By Thomas K. Grose It was a very different
America that President John F. Kennedy addressed on
television the night of June 11, 1963. It was an
America where, throughout the South, racial
segregation was culturally accepted and legally
sanctioned. It was a country rent by protests
pleading for full freedoms for African-Americans, a
place where all too often the response to those
pleas was racist taunts, intimidation, and
bloodshed. It was, in short, a country deeply wary
of extending civil rights to blacks. And John
Kennedy was no exception.
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Kennedy's embrace
of the civil rights movement had been hesitant and
politically calibrated. But increasing levels of
violence in the South convinced the president that
moral courage mattered more than political calculus.
That night he delivered what historian Robert Loevy
calls "one of the greatest civil rights
speeches ever given," eloquently laying out the
moral imperative for a color-blind republic. And it
resulted in the most sweeping civil rights
legislation ever enacted by the U.S. Congress: the
1964 Civil Rights Act.
That landmark
legislation--which Kennedy would not live to see
become law--barred segregation in places of public
accommodation, including restaurants, hotels, and
theaters; ordered the desegregation of public
schools; set uniform voting standards; and required
employers to provide equal employment opportunities.
Though it did not stamp out racism, it ushered in an
era of positive change in American race relations
that remains ongoing--and incomplete--nearly 40
years later. "A social revolution was put in
place by the act," says Robert Dallek, author
of a recent Kennedy biography, An Unfinished
Life.
Its passage was the culmination of
organized social protests that began soon after the
end of the Second World War. But it was necessitated
by social upheaval of a much different sort nearly
100 years earlier in the 11 states of the
Confederacy. After the Civil War came Reconstruction
in the South, and blacks enjoyed newly gained
rights, bolstered by occupying federal troops. A
trio of amendments to the U.S. Constitution was
meant to help integrate blacks into society. The
13th Amendment, which became law in 1865, abolished
slavery. The 14th Amendment (1868) gave all
Americans equal protection under the law. The 15th
Amendment (1870) proclaimed that voting rights
should not be infringed by race, color, or previous
servitude.
Jim Crow. But after federal
troops were withdrawn in 1877, the South's
white power structure--seething with resentment
against federal authority--reasserted itself and
began to whittle away at the former slaves'
hard-won freedoms. "There was no lasting
commitment [from the federal government] to enforce
these laws," explains Stanford University
historian Clayborne Carson. "And without that
commitment, it was easy for the South to just say
no." Onerous poll taxes and so-called literacy
tests kept blacks disenfranchised. Local codes--the
Jim Crow system--were enacted that segregated
everything from restaurants and hotels to restrooms
and theaters. They were enforced in part by legal
authorities and in part by extralegal ones, like the
white supremacist Ku Klux Klan. Protesting was not
an option. "If you staged a sit-in in the
1870s," says Carson, "you'd have been
a lynching statistic." In 1896, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson, a
case that focused on railroad carriage seating, that
"separate but equal" public accommodations
were legal. And Jim Crow became the law of the land.
