June 11, 1963
John F. Kennedy, George Wallace, Medgar Evers and America's Unending Search for Freedom
SIXTY ONE years ago today—June 11, 1963—President John F. Kennedy, the youngest president ever elected and perhaps the office’s most privileged occupant, did something no other president had done in a century, and few have done since: he told the truth about race in America.
The moment had been decades in the making. After the Civil War and President Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson—previously the lone Southern Democrat who remained in the Senate after secession, declared the United States to be “a country for white men, and by God, as long as I’m President, it shall be a government for white men.”[1] When vetoing the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (both of which were overridden by Congress and for which he was nearly removed from office after being impeached in the House), Johnson lamented that the government chose “one class of people” over “our own race.”[2]
After Johnson’s near conviction, President Ulysses Grant provided the last vestiges of legislation that embraced Black freedom, with the adoption of the 14th and 15th amendments, along with the Ku Klux Klan Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1875—the last piece of Civil Rights legislation passed for another 82 years. During the ensuing eight-plus decades long nadir, Union troops abandoned the South, as white “Reedemers” rewrote Southern state constitutions and introduced poll taxes, literacy tests, and pursued outright violence against would-be Black voters. As W.E.B. DuBois wrote in his 1935 epic, Black Reconstruction, “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”[3] It wasn’t until 1957 that federal troops returned to former Confederacy, this time to escort nine Black teenagers into Little Rock Central High School, at the reluctant orders of President Eisenhower, who had viewed Brown v. Board—which had overturned the legality of segregation in 1954—to be an overstep in the first place.
Even by 1963, it was still rare for a Southern school to have been integrated. In places like Mississippi, only 6.7 percent of eligible Black voters were registered.[4] And those who were registered often did not vote out of fear of retribution. Across the South, the Supreme Court’s orders had simply been ignored, echoing the region’s a la carte attitude to the Constitution. But on this day 61 years ago, history and fate met when Vivian Malone and James Hood sought to become the first Black students in the history of the University of Alabama. That morning, as they attempted to enter the Foster Auditorium, a man stood in the doorway: Governor George Corley Wallace. At his inauguration in January of that year—standing on the same spot Jefferson Davis had when he was sworn in as president of the Confederacy—he promised “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”
Six months later, reading from a statement as Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach looked on, Wallace lamented that the assistance provided to two Black students, then both just 20, represented “the oppression of the rights, privileges and sovereignty of this state.” Eventually—after Wallace was sure that the photographers captured his defiance—he moved out of the way. Malone and Hood entered the auditorium and registered for classes.
Incensed, President Kennedy made an address that very night at 8PM from the Resolute Desk. Speaking directly to the nation—over a century after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—Kennedy declared that Civil Rights was a “moral issue…as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.” Moreso than ever in his presidency, Kennedy was clear on the realities facing Black America: “The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the Nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is 7 years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much.” Continuing, before asking Congress to act and pass a substantive Civil Rights bill, he noted, “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free.”
Just after midnight on the night of the address, a Black man who had been listening to Kennedy’s address pulled into the driveway of his home on Margaret Walker Alexander Drive in Jackson, Mississippi. His name was Medgar Evers. Mississippi, which once elected the first Black man in the history of the U.S. Senate in 1870, Hiram Revels, had re-written its Constitution in 1890 to effectively outlaw the Black vote. Evers, who had worked for the NAACP as a field secretary to fight the realities of Southern racism, opened his car door carrying shirts that read, “Jim Crow Must Go.” In an instant, a bullet fired from a 1917 Eddystone Enfield rifle would pass through his heart. Stumbling to his doorstep, his wife Myrlie would find him—with their three children inside. Medgar Evers, who had fought fascism in the Battle of Normandy in WWII, was killed for fighting racism in the United States. His killer, Byron De La Beckwith, would be tried twice for the murder. In both trials, with only eligible voters able to sit on a jury, the juries were all white and all male, and in both, they could not reach a verdict. Before the second verdict, onlookers saw Ross Barnett, then the Governor of Mississippi, shake De La Beckwith’s hand.
Just a few months later in August, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A few months after that, on a beautiful November day in Dallas, President Kennedy too would be killed by a rifleman. In his place, President Lyndon Johnson would take on the Civil Rights program that Kennedy had embraced in the last months of his life. In his first address to Congress, just five days after President Kennedy’s death, Johnson urged “no memorial, oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the Civil Rights bill for which he fought so long.” After his own landslide election in 1964, Johnson would do just that: he would lead the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Through the Social Security Act of 1965, Medicare and Medicaid were created, and benefits for American seniors were raised substantially. He continued, signing into law the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 which provided rent subsidies for low-income families and perhaps most importantly, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which effectively ended the voting limitations introduced by Jim Crow laws in the late 19th Century.
Today, Black Americans are far better off than they were 61 years ago. And much of that success is due to programs the federal government put forth; promises that were made and kept.
Still, Black Americans die on average about seven years younger than white Americans—the same figure President Kennedy spoke of in 1961, they suffer disproportionately from rates of disease compared to white Americans, and they earn far less. One in 31 Americans is under some kind of penal control—including one in 11 Black American men—while Black men born after 1965 who lack a high school diploma are more likely to serve prison time in their lives than not.[5]
In 2024, this anniversary—and all that it represents—means more than it usually might. Joe Biden’s presidency, which is a reality because of Black voters, may end because his waning Black support. President Biden for his part has helped create 2.6 million jobs for Black workers and helped achieve the lowest Black unemployment rate on record. If reelected, he stands to continue the legacy of the pursuit of progress. If he loses, it will mean another nadir, and the potential retreat of the freedoms in the United States for which Kennedy and Johnson fought.
Because that’s what this election is about—freedom’s expansion or freedom’s retreat. Perhaps the President and his Administration would do well to make that clearer to the American people—and to Black voters who may well decide the election again. Right now, Donald Trump is standing in the doorway of freedom. He already successfully helped take away the freedom of choice from women, sought to overturn a free and fair election, and promises to take away freedoms from anyone who disagrees with him. To prevent that, it will require President Biden to speak clearly and directly about the freedoms he is fighting for—and remind voters of what side of history he is on.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/grant-impeachment/
[3] W. E. B. Du Bois. Black Reconstruction in America : an Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.)
[4] Joseph Crespino. In Search of Another Country. (Princeton: Princeton Press, 2007), 4.
[5] Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, 5
Bravo ~