In the run-up to the 1960 election, the Eisenhower administration’s tight money policy and push for a budget surplus had slowed the economy, giving Kennedy an opening to run on a promise of accelerated growth. Once in office he sought a cut in corporate taxes and other tax reforms that he believed would stimulate demand and promote economic expansion. Kennedy rejected the advice of economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a longtime supporter whom he appointed ambassador to India, for economic stimulation through increased government spending on public goods. Kennedy did not share the concern of some liberals, including Galbraith and White House aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr., that increased production in itself would not address the challenges of improving the quality of life at a time when society had achieved aggregate material abundance.
Congress, in the absence of a recession and worried about budget deficits, spurned Kennedy’s repeated calls for tax cuts. Kennedy did manage to promote business investment with liberalized depreciation allowances and tax credits for capital spending on machinery and equipment. To make sure that inflation did not accompany accelerated growth, his administration established wage and price guidelines and used public and private pressure on union and business leaders to lessen boosts in wages and prices.
Civil Rights
The thinness of Kennedy’s domestic achievements reflected the continued stalemate in Congress, the brevity of his presidency, and the shrinking ambitions of liberalism. It also gave the lie to the centrality that political scientists and many politicians ascribed to the presidency. In the early 1960s, the sources of political innovation and change lay elsewhere, in the civil rights movement and in the courts.
Four months after Kennedy took office, the Congress of Racial Equality launched a new challenge to southern segregation with its “Freedom Ride.” In 1947, after the Supreme Court’s declaration that laws enforcing segregation on interstate buses were unconstitutional, the Fellowship of Reconciliation and CORE sent a racially integrated group of bus riders through the upper South. The riders desegregated some buses, suffered a dozen arrests, but received little national attention. Fourteen years later, CORE decided to repeat the undertaking, this time going into the Deep South. Though in December 1960 the Supreme Court had extended its earlier ruling to invalidate laws segregating waiting rooms, lunch counters, and bathrooms serving interstate passengers, in practice segregation remained the norm on interstate buses and in their terminals.
The Freedom Ride at least implicitly challenged the federal government, since it aimed to have federal court decisions implemented. The new president disapproved of the effort, seeing civil rights as a low priority, best dealt with through incremental change rather than dramatic confrontation. In the upper South, the travelers were able to use some previously segregated facilities without regard to race. But when they entered Alabama, Ku Klux Klan members, working in collusion with local and state police, unleashed a torrent of violence upon them. Outside of Anniston, they set one bus on fire. When the riders arrived in Birmingham, a mob assaulted them while the police arranged to be absent. The extraordinary brutality directed against the nonresisting Freedom Riders, several of whom were beaten near to death, received extensive national and international publicity. Through an informer, the FBI had detailed foreknowledge of the plans for violence but never warned the riders. For their part, John and Robert Kennedy tried to avoid getting publicly involved, privately urging southern officials to defuse the situation, with no success.
The CORE group, beaten, threatened, and with bus companies refusing to carry it farther, reluctantly terminated its ride in Birmingham. But from Nashville, SNCC activists led by John Lewis and Diane Nash stepped into the fray, organizing an interracial group to ride from Birmingham to Montgomery. When the replacement riders arrived in Montgomery, they found themselves in an ambush plotted by white supremacists and police. With the police nowhere to be seen, a mob viciously beat the debarking riders. John Kennedy’s emissary on the scene, John Seigenthaler, was knocked unconscious while trying to rescue a woman under attack.
With violence unabated, the Kennedys decided to intervene. Federal marshals sent to Montgomery barely held off a white mob attacking a church where Martin Luther King Jr. and twelve hundred civil rights supporters had gathered. As the Freedom Riders got ready to go on to Mississippi, Robert Kennedy privately made a deal with Senator James Eastland that if no violence occurred, Washington would look the other way if protestors were arrested for violating segregation laws that the Supreme Court already had invalidated.
During the months that followed, hundreds of Freedom Riders traveled to Mississippi bus and train terminals, where they were arrested. Most refused bail, crowding local prisons until the state began shipping them off to the notorious Parchman Prison Farm, where they suffered beatings, indignities, and solitary confinement. Meanwhile, the Kennedy administration asked the Interstate Commerce Commission, which regulated buses and trains, to enforce the Supreme Court decisions. On September 21, it ordered interstate carriers to post signs in buses saying that seating was without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin and forbade them from using segregated terminals. Over the next few months, continued Freedom Rides, more aggressive federal legal action, and a series of court orders ended the segregation of most interstate travel facilities.
Even before the Freedom Rides ended, Robert Kennedy sought to forestall further violent confrontations by urging civil rights leaders to move from direct action protests to registering southern black voters, implying that the federal government would protect them if they chose the latter path. Activists in SNCC and other southern civil rights groups divided over which strategy to embrace, in the end pursuing both. They centered their efforts in some of the most staunchly racist sections of the South, including the Mississippi Delta. Young organizers, mostly southern-born blacks, moved into rural communities, where they began forging ties to veteran black activists and mobilizing African American communities to try to register to vote and protest against discrimination in employment and public accommodations. But determined resistance by state and local authorities and a continuation of the white terrorism that so boldly surfaced during the Freedom Rides—church burnings, the shooting up of homes, arrests, beatings, and murders—kept advances to a minimum, with the federal government failing to provide civil rights workers with protection.
As the civil rights push in the South stalled, in Washington Congress and the Supreme Court took several steps toward democratizing governance. In 1960, Congress passed the Twenty-Third Amendment (ratified by the states a year later), which gave the District of Columbia electoral votes in presidential elections. In 1962, it passed the Twenty-Fourth Amendment (ratified two years later) that outlawed the poll tax in federal elections (five states still had it). That same year, the Supreme Court took a major step toward greater electoral democracy in its ruling in Baker v. Carr, a suit that sought to equalize the representation of voters in the Tennessee state legislature.
Post–World War II population shifts, unaccompanied by reapportionment, resulted in increased inequalities in the number of people in state legislative districts. In Minnesota in 1958, one Senate district contained 16,878 people while another had 153,455. In rapidly growing states, malapportionment was even more extreme. In California, a Los Angeles state senator represented 4.1 million people, while another senator represented three counties with a combined population of 14,014. In Florida, senators and representatives from districts representing less than 15 percent of the population, mostly in rural areas in the north of the state, formed the majority in both houses of the legislature and tightly controlled its actions.
Unequal apportionment had concrete consequences. With rural districts dominating state legislatures, cities got shortchanged in the distribution of state funds. Also, because the state legislatures determined congressional district lines, rural areas had overrepresentation in the House as well, skewing its priorities and pol
icies away from urban needs and toward more conservative positions than held by the population as a whole.
In a split decision in the 1946 case of Colegrove v. Green, the Supreme Court had rejected federal court jurisdiction over redistricting. But within a decade, elected officials in underrepresented areas, trade unionists frustrated by the defeat of pro-labor and liberal legislation in malapportioned legislatures, and political activists affronted or negatively impacted by inequities in representation began filing new legal challenges. At least indirectly, their efforts were linked to the civil rights movement. Both fed off the rhetoric of democracy that came to the forefront during World War II and the Cold War. Also, the civil rights movement brought new attention to using the courts rather than legislative bodies to effect social and political change. The Supreme Court decision to apply the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause to voting rights in its wartime decision banning whites-only primaries opened the door to applying the amendment to other voting inequities, an argument successfully made in Baker v. Carr.
The plaintiffs in Baker v. Carr (Charles Baker, a local government official from Memphis gave his name to the suit) received a boost when the Kennedy administration decided to file an amicus brief supporting them. Solicitor General Archibald Cox played a leading role in arguing the case before the Supreme Court, which held two hearings on what Earl Warren later characterized as “the most important case” he participated in as chief justice. On March 26, 1962, the Court ruled six to two in support of the plaintiffs. Baker itself only gave the federal courts jurisdiction to hear legislative apportionment cases, but it opened the floodgates for what became a democratic revolution that swept through the nation’s legislative bodies. The next year, the Court, in a decision throwing out Georgia’s county unit system of voting, said that constitutionally guaranteed political equality “can only mean one thing—one person, one vote.” Subsequent decisions extended that principle from state legislative districts to congressional districts and finally to most local government bodies, including school boards, so that with the major exception of the U.S. Senate, legislative and administrative districts on all levels of government had to be roughly equal in population. It took a few years for the mandated changes to be implemented, but by the mid-1960s they were largely in place on the state and federal level, and by the early 1970s on the city and county level, giving greater representation to cities and suburbs, reducing the rural and small-town hold over lawmaking, and changing the political balance in many legislative bodies.
Federal Intervention
In September 1962, a crisis over the integration of the University of Mississippi led President Kennedy to begin moving gingerly toward greater support for the civil rights movement. After the Supreme Court ordered Ole Miss to admit its first black student, James Meredith, Governor Ross Barnett personally blocked his effort to register, then used state police and county sheriffs to keep him out, and finally, when he did enroll, failed to provide him protection. Kennedy at first tried to safeguard Meredith with federal marshals, but as the danger from segregationist crowds grew, he federalized units of the Mississippi National Guard. By the time the troops reached the university, a huge mob of students and older white supremacists had overwhelmed the marshals in an orgy of violence. Two people were killed and 160 marshals injured. After the fall elections, Kennedy issued an executive order he had promised two years earlier to desegregate federally funded public housing, but still declined to initiate a more comprehensive civil rights initiative.
Frustrated by white southern intransigence and federal passivity, civil rights leaders decided to force federal intervention and create pressure for new legislation by sparking a crisis that Washington leaders simply could not ignore. SCLC chose Birmingham as its battleground. The city—a center of heavy industry and regional services—had a long history of repressing democratic movements, first labor and then civil rights, through legal and extralegal violence, organized or at least tacitly supported by local wealthy interests. City officials, particularly Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, used every means at their disposal to keep the city strictly segregated, even if it meant closing parks and other public facilities rather than allowing court-ordered integration.
Martin Luther King Jr., his aide Wyatt Tee Walker, Birmingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth, and other SCLC leaders carefully prepared for an extended nonviolent direct-action campaign, code-named Project C, for “confrontation.” Its demands were modest but too much for white Birmingham leaders: desegregation of downtown stores and their adoption of fair hiring practices; equal opportunities for African Americans in city government jobs; the reopening of recreational facilities on an integrated basis; and the creation of a biracial committee to further progress toward desegregation. On April 3, 1963, the campaign began with a boycott of segregated stores and a sit-down at segregated lunch counters. In the days that followed, sit-downs and marches led to the arrest of more and more demonstrators, including King. But after nearly a month of protests, the campaign seemed to be losing momentum.
To escalate the confrontation, SCLC leaders decided to involve black high school students. On the first day they marched, Connor’s men arrested more than five hundred students. The next day, Connor used high-pressure water hoses and police dogs to try to stop hundreds more young demonstrators from reaching downtown. The day after, the police grew more violent in their efforts to stop the marches. In response, adult bystanders began stoning the police. In just three days, some fifteen hundred black teenagers and children were arrested.
Civil rights activities during the 1940s had received little coverage in the national press. By contrast, the Freedom Rides and other protests of the early 1960s garnered extensive media attention, including on network television news shows, which were rapidly emerging as a main source of information for the public. Images of police dogs attacking black children and fire hoses ripping off their clothes spread around the world. Their dissemination helped generate growing northern liberal and labor support for the civil rights effort and pushed the president, who had tried to maintain his distance from the Birmingham conflict, to get involved. Kennedy sent in mediators to start negotiations between black leaders and a committee representing the Birmingham white power structure and pressured, with only modest success, national corporations to order their local managers to support desegregation. As the demonstrations grew even larger, the police more brutal, and retaliatory attacks against the police more common, mediators worked out an agreement that provided for the phased implementation of store desegregation and nondiscriminatory employment.
No significant group of southern whites supported desegregation, but their willingness to resist it varied. In Birmingham, as in many other cities, white business owners, when faced with losses as a result of boycotts, demonstrations, and negative images of their city, ultimately abandoned all-out resistance to desegregation, agreeing to gradual change. White supremacist ideologues and some elected officials proved less willing to bend, leading to a fracturing of segregationist forces and the end of restraints on the most extreme elements. Bull Connor and other local and state officials denounced the Birmingham desegregation agreement. Ku Klux Klan members, who for years had undertaken a bombing campaign in Birmingham aimed at terrorizing the black community, rallied in force to protest the agreement and try to intimidate the black community, detonating bombs at the home of King’s brother, who was a local minister, and at the motel where SCLC had its headquarters. In response, crowds of African Americans, largely working-class men who had not participated in the earlier protests, began stoning police and firemen. Soon growing mobs attacked police and white passersby and burned down white-owned stores.
Kennedy saw in the violence that came at the end of the Birmingham protests a portent of the spread of civil rights confrontations throughout the country. After tangling with another southern governor over enforcing another court order to desegregate a universi
ty—this time Alabama governor George Wallace—Kennedy, eager to find a way to move civil rights issues off of the streets and into the courts, announced that he would seek a new civil rights law.
By then, Birmingham had electrified black America. In its wake, boycotts, marches, sit-downs, and mass arrests took place in hundreds of southern towns and cities, with college and high school students often playing a central role. Some cities began cautiously desegregating. But violent resistance continued, both brutal police action against demonstrators and extralegal terrorism. Just hours after Kennedy gave a national speech to announce his civil rights legislation, longtime Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, who had been leading a Birmingham-like campaign in Jackson, Mississippi, was assassinated outside his home.
In the North, African Americans and white allies demonstrated in support of the southern struggle and to protest local discrimination. In New York, a coalition of civil rights groups undertook a summer-long campaign against employment discrimination in the construction industry that included sit-downs, mass picketing, nightly church rallies, and hundreds of arrests. Public officials and construction union leaders proved adept at endorsing the protestors’ goals while avoiding meaningful steps toward realizing them.
The August 28, 1963, March on Washington channeled the post-Birmingham explosion of civil rights activity toward pressing Congress to pass a civil rights bill. The idea for a march came from veteran black trade unionists and civil rights leaders, most notably A. Philip Randolph, concerned with the economic plight of African Americans, who had higher levels of unemployment and lower incomes than whites. To improve black living standards, the march organizers hoped to push forward the long-standing labor-liberal agenda of a higher minimum wage, a federal public works program, and a World War II–type Fair Employment Practices Committee. The focus of the march broadened when in the wake of Birmingham and Kennedy’s public support for civil rights legislation all the major civil rights groups joined together to cosponsor what became called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Bayard Rustin, an African American leftist and pacifist, forced out of a large public role in the civil rights movement by threats to disclose his homosexuality, coordinated the organizing for the ambitious plan. The Kennedy administration first tried to discourage the rally, then endorsed it but worked behind the scenes to soften its radical edges.
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