Lincolnâs birthday, the governor criticized Kennedy for appointing segregationist judges to Southern benches.
Kennedy was infuriated. âRockefeller gets away with murder. Whatâs he doing for Negroes in New York?â he grilled a Time journalist who knew the Republican governor during an informal White House dinner the next night. However, the placid political climate would erupt into a national crisis and force his hand. The trouble had begun in earnest in September 1962, when the Fifth Circuit Court of the United States of Appeals ruled that James Meredith, an African-American Air Force veteran, was allowed to register at the University of Mississippi in Jackson. Meredith had first attempted to enroll in Januaryâafter being inspired by President Kennedyâs inaugural speech. Despite the court order, it took federal agents, national guardsmen, and high-level negotiations between Mississippiâs racist Democratic governor Ross Barnett, Robert Kennedy, and President Kennedy himself to get Meredith enrolled at âOle Missâ the following month.
The president seemed as shocked by the turn of events as anyone else. He asked Martin, point blank, where young blacks were getting these new ideas from. Martin quickly shot back, âFrom you! Youâre lifting the horizons of Negroes.â The notion certainly wasnât what Kennedy was hearing from his white advisors, and from a purely political viewpoint, he was anxious to put the civil rights issueâand any talk of a civil rights billâon the backburner. âWe go up [to Congress] with that and theyâll piss all over us,â he complained to aides.
With the election of Alabama governor George C. Wallace that same month, Kennedyâs race problems were about to boil over. As a circuit judge, Wallace had been something of a moderate Democrat, at least by Southern standards. However, after the Supreme Courtâs 1954 Brown v. Board of Educationrulingâand more importantly, after his losing bid to become governor in 1958âWallace reinvented himself as a hard-line segregationist, running a race-baiting campaign with the backing of the Ku Klux Klan. At his inaugural address in front of the Alabama state capitol building in January 1963, Wallace took an unequivocal stance in support of the Southern way of life. âI draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever! â The fact that Governor Wallacestood in the exact spot where a century earlier Jefferson Davis was sworn in as the president of the doomed Confederacy was probably not lost on the adoring Dixie crowd.
Wallace was the anti-Kennedy: short, pugnacious (a onetime boxer), and a skilled orator who knew how to work up a crowd; a lawyer who hailed from rural Alabama and who walked and talked like one of his âgood olâ boyâ constituents. He had served in the Air Force in World War II, flying bombing missions over Japan for General Curtis LeMayâthe same trigger-happy general who thought Kennedy had sold out Americaâs interest by negotiating with Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis. * To Northern Democratic politicians like Kennedy (or to unabashed urbanites like Moses) Wallace and his racist demagoguery were an embarrassment. But without Southern Democrats like Wallace (and the voters they represented) a Northern Democrat like Kennedy couldnât get elected to the White House, which is why the civil rights struggle in early 1963âone year before the Fairâs debutâwas not a priority for the chief executive.
* In his failed bid for the 1968 Democratic nomination for president, Wallace would select LeMay as his running mate, forming a sort of dynamic duo of right-wing fanaticism.
And leaders like the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. knew it. King complained that 1962 was âthe year that civil rights was displaced as
Kennedy was infuriated. âRockefeller gets away with murder. Whatâs he doing for Negroes in New York?â he grilled a Time journalist who knew the Republican governor during an informal White House dinner the next night. However, the placid political climate would erupt into a national crisis and force his hand. The trouble had begun in earnest in September 1962, when the Fifth Circuit Court of the United States of Appeals ruled that James Meredith, an African-American Air Force veteran, was allowed to register at the University of Mississippi in Jackson. Meredith had first attempted to enroll in Januaryâafter being inspired by President Kennedyâs inaugural speech. Despite the court order, it took federal agents, national guardsmen, and high-level negotiations between Mississippiâs racist Democratic governor Ross Barnett, Robert Kennedy, and President Kennedy himself to get Meredith enrolled at âOle Missâ the following month.
The president seemed as shocked by the turn of events as anyone else. He asked Martin, point blank, where young blacks were getting these new ideas from. Martin quickly shot back, âFrom you! Youâre lifting the horizons of Negroes.â The notion certainly wasnât what Kennedy was hearing from his white advisors, and from a purely political viewpoint, he was anxious to put the civil rights issueâand any talk of a civil rights billâon the backburner. âWe go up [to Congress] with that and theyâll piss all over us,â he complained to aides.
With the election of Alabama governor George C. Wallace that same month, Kennedyâs race problems were about to boil over. As a circuit judge, Wallace had been something of a moderate Democrat, at least by Southern standards. However, after the Supreme Courtâs 1954 Brown v. Board of Educationrulingâand more importantly, after his losing bid to become governor in 1958âWallace reinvented himself as a hard-line segregationist, running a race-baiting campaign with the backing of the Ku Klux Klan. At his inaugural address in front of the Alabama state capitol building in January 1963, Wallace took an unequivocal stance in support of the Southern way of life. âI draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever! â The fact that Governor Wallacestood in the exact spot where a century earlier Jefferson Davis was sworn in as the president of the doomed Confederacy was probably not lost on the adoring Dixie crowd.
Wallace was the anti-Kennedy: short, pugnacious (a onetime boxer), and a skilled orator who knew how to work up a crowd; a lawyer who hailed from rural Alabama and who walked and talked like one of his âgood olâ boyâ constituents. He had served in the Air Force in World War II, flying bombing missions over Japan for General Curtis LeMayâthe same trigger-happy general who thought Kennedy had sold out Americaâs interest by negotiating with Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis. * To Northern Democratic politicians like Kennedy (or to unabashed urbanites like Moses) Wallace and his racist demagoguery were an embarrassment. But without Southern Democrats like Wallace (and the voters they represented) a Northern Democrat like Kennedy couldnât get elected to the White House, which is why the civil rights struggle in early 1963âone year before the Fairâs debutâwas not a priority for the chief executive.
* In his failed bid for the 1968 Democratic nomination for president, Wallace would select LeMay as his running mate, forming a sort of dynamic duo of right-wing fanaticism.
And leaders like the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. knew it. King complained that 1962 was âthe year that civil rights was displaced as
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