How Martin Luther King Persuaded John Kennedy to Support the Civil Rights Cause - The New York Times

How Martin Luther King Persuaded John Kennedy to Support the Civil Rights Cause - The New York Times




How Martin Luther King Persuaded John Kennedy to Support the Civil Rights Cause


By James Goodman
June 29, 2017
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President John F. Kennedy, November 1963Credit...REUTERS/JFK Library/The White House/Cecil Stoughton/Handout ORG XMIT: BOS06D




KENNEDY AND KING
The President, the Pastor, and the Battle Over Civil Rights
By Steven Levingston
Illustrated. 511 pp. Hachette Books. $28.

Early in this absorbing history, Steven Levingston tells the story of John F. Kennedy’s telephone call to one Coretta Scott King two weeks before the 1960 presidential election. Her husband had been arrested during a sit-in at an Atlanta department store, and then, after all those arrested with him were released, held for violating the terms of his “probation” for an earlier traffic violation: driving (while black) with an expired license. The judge sentenced the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to six months’ hard labor. The next thing Mrs. King heard was that her husband had been taken, in the dark, from the DeKalb County jail and driven more than 200 miles to the maximum security state prison in Reidsville.

Behind the scenes, Kennedy pressed the Georgia governor to arrange King’s release. But Kennedy refused to speak out. The risk of alienating white Southerners seemed greater than any possible reward. In the end, Harris Wofford and Sargent Shriver persuaded him to telephone Mrs. King, who was six months pregnant. Kennedy told her he knew how hard it must be for her. His own wife was due in a month. “If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.”


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Released on bail a day later, King mentioned Kennedy’s call and Vice President Richard Nixon’s silence. King did not endorse Kennedy, but news of the phone call spread quickly and undoubtedly energized black voters in a close election. Among those whose minds were changed was a black Southerner who (unlike most) could vote. He was Martin Luther King Sr. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” Daddy King said. “Now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is.”


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Kennedy was amused. “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father,” he said. Then: “Well, we all have our fathers, don’t we?”


That story has been around at least since 1965, when Arthur Schlesinger Jr. published “A Thousand Days.” So too the stories Levingston goes on to tell in “Kennedy and King” about the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides; the Albany, Ga., and Birmingham campaigns; the integration of the universities of Mississippi and Alabama; the march on Washington and much more, including several memorable conversations between King and Kennedy. Levingston thanks his wife and numerous archivists for their help with the research, but his greatest debt, fully acknowledged, is to books available in most public libraries: oral histories, memoirs, biographies and narrative histories, including “Parting the Waters,” the first volume of Taylor Branch’s monumental trilogy of America in the King years.

Yet people who think the past is important should be the last to make a fetish of the new. As long as racial equality and justice elude us, writers, artists and filmmakers will return to the climactic years of our Second Reconstruction, when African-Americans and their white allies forced the nation to begin to make good on the promise of freedom, equality under the law and voting rights embedded 100 years earlier in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. That’s a good thing, all the more so as the present generation, which was born in an era of mass incarceration of black men and which has come of age at marches and rallies protesting police killings, tries to figure out where we should go from here. Levingston, the nonfiction book editor of The Washington Post and the author of “Little Demon in the City of Light” and “The Kennedy Baby,” writes with passion and flair. If these pages don’t rouse you, call your doctor.


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Martin Luther King at the March on Washington, August 1963.Credit...Agence France-Press/Getty Images




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There are places where Levingston the writer (displaying the occupational weaknesses for stark contrasts and sudden twists of drama) gets the better of Levingston the historian. It is wrong to say — even with King as a source — that in 1955, at the time of King’s arrival in Montgomery, “the Southern black” was “hunched in fear, cringing and passive, broken by the white man.” As far back as Howell Raines’s “My Soul Is Rested” (1977), authors have shown that everywhere King went, the stage for confrontation was set by community leaders and grass-roots organizers, including, as Levingston notes, King’s own father. In Montgomery in 1955, one of those organizers was Rosa Parks, whom Levingston describes as an “efficient volunteer secretary of the N.A.A.C.P.’s local chapter” (in whose “heart lay a well of quiet activism”). Parks may have been good with the carbon paper and coffee machine, but by the time of the bus boycott, her résumé also featured decades of not-so-quiet resistance. She had been fighting Jim Crow injustice, including violence against black women, since the Scottsboro trials in the 1930s.

Levingston frames his book as a study in leadership, and it is, but not the kind he suggests in his introduction, when he evokes Thomas Carlyle and writes of “great individuals, or heroes,” shaping “the world’s destiny.” Kennedy was not a leader in civil rights. Until the last months of his life, he saw the struggle for equality as a righteous distraction from critical domestic issues (including taxes and steel prices) and Cold War foreign affairs. When he acted, he did so in response to the horrific violence peaceful protest made manifest: the clubbing of Freedom Riders; the bombing of black businesses, homes and churches; the attacks on demonstrators with jack boots, water cannons and dogs; the racist riots in Oxford, Miss. Only in June 1963, after the battle of Birmingham and the confrontation with George Wallace in Tuscaloosa, did Kennedy do what King had been urging him to do all along: call civil rights a moral issue and acknowledge that the country faced a crisis that could not be met by “repressive police action” or “quieted by token moves or talk.” Hours after Kennedy’s speech, Medgar Evers was assassinated. Kennedy sent legislation to Congress, but it was left to Lyndon Johnson to make the Civil Rights Act of 1964 law.

That leaves King, who was indeed a leader, as well as a teacher. “It’s a difficult thing,” he said, “to teach a president.” Levingston’s point is that King taught Kennedy to be a leader, and he did, but he did not do it alone, and King’s relationship with his own followers was always complicated. Homegrown heroes, old and young (the subject of books like John Dittmer’s “Local People,” Charles M. Payne’s “I’ve Got the Light of Freedom” and Danielle L. McGuire’s “At the Dark End of the Street”), taught King and his closest associates while they in turn taught the Kennedys. “There go my people,” King said, quoting Gandhi. “I must catch up with them, for I am their leader.”

Levingston’s frame does not fit, but he is too good a writer to get in the way of his history for long. “Kennedy and King” will most likely leave readers thinking that what is needed today is not more leaders, a few men and women shaping our destiny, but more followers. What is needed are ordinary people: alert, informed, engaged, mobilized, idealistic but not naïve, critical but not hopeless, confident about who they are and what they want but able and inclined to work with all sorts of others, exercising rights won at enormous cost, starting with the right to vote. What is needed, in short, are more citizens, prepared to lead our leaders toward a more promising land.



James Goodman, a professor of history and creative writing at Rutgers University, Newark, is the author of “Stories of Scottsboro,” “Blackout” and “But Where Is the Lamb?”
A version of this article appears in print on July 2, 2017, Page 9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Profiles in Caution. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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