John F Kennedy

1. Violence in Kennedy’s Administration

2. Kennedy’s Life Experience

In a Perilous Hour: The Public Address of John F. Kennedy,
Book by George N. Dionisopoulos, Steven R. Goldzwig, Halford R. Ryan; Greenwood Press, 1995

1 JOHN F. KENNEDY: A RHETORICAL INTRODUCTION

John F. Kennedy was the youngest man and the only Catholic ever elected to the U.S. presidency. He would serve as the 35th president approximately "a thousand days," but in that brief period his evocative words would engage and energize the nation--imbuing its citizens with the feeling that anything was possible if they applied themselves in a collective, selfless effort on behalf of change. Kennedy's rhetoric summoned each citizen to face the opportunity and challenge of the new decade. It was to be "a time of quite extraordinary transformation of national values and purposes--a transformation so far-reaching as to make the America of the sixties a considerably different society from the America of the fifties." By focusing our inquiry on some of the public rhetoric of John F. Kennedy we offer herein a partial, but nonetheless important, insight into how such a transformation was initiated, if not realized. The symbolism of the Kennedy era--with its images of wealth, youth, vigor, idealism, pragmatism, and steely determination--was a product of both words and deeds. 1 <35345090>

the September 30, 1962, radio and television address outlining events associated with the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi and the June 11, 1963, radio and television address on civil rights

3. The New Frontier

4. The Reactions from the blacks

5. From the southern white

6. What Kennedy had Failed

Lyndon Johnson

1. Violence in Johnson’s Administration

2. Johnson’s Life Experience

3. The Great Society

4. The Reaction from the Blacks

5. The Reaction from the Southern Whites

6. Why Johnson was Successful in the Domestic Policy

p.333EPILOGUE Ambiguous Resolution

In 1990 skyrocketing homicide rates among African Americans in Birmingham set new records for violent deaths in a city known for brutality. Outside the system and abandoned by black and white, inner-city residents faced insurmountable problems: unemployment, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, gang warfare, AIDS, and grinding poverty. After two decades of work by the Jefferson County Committee for Economic Opportunity, scandals revealed that it had done little more than line the pockets of its minority directors. The corruption spilled over to the Birmingham Housing Authority, which was so poorly managed that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development--itself a troubled agency--had to intervene. Meanwhile, public housing projects resembled war zones as drug lords and gang members fought over the units of the Collegeville and North Birmingham Homes. With drugs and gangs came an increase in violence and black-on-black homicides. Although the white power structure joined the black city government in efforts to reclaim the downtown area by containing the violence, both largely ignored the inner-city poor. 1 <96833177>

CHAPTER TWO Bombingham

The dynamite blast that shattered the house of Sam Matthews oil August 18,1947, marked the first in a series of racially motivated bombings brought oil by the postwar transformation of Birmingham, Alabama. Although racial attacks occurred in other southern cities, the frequency and number--some fifty dynamitings between 1947 and 1965--made Birmingham an exception and gave rise to the sobriquet "Bombingham." At first, the victims of the bombings were African Americans who had responded to a postwar shortage of adequate black housing by moving onto the fringes of white neighborhoods. In time, civil rights integrationists became the targets of the attacks. White vigilantes saw their acts of terrorism as a defense of white supremacy. African Americans responded to the dynamitings by defending black property rights. The traditional Negro leadership class had sought a solution within the confines of Jim Crow, but the failure of white political leaders to address the housing shortage drove black home owners to challenge the color line through a legal battle over Birmingham's unconstitutional racial zoning ordinance. An analysis of residential bombings in postwar Birmingham reveals the evolution of black protest from a request for separate but equal public services to a demand for an end to segregation.1TWO DECADES of depression and world war had given way to a postwar boom that allowed residents to focus on p.63

2. The Year 1965

Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement,
Book by James R. Ralph; Harvard University Press, 1993 p.1

Introduction

In early April 1965 one of Martin Luther King's chief lieutenants, James Bevel, came to Chicago for a weekend of speeches, workshops on nonviolence, and fund raising. The triumphant march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, had occurred less than two weeks earlier, and as a key strategist of the Selma campaign, Bevel was greeted as a hero everywhere he went. By Sunday, as he awaited his turn to speak at a rally at Northwestern University, he was an exhausted conqueror. Yet he perked up when Studs Terkel, the event's emcee, introduced him. Known as one of the movement's most dynamic orators, Bevel rose to his reputation. In a piercing, tense voice, he transfixed the large crowd, surprising it by talking more about racism in the North than about racism in the South. He even predicted that 'the nonviolent movement in a few days, in a few weeks, in a few years will call on Chicago to address itself on the racist attitude that is denying Negroes the right to live in adequate housing." "We're going to have a movement in Chicago," Bevel declared. "We plan to close [ Chicago] down." 1 <54345860>

It was a prophetic speech. In less than five months, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Andrew Young, encouraged by Bevel, announced that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had selected Chicago as the target of its first northern campaign. From late 1965 to mid-1967, King and SCLC teamed up with Al Raby and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), a federation of local civil rights groups, to form the Chicago Freedom Movement, an enterprise determined to root out racial injustice, particularly housing discrimination, in Chicago, to improve the quality of life for the city's black residents, and to prod the nation as a whole to combat urban ills.

3. The Using Violence after 1965

Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement,
Book by James R. Ralph; Harvard University Press, 1993 p7

Coming to Chicago 1

" Chicago is on fire with a nonviolent movement. They want us to come in September. We must not ignore their call," Martin Luther King, Jr., told his Southern Christian Leadership Conference colleagues in late August 1965. At King's command, SCLC geared up for a remarkable new departure, its first full-scale northern civil rights campaign. Until then SCLC had been a distinctly southern creation. Born in the South, it had spent the last eight years working almost exclusively in its native region. But times had rapidly changed. After the rioting in the Watts section of Los Angeles, the plight of urban northern blacks seemed at least as pressing as that of southern blacks. Only by doing something spectacular, by launching a northern nonviolent campaign, King and SCLC believed, could they offer hope to the "teeming millions of Negroes hovered in ghettoes" and steer them away from destructive violence. 1 <54345861>

SCLC's decision to go to Chicago delighted Albert Raby, the leader of the Chicago civil rights movement. To Raby, the Chicago movement was not ablaze, but burning out. Convinced that Chicago could not be reformed from within, he had recently entered into talks with King and Andrew Young, trying to lure SCLC to Chicago. He thought that only a SCLC campaign could alter the segregative and discriminatory practices that plagued nearly one million black Chicagoans. With SCLC's impending arrival, Raby and his followers rejoiced. The civil rights spotlight, for the first time, would be focused on northern racial problems and, more specifically, on their city. 2 <54345861>

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The City in Crisis 4

"Never has this city been so consumed with hatred," a Chicago columnist concluded in early August 1966. Chicago tottered on the edge of a "race riot," the superintendent of police warned. The foundations of civic order, many Chicagoans believed, were rapidly crumbling. 1 <54345905>

Cries of impending disaster hardly ruffled civil rights activists. They knew that crisis was often the father of reform. They would continue marching, for they believed that the city needed an even more vigorous jolt. "We haven't been able to put on enough pressure yet," Andrew Young explained. "In Birmingham and Selma we almost needed martial law before we got anywhere." 2 <54345905>

Yet for many Chicagoans, including influential supporters of the Chicago Freedom Movement, there had already been too many marches and too much pressure. No clear-headed person could now deny that racial intolerance infected the city. Further disorder, many citizens contended, would set back racial justice rather than speed its arrival. It was time for the civil rights crusaders to settle their grievances in the conference rooms and not in the streets.

The Daley administration seconded such exhortations. But it did not simply rely on pleas to realize its wishes; it maneuvered to regain the upper hand. The Chicago police beefed up their protection of the marchers so that there would be no recurrence of the terrible Southwest Side violence. More important, Daley and his lieutenants challenged the civil rights leaders' contention that at the heart of the open-housing crisis was the question of social justice. At stake, the Daley forces argued instead, was the city's civic order.

p.923 The Open-Housing Marches

"There is a good nonviolent fight in Chicago now and I challenge you to get in it," boomed Martin Luther King at a mass meeting on Chicago's South Side in early August 1966. The events of the previous week had invigorated King and his followers. In five of the past seven days, angry whites had terrorized peaceful civil rights demonstrators as they marched through white neighborhoods to dramatize the depth of housing discrimination. Drawn by the tumult, the press rushed to file reports on Chicago civil rights developments. To many observers and participants, it must have seemed as if the scripts of the Birmingham and Selma campaigns had been recycled. 1 <54345894>

The surge of the Chicago movement could not have been more propitious. For weeks the standard line on the Chicago enterprise had been discouraging. "I think King is finished," Saul Alinsky snapped to a Washington Post reporter in mid-July. "He's trapped. He can't get out of [ Chicago] in less than ten months to a year and he doesn't know what to do if he stays." Worse, King's leadership of the black freedom struggle was in jeopardy. A rising black militancy challenged King's vision of a better America. Then in mid-July, to his horror, a riot erupted on Chicago's West Side, in the very region that his movement had tried to mobilize for a nonviolent campaign. Not since the Montgomery bus boycott, the reporter Nicholas Von Hoffman observed, had the position of King and the nonviolent movement been so insecure. 2 <54345894>

Then, almost miraculously, the beleaguered campaign was transformed into a confident crusade. The marches through all-white neighborhoods dramatized that Chicago was a divided city and that northern prejudice rivaled southern prejudice in intensity. Just as Bull Connor's

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Chicago, Congress, the President, and the Nation 5

"I have just been watching the sickening spectacle of the 'superior white race' rioting in response to your march on 'the news' on television," a young housewife from a Chicago suburb wrote to Martin Luther King, only hours after he had been stoned in Marquette Park. She was shocked by the "venom and sadism, not just in the 'backward south,' which we have been feeling superior to, but everywhere in our 'fair city.'" She was not alone in her outrage. "I felt sick at heart when I heard the insults and jeers of the white hecklers on the radio program last night. I just want to let you know that there are many white people who are praying and working for you and your people," another woman wrote. The "horrible and sickening spectacle of the white mob" overwhelmed yet another radio listener, driving her to the point of tears. "I was so ashamed of my race," she said. At the same time a Presbyterian minister from Michigan felt impelled to join the Chicago crusade. "My Christian conscience cannot allow me to stand aside any longer," he confessed. And one woman spoke for many Americans when at the height of the Chicago protests she asked King to "please pray for those of us who do not do enough--that we too may have the courage to do whatever we can and should." 1 <54345918>

The white belligerence also shocked many in positions of power across the nation. "The marchers were simply attempting to raise and expose to the nation the truth about discriminatory housing practices so that the public--churches, government, and individuals--would demand change in law and practice," an American Friends Service Committee officer told a congressional subcommittee in Washington. "The counter-reaction--whites stoning Negroes--that's going on in Chicago

p.195

Stalemate in Chicago 6

The demands of Martin Luther King's schedule never seemed to ease. On August 28, less than thirty-six hours after the Palmer House negotiations, an exhausted King was back in Atlanta for Sunday services at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. Fatigue, however, could not depress his satisfaction with the Summit agreement. We "hammered out," he told his congregation at the outset of his sermon, "what will probably stand out as a most significant and far-reaching victory that has ever come about in a Northern community on the whole question of open housing." And the Chicago accord, he believed, would do even more than right racial wrongs in Chicago; it would "serve as inspiration for us to carry on in the days ahead." 1 <54345929>

Yet King soon realized that he had misjudged the impact of the summer of 1966. The Summit agreement did not prove to be a springboard for a new Chicago. The task of transforming the midwestern city, he confessed in early 1967, was "greater than even we imagined." Nor did the Palmer House accord revitalize the quest for racial justice. The subsequent months were a time of decline, not renewal, for both the Chicago movement and, more generally, the national civil rights movement. 2 <54345929>

Not all Chicago activists were as pleased with the Summit agreement as King was. Even as Ben Heineman, Mayor Daley, and King extolled the accord to eager reporters outside the Palmer House, the head of Chicago CORE expressed his disgust at the decision to settle. "[N]othing but another promise on a piece of paper," Robert Lucas asserted. CORE, he

p.220

Epilogue

More than a quarter of a century has passed since Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference left the South to stage their first northern nonviolent campaign. Since then, the conventional assessment of that effort has remained consistently unfavorable. In the late 1960s most observers considered King's Chicago program a "failure." Two decades later historians and journalists still employed dark adjectives to describe the Chicago venture. 1 <54345936>

It is easy to explain the popularity of this critical evaluation. The Chicago crusade was clearly not the great triumph that the Selma and Birmingham campaigns had been. It failed to rouse the national conscience, to spark the passage of sweeping legislation, or to electrify the nonviolent civil rights movement. On the local level, too, the Chicago Freedom Movement did not accomplish its professed goals. Despite numerous achievements, it failed to "end the slums" or to make Chicago an "open city."

In the 1990s the South Side and West Side ghettoes are far more troubled and impoverished than they were in the 1960s. Today ghetto dwellers speak wistfully about how much better their neighborhoods were three decades ago. Then, at least, industry, businesses, and representatives of the black middle class could be found in places like North Lawndale, East Garfield Park, and Kenwood-Oakland. Now these communities are largely the preserve of people mired in poverty, hostage to a poor school system and besieged by rampant crime and drugs. 2 <54345936>

The Positive Side of Non-Violence for the blacks