John F. Kennedy was in the same era as Martin Luther King Jr., and they both had the foresight to inspire Americans. But sadly, both Kennedy and King were assassinated before they could deliver on their promises as leaders.
In June 1960, Kennedy and King met for the first time. King was then a black clergy leader at the Southern Christian Leaders Association, a major civil rights organization. His courage in the face of threats of intimidation and murder, as well as his eloquence and persuasive appeal to moral justice, made him a prime representative of the civil rights struggle. His enemies were democrats who classified Black Southerners as second-class citizens.
Kennedy, a Democratic lawmaker in Massachusetts, sought to win the party nomination as a Democratic candidate in the 1960 presidential election. This required Kennedy to carefully balance the demands of all sides, regardless of the background of some civil rights leaders who were past communists or socialists. After meeting Kim, Kennedy publicly praised the civil rights activists as "touching examples of courage and morality" and claimed that peaceful protest was "a symbol of courage to take responsibility, a sign of good citizens, and a manifestation of the American spirit." Asked about "sit-in" demonstrations in which black customers entered white-only restaurants to demand service, Kennedy defended their goals and methods, saying, "It's a U.S. tradition to insist on your rights, and there's nothing wrong with taking a new way of sitting down and asserting your rights." ”
To win the Democratic nomination, Kennedy needed votes from white Southern Democrats. To win the presidential election, he needed the votes of the Black Democrats of the North. So when Kennedy publicly solicited black votes from the North, his aides urged King to suspend nonviolent protests for the rest of 1960, but Kim refused to compromise. In the fall of 1960, civil rights protests continued, and pre-election polls showed Kennedy on par with Republican candidate Richard Nixon.
Two weeks before the election, King was arrested in a sit-in at an Atlanta department store. Police, who alleged he had violated traffic laws and were punishing him, arrested him and sent him to a heavily surveilled prison 320 kilometres away. At the same time as Kennedy and Nixon held a televised debate, a difficult 6-month trial of Kim began.
During the 1963 Alabama Birmingham Movement, King stayed at the Gaston Motel. The inn was bombed in May 1963.
Kennedy did not choose to speak out, but both he and his brother carefully mediated and tried their best to get King released. Kennedy's advisers Sargent Schriver and Harris Woffford rejected Robert Kennedy's advice by persuading Kennedy to call Kim's wife, Corrita, who was 6 months pregnant.
The next day, Kim was released after paying bail. He was grateful to Kennedy for his help, but also noticed that Nixon was indifferent to him.
Although King did not support Kennedy, the phone call may have helped change Kennedy's vote situation among black people in the North. This did change the vote of King's father, who had previously refused to vote for Kennedy because he was a Catholic.
Kennedy won the election, so did he really manage to win the freedom of Martin Luther King Jr.? Apparently Kim doesn't think so. In 2014, a tape recording Kim's gratitude to the Kennedy brothers for his help was shown at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, and it was found that King's praise was reserved.
King told the interviewer: "It is true that Senator Kennedy took special action. During my arrest, he kept in touch with officials in Georgia and privately called my wife to express concern about me, and he told her that he was working to get me released. King said Robert F. Kennedy also helped. His younger brother, who was his campaign headquarters manager at the time, contacted Georgia officials directly, and even a local judge. ”
Leaders of the civil rights movement (from left): Martin Luther King Jr., Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Roy Wilkins, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson.
But King believes it wasn't the Kennedy family alone that led to his release. "The Kennedys did play a role in rescuing me, but I must be aware that there are many other forces that contributed to this."
Although John F. Kennedy argued that laws granting equal housing and suffrage to minorities were imperative, he understood that civil rights were a controversial issue, both within his own party and at the national level. He sees other issues as more pressing, such as taxes, steel prices, Fidel Castro's hostile regime in Cuba, and the Cold War. To achieve civil rights legislation, he needs to ensure he has the support of moderate Republicans, which also requires behind-the-scenes negotiations.
Fearing that his party would fall apart in the first few months of his term, Kennedy did not take action against the civil rights movement. Although King was the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement, he was not invited to attend Kennedy's inauguration or to attend kennedy's first White House meeting of civil rights leaders to appease the civil rights movement. The Kennedy brothers intended to take control of the civil rights movement so that it would not interfere with the big picture of Kennedy's first term, including any element of the president's first term strategy, in order to win a second term.
Soon after, King asserted that the civil rights movement must force Kennedy to respond. As word spread throughout the South, the participants were confronted with personal danger and malice from the security police. In May 1961, King traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, to preach for the free riders at the church of Ralph Abernethy, co-leader of the Southern Federation of Christian Leaders, as a sign of support for them.
King and other civil rights leaders still argue that the Kennedy brothers did not make the civil rights movement a top priority. In a Speech in July 1962, King argued that Kennedy should "engage in moral persuasion and occasionally speak out against apartheid." Kennedy responded that his commitment to ensuring equality for All Americans was clear and unambiguous. But it was another year before he made that commitment clear through a legislative proposal. Kennedy did this because the civil rights movement had forced the U.S. government to be a bystander to the moral crisis. In Alabama, scenes of demonstrators being attacked with sticks, police dogs and high-pressure water guns, as well as black children killed in a terrorist attack on churches, have drawn widespread public outrage.
Kennedy was forced to admit that "police repression" and "perfunctory" were not the solution. In June 1963, he finally proposed legislation to repeal the Jim Crow Act in the South. All U.S. citizens with a primary education (16 years of age or older) can vote; blacks will not be discriminated against in public places such as hotels and restaurants.
Despite these epoch-making proposals, the Kennedy family kept their distance from Kim. They knew that the most powerful person in the government agency, J. S. Thompson of the FBI, was the one who had the power to do so. Edgar Hoover hated King and the civil rights movement. They also know that Hoover has been conducting 40 years of unauthorized surveillance to collect secret documents, not only about the private lives of organized crime bosses and more than 400,000 suspected political "subversives," but also about every American in public life, from Hollywood to Washington to the Southern Christian Leaders Association, including the Kennedy Brothers and Martin Luther King Jr.
J. Edgar Hoover
In addition to being extremely fascinated by the political connections of the people he suspected, Hoover also had a special interest in gossip. One can deny the political background of the past, but it is difficult to erase the past affair. Hoover investigated the political activities of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., mastered material on their secret meetings, and accumulated black material from Robert Kennedy.
Hoover's wiretaps revealed that mafia contributions received by John F. Kennedy while running for the Democratic nomination in West Virginia were apparently paid by Frank Sinatra. Hoover also heard gossip from Kennedy's father, Joseph Kennedy, who had enlisted the help of Chicago crime syndicate boss Sam Giankana to fill ballot boxes in Cook County, Illinois, which was crucial to Kennedy's eventual narrow victory. Kennedy was also monitored for dealings with Judith Exna, Kennedy's lover and chicago mafia.
When Kennedy met king at the White House in June 1963, he informed him that he was being tapped by the FBI. At the same time, Kennedy publicly disagreed with the planned August 28, 1963 March to Washington, D.C. march for work and freedom. "We need to be successful in Congress, not a show in the capital," he explained. "When the head of the great march A. When Philip Randolph asked Kennedy to lead a "crusade" for civil rights, Kennedy said he preferred to push the legislation through bipartisan consultations with the Republicans. Kennedy must also keep Hoover neutral. The White House recruited and formed a coalition of whites to participate in the march to stem the idea that civil rights were an issue for black extremists.
After The assassination of President Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in on Air Force One on November 22, 1963.
On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Martin Luther King Jr. commented: "His death is a huge loss to the United States and the world. The best gift the American people have given to former President John F. Kennedy is to put into effect his proposed foreign and domestic policies. Kennedy's vice president, Lyndon Johnson, took over as president and won the 1964 election. Johnson, unlike Kennedy, had a deep sense of responsibility for civil rights.
He was determined to push for civil rights legislation, no matter what the Cost to democrats. As a result, the bipartisan Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 came into force. "In the South, we lost a whole generation of votes," Johnson reportedly said after signing the Civil Rights Act. Johnson is ready to pay the price. Historians have debated whether Kennedy would risk splitting the party to refine civil rights during his term of office, but the issue was low on his priorities, and he acted only under public pressure.
(Source: A History of the Struggle of African Americans)