John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Race and Civil Rights

The struggle by black Americans—first to abolish slavery and later to overturn de facto and de jure segregation and second-class citizenship—is without question the defining story against which the success of American democracy must be judged. As a result, scholarship on the re-energized civil rights movement after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is vast and growing. Former BBC Washington correspondent Nick Bryant has made a significant, and in many ways unique, contribution to that literature. He is the first historian to examine, systematically and comprehensively, John F. Kennedy's leadership (or lack of it) on race and civil rights, not only in the thousand days of his presidency but also during his six years in the House of Representatives and his eight years in the Senate.

The twenty-nine-year-old Kennedy, a decorated World War II Navy veteran, first ran for Congress in 1946 and focused, like many of his working-class constituents, on domestic issues such as the postwar housing shortage and veterans' benefits (as well as on the emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union). Nonetheless, as Bryant demonstrates, Kennedy made a serious effort in his initial campaign to court the small number of black voters in the Massachusetts 11^th congressional district. His campaign platform praised the courage and heroism of black servicemen in combat (a view that contradicted a report still in use during FDR's presidency that claimed, "In physical courage, [the Negro] falls well back of whites. . . . He cannot control himself in fear of danger . . . [and] is a rank coward in the dark.")¹ However, despite these "eloquent" words, Kennedy's campaign, which recruited white and black college women as volunteers, invited only the white women to lunch with the Kennedy sisters. When JFK's black valet, George Taylor, objected, the candidate replied, "George, you're thin-skinned. That's one of the things of the time" (p. 17). Bryant sees in these two early examples the emergence of what became a persistent pattern in JFK's career: a willingness to make important symbolic gestures about race and civil rights, coupled with a reluctance to take political risks.

Once in Congress, Kennedy "battled hard" for an anti-poll tax bill, and, as a member of the House District of Columbia Committee, supported legislation to establish home rule and ban hiring segregation in the nation's capital. But, at the same time, Kennedy avoided becoming politically identified with so-called ultra-liberals like Hubert Humphrey. Race and civil rights, Bryant concludes, "seemed to trouble him intellectually rather than arouse him emotionally"—especially because "the persistence of racial inequality undercut America's oft-stated claims of moral superiority over the Soviet Union" (pp. 30, 32).

When JFK chose to challenge the popular incumbent Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. for the Senate in 1952, Massachusetts' 50,000–70,000 black voters became potentially decisive for the Kennedy campaign. Several prominent black activists in Boston were brought into the "inner sanctum of the campaign. They worked out of the same headquarters on a fully integrated basis, something that, in the early 1950s, was unusual. They participated in strategy meetings and had regular access to the candidate" (p. 38). Kennedy renewed his criticism of segregation and lack of home rule in D.C. and attacked Lodge for voting against efforts to curb the Senate filibusters that made civil rights legislation virtually impossible. Elaborately staged teas, organized to introduce female voters to the Kennedy family, included two very successful events for black women. JFK won by 70,000 votes (despite the fact that Dwight Eisenhower swamped Adlai Stevenson by 209,000 in the presidential contest) and black voters had made "a significant, if not decisive contribution" to the outcome. Kennedy, Bryant concludes, had raised the expectations of his black supporters in Massachusetts. They hoped, despite his fixation on black turnout, that he might gain "a more sophisticated understanding of the struggle for equality...