also told Kennedy it was not possible. (Bernstein, p. 50) The president’s chief vote-counter in Congress, Larry O’Brien, also said the votes were not there, even in 1962. (Andrew Cohen, Two Days in June, p. 82) The new Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, did not think a civil rights bill would pass, and this was in 1963. At that time, Vice President Johnson felt the same way; further, he thought the very attempt would kill off other parts of President Kennedy’s program. (Carl Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction, p. 245) Yet we are supposed to think that a British BBC reporter today, like Bryant, knows better than the experts on the scene did at the time.

But the ultimate proof that both Bryant and Levingston are wrong on this point emerges from the list of events that had to occur for the bill finally to pass in the summer of 1964.

1. The Democrats gained four more seats in the Senate in 1963, all outside the South.
2. The May 1963 televised violent demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama.
3. The Kennedys’ televised showdown with Governor Wallace at the University of Alabama the following month.
4. JFK’s televised watershed speech on civil rights in June of 1963.
5. The murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers on that same day.
6. The televised Randolph/Rustin March on Washington in August of 1963.
7. JFK’s massive, unprecedented White House lobbying effort for the bill.
8. The president’s assassination in a southern city in November of 1963.

Signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act

Even with all of those momentous events, it took one year to pass Kennedy’s civil rights bill. It was the lengthiest debate in congressional history, featuring the longest filibuster in Senate history. This is how determined the South was to block it, since they knew it would mark the beginning of the end of the system this author outlined in Part 1. How do Levingston and Bryant surmount this overwhelming evidence that they are wrong? They don’t deal with it. Talk about profiles in courage. Levingston mentions the passage of the bill in one sentence (Levingston, p. 432), while Bryant does not even refer to it. In fact, in his usual manic, over-the-top manner, Bryant says that Kennedy was not really concerned with the bill’s passage at the time of his death. (Bryant, p. 452) This is completely contradicted by the record produced in Clay Risen’s book, The Bill of the Century, describing the passage of that act. (See pages 97-134) Need I add that playwright Levingston listed the Risen book in his bibliography?

To characterize the value of the efforts of Levingston and Bryant: If the main thesis of your book—that Kennedy could have gotten a civil rights bill through earlier—is so weak and unfounded that you cannot even present the evidence that counters and neutralizes it, then, 1) How honest are you being with the reader? And 2) What is your book worth? I would add a third question: Why would you write such a book? Because to anyone familiar with the issue, the person who dawdled on civil rights was not Kennedy, it was Eisenhower.

II. Taking Aim at RFK

David Margolick

David Margolick’s The Promise and the Dream and Michael Eric Dyson’s What Truth Sounds Like, deal much more with Bobby Kennedy than with President Kennedy’s role in civil rights. One of the strangest parts of Margolick’s book is where he actually seems to endorse Levingston’s flatulent volume as being accurate about JFK’s role in that cause. He calls President Kennedy’s position passive for the first two years. (Margolick, p. 112) As we shall see, this is not supported by the record.

But in keeping with these questionable characterizations, Margolick, as with Levingston on JFK, wishes to shrink Bobby Kennedy in relation to King. So Bobby is represented as a committed Cold Warrior (similarly to the appraisal of his brother which has mistakenly prevailed), and that somehow, “like him and so many others, [RFK] had seen Vietnam as a place to take a stand against communism.” (Margolick, p. 235) His main source for this is a nearly fifty-year old book by David Halberstam. It is notable that he ignores the more recent research by Richard Parker which reveals that Bobby Kennedy was in the room during the November 1961 debates about committing combat troops to Vietnam. In newly discovered notes, Bobby kept insisting, “We are not sending combat troops.” This was clearly meant to back up his brother, who then said that if troops were ever sent it would only be as part of a multilateral force under the aegis of the United Nations. (The Nation, 2/24/2005, “Galbraith and Vietnam”)

Bobby Kennedy’s role in 1961 is bookended by the fact that, in 1963, he served as the liaison between his brother and the writing team of General Victor Krulak and Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who actually composed the McNamara/Taylor trip report in Washington. When it was finished, it was then bound and sent to Hawaii so Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor could read it on their return trip from Saigon, on the plane flight to Washington. RFK knew that this dictated report would serve as the backing for NSAM 263, Kennedy’s order for a military withdrawal from Vietnam. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 401) Why Margolick would use the 1969 work of a man like Halberstam, whose writing on Vietnam is pretty much obsolete, and ignore Parker, is kind of odd.

But there is some creditable work in Margolick’s book. He produces clear evidence that when Bobby Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles in June of 1968, both Jackie Kennedy and Coretta King journeyed to California to be on the plane that carried his body back to New York with Ethel Kennedy. It is as if they knew that with the murder of RFK, what their two husbands had done so much to build was now going to be dissipated. What makes this even more tragic is that Jackie Kennedy did not want RFK to run for president in 1968, because she felt he would also be killed. (Margolick, p. 312) On the plane back, Jackie said to RFK’s aide Frank Mankiewicz, “Well, now we know death, don’t we, you and I. As a matter of fact, if it weren’t for the children, we’d welcome it.” (Margolick, p. 380)

The fact that Coretta King was there may partly be due to what her husband had said a few months before, namely that Bobby Kennedy would make a great president. (Margolick, p. 295) It may also owe to what RFK did in her time of need. After her husband had been killed two months previous in Memphis, Bobby called her and asked if she needed anything. She asked if he could arrange to have King’s body transported back to Atlanta. He said he would do so but he wanted no publicity about it. He then paid for more phone lines to be tied into her home, arranged for a jet to fly her to Memphis, and booked dozens of hotel rooms for celebrities and dignitaries flying in to attend the funeral. (Margolick, p. 347) When that was done, as he previously promised, he went and met with the youths who had organized his aborted rally in Indianapolis that evening. They called themselves the Radical Action Program. (Margolick, p. 348)

I should add one more detail about RFK and the death of King. When Bobby first heard that King had been shot, he was in Muncie, Indiana. He heard about it as he was boarding a plane to fly to Indianapolis. He was not sure King was dead. But on the plane he already looked bereaved and ashen. He rejected the drafts for speeches offered by Mankiewicz and Adam Walinsky. Those were his own words he delivered. As many have said, it was probably the most memorable speech he ever gave. (Margolick, pp. 337-39) That night, as he spoke, he was wearing his brother’s overcoat.

Kennedy & King Park, Indianapolis IN Plaques commemorating RFK’s speech delivered on this spot on April 4, 1968

Kennedy & King Park, Indianapolis IN Landmark for Peace Memorial artist Daniel Edwards, design by Greg R. Perry

Commenting on what RFK did that evening, the great decathlon athlete Rafer Johnson said, “Bob Kennedy knew better than anyone else, better than Martin Luther King, that if something wasn’t done … to somehow solve the racial strife, then we’re in deep trouble.” He continued by saying that no African American could have brought black militants and moderates together as Robert Kennedy could have, and no American could have spoken to both races as he did. He then concluded:

Senator Kennedy proved that color doesn’t make any difference. He was—in terms of the Negro—as much a Negro as Adam Clayton Powell … As Ralph Bunche or Senator Brooke. He was as much a Negro as Jesse Owens or Joe Louis because he did right by people. (Margolick, p. 349)

I should add that Margolick’s book is profusely illustrated with some powerful and rarely seen pictures. If one can discount the several specious passages, such as those quoted above, then the book is readable. If for some reason I had to recommend one of these four volumes, Margolick’s would be the one. But only with severe reservations—most importantly, concerning his statements that James Earl Ray killed King and Sirhan Sirhan shot Kennedy. But he worked for the NY Times for a number of years, so he has to say these things.

III. Michael Eric Dyson Commits an Atrocity

Michael Eric Dyson

Michael Eric Dyson’s book might be the worst of the bunch, which is saying something. First of all, it is not even a book. Dyson slapped a series of disconnected essays together, put them into a small format book with large spacing between lines, and the publisher somehow had the temerity to call this a book.

Dyson begins his confection with a description of Martin Luther King’s funeral in Atlanta. Right there, on pages 2 and 3, I sensed something was upside down. Why? Because he mentions some of the luminaries who were there, like Thurgood Marshall and Richard Nixon. But he does not mention Bobby Kennedy being in attendance. And he does not note RFK’s role in arranging the ceremony, as Margolick outlined above. Dyson then adds that President Johnson was not there since he did not “want to drape the service in the controversy of the Vietnam War …”

These are hints of what Dyson is up to. Two of the goals driving his manufactured history are to do everything possible to smear RFK, and to be as soft as possible on Lyndon Johnson. For Dyson to write that Johnson was not in Atlanta because of some personal abnegation is simply not being honest about the relationship between King, Johnson and RFK, not only by 1968, but even before that. By this time, Johnson was involved in a bitter feud with both RFK and MLK. It was not just over what he had done with the Vietnam War. As we shall see, it was also over what Johnson had done with JFK’s plan to attack the problems of African Americans through a “war on poverty”, something which Bobby Kennedy had been at work on since 1961. In fact, according to Harris Wofford, the reason LBJ did not attend is because he thought he would be overshadowed by Robert Kennedy. Which is precisely what happened. According to Wofford, at the funeral, everyone understood that with King dead, RFK was their last best hope, since LBJ had blown it. (Wofford, pp. 221, 227)

Peter Kunhardt’s film, King in the Wilderness, opens with King calling Johnson from the scene of the Watts riots in 1965. It is a tense, desperate call, with King telling the president that he has to do something about the economic aspects of the race problem in order to give youths in the ghetto some hope. As we shall see, by 1968, LBJ had all but abandoned the concept begun by JFK in 1963.

But further, it is instructive to compare what King said about that riot with what Bobby Kennedy said. King saw it as a stirring of those in society who had been bypassed by the prosperity of the decade; he wished to minimize the racial aspect, since it was more the rumblings of the “have nots” inside of the affluent society. (LA Times, 8/12/15, “Viewing the Watts riots through different eyes”) Rhetorically, Bobby Kennedy went beyond King. When Eisenhower and Johnson used the word “lawbreakers” in regard to the riots, RFK replied with this: “There is no point in telling Negroes to obey the law. To many Negroes the law is the enemy. In Harlem, in Bedford Stuyvesant, it has almost always been used against them.” (Schlesinger, p. 815) Kennedy also said that too many civil rights leaders had ignored the problems in the north, so the larger population of the deprived in the north had no real leadership. He also stated that the tactics used in the south—marches and sit-ins—would not work in the northern cities. (LA Times, 8/12/15)

Images of the Watts Riots

The last observation by RFK is directly relevant to Dyson’s principal subject. So it makes perfect sense that he would ignore it. For besides RFK and Lyndon Johnson, the third main character Dyson deals with is author James Baldwin. And as we shall also see, because Dyson is intent on smearing RFK, he correspondingly inflates and elevates Baldwin.

James Baldwin

Dyson’s series of essays is superficially based on a meeting that was held in May of 1963 between Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and a group of African American intellectuals, writers and artists. It is a meeting that became famous when Baldwin revealed it afterwards to a reporter from the New York Times. (Dyson, p. 11) And it has been used by hack writers like Levingston and Larry Tye to disparage RFK. After reading further on the meeting and on Baldwin, I have come to a different point of view on this matter than the MSM, and certainly Mr. Dyson.

Fred Shuttlesworth

In setting the stage, Dyson shows what a poor historian he is. He says the Birmingham demonstrations were led by King. (Dyson, p. 12) Not so. Local leader Fred Shuttlesworth began the Birmingham demonstrations months before King’s group, the SCLC, ever got there. They were carried out by a group of students from nearby Miles College who were inspired by Shuttlesworth. (Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home, pp. 265-72) It was Shuttlesworth who, in the summer of 1962, first suggested that the SCLC go to Birmingham to extend the protests. He suggested this because he thought (correctly) that Sheriff Bull Connor would play into their hands. Then, in June of 1963, Shuttlesworth pushed it on the SCLC again, but King was still noncommittal. Finally, the Birmingham leader made an impassioned plea: “We’ve been hammering away for 7 years with no impact. If segregation is going to fall, we’ve got to at least crack the wall in Birmingham!” That is what finally made the SCLC move. (McWhorter, p. 307)

Dyson follows this up with another faux pas. He writes that it was Birmingham that forced JFK to submit a civil rights bill to Congress. On February 28, 1963, well in advance of the SCLC beginning its Birmingham action, President Kennedy made a speech on civil rights. He concluded by saying that action must be taken for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do. He also said that he had gone about as far as he could with executive orders. It was time for Congress to step in and fulfill its obligations. (Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century, p. 36) He then outlined a bill he was going to send to Congress. It was the draft of this bill, praised by leaders like Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins, which formed the basis of the Civil Rights Act that was passed in 1964. Again, Risen’s book was published four years before Dyson’s. If Dyson were serious about his subject, he would have consulted that book.

But he didn’t. Dyson is only interested in polemical smears. From here, he writes one of the most preposterous passages I can recall in the literature. He says that:

… the brothers claimed interest in race but let the moment pass, and they spoke out of both sides of their political mouths, to black leaders and conservatives alike, doing little to move the racial needle. (Dyson, p. 15)

What a pile of bird dung. By the fall of 1962, with the calling in of 20,000 federal troops to quell the insurrection, partly organized by General Edwin Walker, at Ole Miss over the admittance of James Meredith, the Kennedys were now seen as the hated enemies of the South. During that battle, the rallying cry of the Klansmen was “2-4-1-3 we hate Kennedy”. Another one was “Go to Cuba, nigger lovers”. (Brauer, p. 192) The right-wingers in Alabama, knowing another showdown would occur there the next year, tried to vote out moderate Democrats who would side with the Kennedys; they had to “show the Kennedys we will not be kicked around any longer.” (Brauer, p. 201) This is why John Bohrer notes in the introduction to his book The Revolution of Robert Kennedy that the attorney general was writing a letter of resignation to his brother in November of 1963. He thought that by being too far out there on civil rights, he had lost the entire South for the 1964 election. How is this playing both sides?

What on earth is Dyson saying when he asserts that JFK had “let the moment pass” on civil rights? President Kennedy was right about the filibuster issue, as proven with abundant evidence above. The spring of 1963 was the correct moment to submit a bill, since the issue was dominating the air-waves. As per the concluding remark, how any writer can say that the Kennedys “did little to move the racial needle” is absurd. What the Kennedys did with Brown v Board in 1961, at Ole Miss in 1962, at Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1963, and with the Civil Rights Act of 1964—just those four achievements were enough to surpass any previous administration. But there is much more, and I will enumerate it in Part 3. What can be stated here is that with this kind of junk, Dyson already acquires little credibility for the informed reader, even before he gets to the main topic of his concoction.

Baldwin had been sending telegrams and letters to RFK. (Dyson, p. 25) In May of 1963, Robert Kennedy met with Baldwin briefly at Kennedy’s home in Hickory Hill. Kennedy then asked him to bring some people he knew to his apartment in New York the next day. He would be there since he was lobbying some department store executives to give more positions in their southern stores to black applicants. (Schlesinger, p. 345) What RFK told Baldwin he wanted to discuss were ideas about attacking the racial problem in the north. (Robert Kennedy in his Own Words, Ed Guthman & Jeff Shulman, eds., p. 223)

There is some confusion about who was at the meeting. But to be fair to Dyson, this is his roster of African Americans:

• Clarence Jones—King’s attorney
• Edwin Berry—member of the Chicago Urban League
• Kenneth Clark—an illustrious social scientist studying urban poverty
• Harry Belafonte—celebrity singer and actor
• Lena Horne—celebrity dancer, actress and singer
• Lorraine Hansberry—reporter and playwright, author of A Raisin in the Sun
• Jerome Smith—activist for the civil rights group CORE, rode on the Freedom Rides

There were four white persons there. Baldwin had invited the actor Rip Torn, and Kennedy was accompanied by two assistants, Burke Marshall and Ed Guthman.

Since it was an informal meeting, there was no stenographic record. We are thus reliant upon people who were there to convey what happened. By most accounts, Kennedy started the meeting trying to state what the administration had done in the South up to that time. This was clearly meant as a segue to what he wanted to talk about now: addressing the urban cities in the north. Which, considering the series of devastating and deadly riots that occurred from about 1965-1967, seems rather prescient.

By almost every account, the discussion never got that far. Smith shattered any kind of profitable discussion by saying that being in the room with Robert Kennedy made him want to vomit. (Risen, p. 51; Dyson, p. 43) Before we get to why Smith said something like that and why he was wrong in saying it, I wish to ask a pertinent question no one has ever posed before, namely: What was Smith doing there? If the discussion was to be about countering racism in the north, what did Smith know about that? Smith was born in the South and joined the CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] faction in New Orleans. The bill the Kennedys were revising for congressional passage was aimed at the eradication of Jim Crow in the South. As noted above, Bobby Kennedy stated, in his response to Eisenhower and Johnson about the Watts riots, that he knew it would take different leadership and tactics to address problems in the north. So what were Smith’s qualifications in this regard?

Needless to say, Smith completely sidetracked the conversation. He seemed to be striking out at RFK personally because he had been attacked during the Freedom Rides in 1961. And this managed to turn the conversation into a kind of competition. Reportedly, Clark and Berry had come to discuss what Bobby Kennedy wanted to talk about. (Schlesinger, p. 345) But that all went out the window with Smith’s sideswipe and Baldwin’s encouragement of it. In fact, Hansberry actually said that the man RFK should be listening to was Smith, in spite of the fact that JFK’s bill was designed to eliminate discrimination in the South. (Schlesinger, p. 345)

Dyson is such a cheerleader for Baldwin that he never even ponders the fact that Smith may have been wrong in his vindictiveness. For instance, one of the things that Smith reportedly said was that Bobby Kennedy’s men stood around taking notes while he was getting beaten up. This is not accurate. It was the FBI that stood around. And what makes it worse is that the informant the Bureau had inside the Klan cadre that performed the assault had actually told them a week in advance that the Freedom Riders attack was coming. That information never got to the attorney general. (Schlesinger, p. 307; Wofford, p. 152) When Bobby did learn about the attacks, he sent two of his men to the scene: John Siegenthaler and John Doar. Siegenthaler tried to help a fleeing victim who warned him he was going to get hurt. He was then clubbed unconscious and sent to the hospital. Doar was on the phone from Montgomery telling RFK what was happening. When Kennedy learned that the local authorities were not doing anything to keep order, the attorney general sent in five hundred marshals under the command of his assistant Byron White. (Schlesinger, p. 309)

As Bobby Kennedy said more than once, he did not know the Freedom Riders were going to test the interstate buses when they did. (Schlesinger, p. 307) During an oral history interview for the JFK library, he once said that he first learned about it in the papers. And in fact, while the Riders had been in the upper South, there were no notable disturbances. But once they entered the Deep South, things got brutally violent. As the attorney general said, a mobile demonstration like this was pretty much unprecedented. He and Burke Marshall were working the phones willy-nilly trying to find ways to save the situation.

But the attacks could have all been prevented. And it was not just J. Edgar Hoover’s fault. The organization Smith worked with, CORE, had chosen to make it a dramatic confrontation. As Harris Wofford wrote in his book, Bobby Kennedy had met with some civil rights leaders at his office in April. They had asked him about this very issue: when interstate transportation would be straightened out and the segregation signs pulled down at the terminals. A Supreme Court case had been decided in that regard two months prior. The attorney general said he was working on it at the time but the body involved with the details, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was slow in issuing its orders. CORE was one of the groups in attendance at that meeting. They did not tell Kennedy about their planned Freedom Rides scheduled for the next month. Why? As their leader James Farmer later explained, “Our philosophy was simple. We put on pressure and create a crisis and then they react.” (Wofford, p. 151) The first edition of Wofford’s book was released in 1980. Are we to believe that Dyson never read it? This is why his book is so mistitled. Smith’s outburst was not based on truth. Not even close. So the book’s proper title is: What Ignorance Sounds Like.

Based on this false information, most everyone in the room either joined Smith’s side or stayed quiet, even when Bobby Kennedy said things that were clearly correct. For instance, that his department had helped King in Birmingham—which they had done by raising bail money and monitoring King’s treatment while he was arrested and imprisoned. They also sent Burke Marshall to arrange a settlement between the city and the civil rights demonstrators to begin integration. When RFK brought this up, they laughed and jeered. (Schlesinger, pp. 342-43, 47) After the meeting was over, Clarence Jones tried to make amends to RFK since he knew that this was the case. Belafonte also tried to explain his silence. His excuse was that if he sided with RFK he would forfeit his position with the others, whom he still had a chance to influence. (Schlesinger, p. 347)

Some have tried to say, as Dyson does, that this meeting somehow helped the attorney general by sensitizing him. I disagree. By this point, Bobby Kennedy had been at this for going on three years. He understood the situation, and as Belafonte had told him, he had done more for civil rights than any prior attorney general. What this meeting did was convince RFK that he had to consult with men like King and Wilkins, and later Cesar Chavez, on minority rights, because those men had a degree of understanding, knowledge and vision about them. Baldwin was so misinformed on the racial issue that he once verbally attacked the perennial champion of that cause, Washington lawyer Joe Rauh, in his own house. (Michael Parrish, Citizen Rauh, p. 155) Even someone as moderate as Henry Louis Gates, who liked Baldwin and is featured in the writer’s last play, has said that as a civil rights leader Baldwin had neither a grasp on his role nor an unambiguous message. And when this was discovered later, “he was relieved of his duties and shunted aside as an elder and retired statesman.” (Herb Boyd, Baldwin’s Harlem, p. 156)

After reading three books on Baldwin, I would have to agree. Baldwin simply did not possess the emotional or mental stability to be any kind of a political leader. Even his sympathetic biographer, David Leeming, understood this. He begins his volume by describing Baldwin as somewhat paranoid and not always psychologically or emotionally stable. (James Baldwin: A Biography, p. xii) He further notes that, by 1967-68, Baldwin thought that people like Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton and H. Rap Brown were the new hope of the black movement. If the reader can comprehend it, Baldwin predicted that this new emerging black consciousness meant the beginning of the end of America. (Leeming, pp. 292, 311) This is why the celebrated African American journalist Ralph Matthews once called Baldwin the Genghis Khan of the civil rights movement. (Schmitt, p. 57) I could go on about Baldwin, but I really don’t think pointing out all of his personal and public failings is worth it, except to show that Dyson is intent on concealing them.

Let me gladly conclude my discussion of Dyson’s sorry pastiche by addressing his points about Lyndon Johnson and civil rights. He gives Johnson credit for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. (Dyson, p. 56) This makes Dyson one of the worst historians ever. As mentioned previously, Clay Risen’s book proves that Johnson did little to pass the 1964 act. The men who were most responsible for breaking the filibuster were Robert Kennedy, his Department of Justice team, Senator Thomas Kuchel, and Senator Hubert Humphrey. (Risen, pp. 222-23)

As per the Voting Rights act of 1965, Johnson told King that he did not have enough capital left after the 1964 act to get that bill passed—unless King did something. So King did something in Selma. (Louis Menand, “The Color of Law”, The New Yorker, July 8, 2013) For this writer, that was King’s most significant achievement. For Dyson to give the credit to Johnson shows just how agenda-driven he is.

As per the 1968 Fair Housing Act, this was an expansion and extension of what President Kennedy had signed into law in late 1962. Johnson sent this bill up in 1966. But it only passed in 1968, as a result of King’s assassination.

Lorraine Hansberry reporter, playwright, author

The rest of Dyson’s screed is just as useless as the first part. Since he has to fill out a couple of hundred pages, he now attempts to relate the African Americans at the meeting to modern day equivalents. Anybody who would parallel the work of someone like Hansberry with the films Black Panther and Get Out! is an even worse cultural critic than historian. He gets even sillier when he tries to say that Muhammad Ali—who was not there—was some kind of civil rights leader of the sixties. The man who really fits that bill is the great NFL running back Jim Brown. But Dyson does not want to go in that direction, since Brown has little but disdain for most of the black athletes of today.

The worst thing about Dyson’s mess is that Amy Goodman of Democracy Now chose to feature it on the anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s assassination this year. In other words, the individual who did so much to get the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed, who came out strongly against Johnson’s mad pursuit of the Vietnam War, who faced off against Governor Wallace at the University of Alabama, who encouraged the peasants of Brazil to overthrow their government in 1965, who ran the incandescent progressive campaign of 1968—this figure was entirely ignored. On the fiftieth anniversary of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, Amy Goodman wanted her listeners to remember RFK through Dyson’s completely lopsided view of his dispute with James Baldwin and Jerome Smith. And to also ignore the good that could have come out of that meeting if Smith and Baldwin had not been there.

What a disgrace.

Go to Part 1

Go to Part 3

Go to Part 4