Today marks the 45th anniversary of the 1963 march on Washington for civil rights. Today is also the day when Sen. Barack Obama will formally accept the Democratic presidential nomination. Therefore, we can expect a massive number of stories about the 1963 march. It is doubtful that many of them will remind us that the whole point of the march was to put pressure on a Democratic president and an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress to do something on civil rights.
Dwight Eisenhower and the Republicans had been excoriated by John F. Kennedy during the 1960 campaign for not doing more on civil rights and Kennedy pledged a comprehensive civil-rights bill as soon as Congress reconvened. He also promised executive orders ending discrimination in housing and hiring as soon as he took office. “Many things can be done by a stroke of the presidential pen,” Kennedy said. But once in the White House, he basically didn’t do anything on civil rights — no executive orders, no legislation, no nothing. He even had to be pressured into appointing a liaison to the civil-rights community — and then named a white man, Harris Wofford. In what Kennedy must have viewed as a low blow, the
New York Times observed no difference between his policies on civil rights and Eisenhower’s.
Kennedy seemed to think that all he had to do was appoint a few token blacks to administration positions and that would be enough to keep them happy. This was the way the Democratic party in Massachusetts had always gotten the black vote and Kennedy saw no reason to change. But by 1961, it was not nearly enough; the civil-rights movement was too far advanced for that.
Moreover, the time was ripe for another legislative effort. In early 1961, House Speaker Sam Rayburn (D., Texas), went to considerable trouble to reform the House Rules Committee just to accommodate Kennedy’s anticipated civil-rights legislation. Plans were also made to limit an expected Senate filibuster and Vice President Richard Nixon, as president of the Senate, was prepared to make a critical ruling on the matter before leaving office on January 20. But Kennedy refused to lend his support to the effort for fear of alienating southerners like Sen. Richard B. Russell (D., Ga.) and it died.
When black leaders pressed Kennedy for a civil-rights bill, he brushed them off and none was forthcoming. Nor was the Justice Department much interested in using its new powers under the 1957 and 1960 civil-rights bills enacted under Eisenhower. “I did not lie awake at night worrying about the problems of Negroes,” Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother, confessed.
President Kennedy remained sensitive to southern concerns, appointing judges unlikely to push too hard on desegregation and resisting pressure to appoint a black to the Supreme Court when Justice Charles Whittaker retired in 1962. A black judge, William Hastie, who had been named to the federal appeals court by Harry Truman, was considered by Kennedy but rejected as unqualified. Among Kennedy’s circuit court appointees was William Harold Cox, who had been Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland’s college roommate and shared his political philosophy. The Eisenhower administration had previously rejected Eastland’s recommendation of his friend for a judicial appointment on the grounds that Cox was a racist.
When Kennedy finally got around to issuing an executive order against housing discrimination, it was not until after the 1962 elections in order to protect Southern congressmen and senators from the fallout. The order was also severely watered-down from what he promised during the campaign, with so many escape hatches that its impact was mostly symbolic. By the end of the year, liberal historian Howard Zinn was complaining that the Kennedy administration had an “undeserved reputation” for supporting civil rights.
Meanwhile, the Kennedy administration was irritated by the Civil Rights Commission — Bobby Kennedy likened it to the House Committee on Un-American Activities — and prohibited it from having access to Justice Department files on voting-rights abuses. Although the department pressed forward with voting rights cases, it did so slowly and without enthusiasm. Nor did the administration take any action to hasten school desegregation. In fact, Kennedy empathized with white parents, saying it was “really tough” for them to put their children into classes with blacks. University of Alaska historian Kenneth O’Reilly summarizes the approach of both Jack and Bobby Kennedy during 1961 and 1962:
John Kennedy designed the something-for-everyone approach to placate both the Democratic Party’s northern liberal wing and southern states’ rights wing. He offered voting rights litigation and affirmative action initiatives to one wing, the appointment of segregationist judges and a rejection of the Civil Rights Commission’s legislative agenda to the other wing. . . . The Kennedys saw no political gain in pushing too hard for voting rights for southern blacks. They also had no moral commitment to the cause. By their own account they pursued voting rights as the least objectionable and least intrusive course of action. If it had not been for the pressure brought by the civil rights movement, in all probability the Kennedys would not have moved at all.
The result of the Kennedy administration’s half-hearted approach to civil rights — Martin Luther King Jr. branded it “tokenism” in early 1963 — led to a radicalization of the movement. Civil-rights demonstrations increased in number and intensity, leading to ever more violent responses by local law-enforcement officials in the South. The escalation peaked in early 1963, when King began his Birmingham, Alabama campaign. Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, who was also the state’s National Democratic Committeeman, was easily baited into attacking the civil-rights demonstrators with police dogs, fire hoses, and nightsticks.
CONTINUED 1 2 Next >
