Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement

14. A New Day Dawning

174 14 A NEW DAY DAWNING The day before JFK’s inauguration, I received a telephone call informing me of my selection for the press pool accompanying the president-elect. For a Negro, this was as unprecedented as Kennedy’s earlier rerouting of the campaign planes back to Washington after a Kentucky hotel refused me a room. And this was just the beginning. Watching the inaugural parade as the marchers passed the White House reviewing stand, Kennedy noticed that there was no black cadet in the color guard of the United States Coast Guard Academy. When he asked why not, he was told the academy had no black cadets. He ordered a recruitment effort to address that.1 Kennedy also established new policies that assured the black press equal status at the White House. Unlike his predecessor, he routinely recognized us and took our questions. I also had an assigned seat at press conferences for the first time, in the second row, among the other accredited White House correspondents. Less than three months into the new administration, I had an opportunity I’d been looking forward to for four years, but never as much as in the months since being rebuffed by Eisenhower’s press secretary when I objected to the White House News Photographers Association’s refusal to admit our Jet photographer. The Kennedy news conference on April 12, 1961, in the Department of State auditorium was attended by more than 400 foreign and domestic journalists. For the first time in my years covering the White House, I was recognized when I sought to ask a question, and it made headlines. “Mr. President,” I began, “the White House News Photographers Association bars Negro members. Do you feel that a group attached to the White House should follow such a policy?” Kennedy replied emphatically, “No, I don’t,” adding, with some stammering, that he was sure once the matter was brought to their attention the association would admit every photographer accredited to the White House, and “that’s the way I would certainly like to see it.”2 A New Day Dawning 175 JFK may have been personally unaware of the issue, but his press secretary , Pierre Salinger, had taken it up with the association’s leadership the previous December, and was told they were going to review the matter. It would be several months before Jet photographer Ellsworth Davis could apply again, because the association’s bylaws required a lapse of one year before a rejected applicant’s next try. Davis had applied twice and been rejected, but the application of another black photographer, Maurice Sorrell of the Afro-American newspapers, was still pending. Sorrell’s application had been approved by the association’s executive board and would be voted on in several weeks at the next membership meeting, where, under the bylaws, a three-fourths affirmative vote would be required to approve it. It was at these membership meetings that black applications were rejected by a minority of the membership, led by the same outwardly racist members whose names are remembered even today by veterans of the association. Even though he stammered, JFK’s whole demeanor in answering my question was so different from Eisenhower’s handling of any race question My first question to President Kennedy was whether he thought it was all right for the White House News Photographers Association to bar Negros from membership. He said he didn’t, and the discrimination quickly ended. (Courtesy of the author.) A New Day Dawning 176 (at least the few he inadvertently fielded during news conferences) that it seemed a whole new era of enlightened thinking was permeating the White House—coming straight from the president. Salinger asked me for a copy of my correspondence a year earlier with his predecessor, Jim Hagerty, and I recounted how a small bloc of racists had repeatedly barred our Jet photographer’s application, although it had been sponsored by New York Times, Washington Post, and Life magazine photographers, was approved by the association’s executive board, and had the support of a majority of the approximately 150 members. The Eisenhower administration had bought the group’s argument that despite the privileges and advantages its members enjoyed while covering the White House, the organization was essentially a “social” club, which could exclude anybody it wished. Kennedy saw no merit in that argument. When the controversy hit...