Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright”
Delivered at the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy

They say poets are oracles. Exhibit A: Robert Frost’s Kennedy Inauguration poem, whose lines seem eerie given what came after. “Found salvation in surrender” might serve as an epitaph for Kennedy, the 1960s, and The Movement.

Kennedy himself would face two supreme tests: the Cuban missile crisis and Civil Rights. One threatened to blow apart the world; the other threatened to tear apart America. Both represented tests of values as much as tests of will.

Values is not a word many would associate with John Fitzgerald Kennedy. All that seemingly remains of his Camelot is that flame always burning not far from Robert E. Lee’s former home. The “brief shining moment” appears so badly tarnished that some are ready to toss it on the junk heap of history. The only concession some would make to tossing aside the Kennedy years is that whatever else he was, John Kennedy was a memorable–even inspiring–speaker.

You would think Kennedy’s performance in those two crises alone would be enough to counter what almost amounts to a half-century long smear campaign, the worst of which has not reflected very well on this country or its writers and journalists. What we forget about the two crises is that John Kennedy’s performance during both of them represented a supreme act of political alchemy that fused action, rhetoric and values with a skill few presidents have mastered.

While the missile crisis is the most remembered and most honored–even Hollywood put its seal of approval on it–to me the Civil Rights struggle represented the more difficult task. It involved politics and values that even in Kennedy’s own mind were far more tangled and complex than missiles in Cuba. That from this should come one of the twentieth century’s most memorable speeches–a speech that like the Kiel Auditorium speech of Harry Truman came in part off the cuff–is truly remarkable.

In American Rhetoric’s “Top 100 Speeches of the Twentieth Century,” John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address ranks second, behind Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and one spot ahead of Franklin Roosevelt’s First Inaugural. Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, William Jennings Bryan and Kennedy have 19 speeches on the list, almost equal to the Republican Party’s total of 20. FDR and Ronald Reagan both have the most speeches on the list, six each, which given their places in history is appropriate.

There are 49 Democratic speeches on the list, more than double the Republican total, yet more evidence that the twentieth century was the Democratic Century. Since everyone concedes Ronald Reagan’s term marked the end of the Democratic Century that leaves the Republicans with only 14 speeches. The only president who makes the list after Reagan is Bill Clinton with his speech at the Prayer Service for Victims of the Oklahoma City Bombing, yet more confirmation of the mediocrity of our current political rhetoric.

The high ranking of Kennedy’s Inaugural, like the ranking of FDR’s First Inaugural, makes it a logical choice to include among the speeches that defined the Democratic Legacy. Yet like Roosevelt’s speech, Kennedy’s is so well-known–still memorized by schoolchildren–that its familiarity makes it seem redundant. The importance of Kennedy’s speech is indisputable, for like Franklin Roosevelt’s it served not merely to define a presidency, but also an era.

Yet there is another Kennedy speech, that like Franklin Roosevelt’s “Forgotten Man” (which, by the way, did not make the list) and Truman’s Kiel Auditorium speech (also inexcusably not on the list) could be argued to have more significance than the Inaugural. Without “Forgotten Man” and the Kiel Auditorium speech, it is entirely possible neither Franklin Roosevelt nor Harry Truman would have been president. In fact without “Forgotten Man,” FDR may not have even captured the nomination. Without what became known as the “Civil Rights Speech” John Kennedy’s administration and American history might have also taken a different turn.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s profile in courage came at a key point in his presidency and in American history. Like “Forgotten Man,” the “Civil Rights Speech” represents the heart of the Democratic tradition, for it also reached out to people who for too long had not only been forgotten but mercilessly persecuted. Like “Forgotten Man” it too deserves wider recognition, for Kennedy’s speech represents the capstone of the Democratic Century by eloquently making the case that a party built around using government to insure equity for the common people could not turn its back on people of color.

There is no questioning that Kennedy’s speech came at one of the twentieth century’s most critical and contentious turning points. The forces of history may often move at an apparently glacial pace, but in the early 1960s a huge iceberg cleaved off the face of that glacier that forever altered navigation in the stormy seas of American politics. Some Democrats did recognize the South would never be the same, but they clung to a belief that segregationists such as James Eastland and John Stennis occupied some mythical “middle ground” between the growing Civil Rights Movement and the hooded myrmidons of the Klan. If they could hold that “middle” they could keep the South solid.

But the Movement had already cleaved from that glacier. The first cracks echoed from far back in American history, but with the end of World War II the cracks had widened to the point where everyone could see the coming crisis. Harry Truman’s desegregation of the military and the Democrats’ 1948 convention were followed by Brown v Board and the Montgomery bus boycott. In 1955 the open coffin of Emmitt Till took the lid off what the South euphemistically referred to as “the separation of the races” and showed its true face to the people of the world, a face so mutilated beyond recognition that people fainted or vomited at the sight of it.

In response the South became even more irrational. In 1956, in response to the Brown Decision, the Mississippi legislature approved the creation of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission:

To do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi, and her sister states, from encroachment thereon by the federal government or any branch, department or agency thereof.

The Commission and similar organizations in other states along with the Klan and other hate groups formed the equivalent of a police state with the Commission paying informants and fomenting trouble while the Klan and others enforced the color line with brutal ruthlessness.

As I wrote in the book The Strange Death of Liberal America, to picture the South at that time you have to be prepared to walk into a fevered nightmare which periodically reasserts itself into our consciousness. Fantastical images and shapes flit in the darkness, and curses and screams come from beyond the edge of safety and sanity. We awake with that uncomfortable feeling of sorting out what is real. A memo labeled MSC 2‑44‑2‑25‑2‑1‑1 with the Sovereignty Commission’s almost indecipherable code captures the atmosphere:

It was pointed out to Shiboh by the writer that he was going a bit beyond the tutoring in Leland and he was advised to be very careful he did not go beyond the provisions of the law and create a problem which could bring about serious trouble.

By the time John Kennedy assumed the presidency, the waves from the Civil Rights movement were reverberating through America, as television cameras showed the truth with all its immediacy. In Birmingham, Alabama as Civil Rights protesters began marching in defiance of a city ban, the cameras brought pictures of police dogs attacking demonstrators and fire hoses knocking them to the ground, accompanied by the dull, thudding rhythms of nightsticks and fists. The admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi in 1962 required mobilizing the National Guard and calling in federal marshals and even then riots left two dead.

On March 28, 1963, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, jr. sent President Kennedy an urgent telegram about the situation in Greenwood, Mississippi where Civil Rights workers were trying to register voters.

I HAVE NO ALTERNATIVE BUT TO APPEAL TO YOU AS HEAD OF OUR NATION TO PERSONALLY INTERVENE IN BEHALF OF THE SAFETY AND PROTECTION OF CITIZENS AND WORKERS INVOLVED IN VOTER REGISTRATION.

One of the leaders of those workers in Greenwood was Fannie Lou Hamer. One of twenty children, she first went to work in the fields with her sharecropper family when she was six. In 1962 she was recruited to register to vote by workers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She became one of the local leaders, attracting retaliation for her efforts. In 1964 testimony to the Select Panel on Mississippi and Civil Rights she recalled:

On the 10th of September [1962], they fired into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Cuker sixteen times, for me. That same night, two girls were shot at Mr. Herman Sissel’s; also, they shot into Mr. Joe Maglon’s house. I was fired at that day, and haven’t had a job since.

Later Hamer would undergo a savage beating she would describe to a national television audience.

King’s telegram no doubt referred to the burning of the Council of Federated Organizations headquarters in Greenwood. A day after King sent his telegram, Greenwood police unleashed what the New York Times termed a “snarling dog” on 42 African Americans who marched home after attempting to register to vote.

On May 8, James Farmer sent Kennedy another telegram that described the situation in Birmingham.

EVEN IF GUNS OF ALABAMA SUCCEED IN QUELLING NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE IN BIRMINGHAM IT WILL RISE UP AGAIN IN PLACE AFTER PLACE UNTIL SUCH TIME AS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OVERCOMES HIS FEAR OF SPEAKING OUT AND DECIDES TO ACT FORCEFULLY TO SECURE FREEDOM OF NEGRO AMERICANS.

As records and histories of the Kennedy years show, sooner or later, John Kennedy knew he would have to deal with segregation. Like many Democrats at the time, he would have preferred later, for Kennedy also feared losing the so-called “solid South” that once had supported the Democratic Party. The South had helped elect John Kennedy in a close election, but in Mississippi’s “unpledged electors” he had to see that far from being an aberration, the Dixiecrat rebellion of 1948 had signaled a warning to the Democrats.

Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek writes that Burke Marshall, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, recalled that the president–echoing Farmer’s telegram–saw Birmingham as representative of a pattern that “would recur in many other places.” Dallek notes that Marshall observed that the young president:

Wanted to know what he should do–not to deal with Birmingham, but to deal with what was clearly an explosion in the racial problem that could not, would not, go away, that he had not only to face up to himself, but somehow to bring the country to face up to and resolve.

In is biography of Kennedy, speechwriter Theodore Sorenson captured the young president’s ambivalence:

The choice confronting the president was clear. He could put forward and fight for bold proposals anyway, without any prospects for their passage, and with some risk of jeopardizing other legislation, or he could accept criticism for failing to carry out the platform by confining himself to an expansion of executive actions, as his campaign speeches in fact emphasized. (p. 475)

In the spring of 1963, as Southern resistance to SNCC and others grew more overt, violent and defiant, the administration began drafting a civil rights bill. The bill would:

(1) protect African Americans against discrimination in voter qualification tests;
(2) outlaw discrimination in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce (private clubs were exempted);
(3) authorize the U.S. Attorney General’s office to file legal suits to force desegregation in public schools;
(4) authorize the withdrawal of federal funds from programs practicing discrimination; and
(5) outlaw discrimination in employment in any business exceeding twenty five people and creating an Equal Employment Opportunities Commission to review complaints.

What the administration needed was a dramatic opportunity to introduce the bill. That would come when a federal court barred any state government interference with the enrollment of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, at the University of Alabama. The decision would set in motion one of the great pieces of political theater in American history, one of the greatest and most courageous presidential speeches and eventually lead to what became known as the “Southern Strategy” and the Republican Counterrevolution.

PART TWO follows next week.

Tagged with: African_Americans • American_justice • Bill_Clinton • black_voters • Brown_v_Board • civil_rights • civil_rights_movement • Democratic_Presidential_candidates • Democrats • Dixiecrats • Dr._King • Emmitt_Till • Fannie_Lou_Hamer • FDR • FDR_first_inaugural • forgotten_man_speech • Franklin_Roosevelt • GOP_Counterrevolution • great_presidents • Harry_Truman • JFK • John_Kennedy • Kennedy_inaugural • Martin_Luther_King • Mississippi_Soverignty_Commission • moral_values • New_Deal • new_frontier • New_York_Times • oklahoma_city_speech • Reagan_administration • Republicans • Ronald_Reagan • segregationists • Southern_strategy • William_Jennings_Bryan • Woodrow_Wilson