a pinch-penny campaign treasury dictated that most of my electioneering would be conducted in person. This candidate wasn’t seen in television ads or heard on the radio; my constituents-to-be saw me first on their porches and heard me after they’d answered their doors.
If I could talk my way inside, where I could deliver my election pitch away from the competition of street sounds, I almost immediately saw one feature common to nearly every home in the low-income district in Atlanta I wanted to represent. Almost every living room wall had three pictures, heroes, usually hung together: Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy.
Seeing the late president’s picture there summoned many memories, both for the voters whose homes I had invited myself into and for me.
When my coworkers in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and I first heard, on the early afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, that President Kennedy had been shot, we immediately assumed the attack on him came from forces opposed to his views on civil rights.
Those views weren’t ours. We thought the three-year-old Kennedy administration had been cowardly in enforcing existing civil rights laws, cautious in seeking new, stronger legislation from Congress, and too eager to trade justice for order when racist whites threatened violence against civil rights forces in the South.
In his time in office, Kennedy had failed to satisfy critics like us: young black men and women who had left our segregated southern college campuses to work full-time in the activist civil rights movement that spread like wildfire after the sit-ins began in earnest in early 1960.
In fact, some of our resentment against Kennedy stemmed from his failure to properly acknowledge the way he had won the White House. News of a telephone call he had made to the wife of jailed civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., expressing his sympathy, had been trumpeted to black voters in the closing days of the 1960 campaign. When Vice President Richard M. Nixon refused to comment on King’s arrest and jailing, 30 percent of black voters shifted their allegiance from the Republicans to candidate Kennedy.
King had been arrested in an Atlanta sit-in. We sit-in veterans felt the new president owed the growing movement some reward for having given him the opportunity to claim the White House.
But with a narrow Democratic margin in Congress, and with Southern committee chairs dominating the flow of legislation, civil rights retreated from the new president’s agenda. A campaign promise to eliminate housing segregation “with the stroke of a pen” was stricken from the agenda until civil rights supporters flooded the White House with pens.
In 1961, groups of Americans known as Freedom Riders boarded buses to test orders requiring integrated interstate transportation facilities. The president’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, with the president’s approval, negotiated an agreement with Mississippi Sen. James O. Eastland to allow Mississippi to arrest the Freedom Riders under the very segregation laws which the U.S. Supreme Court had already declared illegal. In return, Eastland guaranteed the only violence done to the Freedom Riders would be to their constitutional rights, not their bodies.
After violence against the Freedom Riders produced embarrassing headlines in newspapers around the world, the Kennedy administration persuaded movement activists to abandon confrontational tactics like the riders, and to place their energies into registration drives, promising federal protection for registration workers. Any protection was slowly given, however, and then only when white violence was threatened, not when black rights were violated.
Our elders, men and women who had long labored in civil rights in the years before we were old enough to sit in a high chair, let alone at a lunch counter, warned that we didn’t understand politics, that Kennedy’s heart was in the right place, that he could do more quietly than by making a big noise.
For us, it didn’t matter. He was the president, sworn to uphold the Constitution. We knew that the Constitution guaranteed our right to work for civil rights without fearing attacks from midnight riders or small-town sheriffs, and we wanted the new president to believe what we believed too.
There were times during his 1,000 days when he did believe, and when we believed him. During the middle of King’s campaign in the summer of 1962 against segregation in Albany, Georgia, Kennedy reminded Albany’s white officeholders that the United States was negotiating with the Soviet Union. Why, he asked, couldn’t Albany’s city government negotiate with its own citizens?
The Kennedy administration conspired with Albany officials to have a local lawyer secretly pay King’s bail, freeing him from jail. Robert Kennedy had privately complained to an Albany lawyer that King’s jailing there had embarrassed “the United States in the court of world opinion. It must be terminated by any means necessary.”
Just five months before he was killed, Kennedy claimed the civil rights mantle we had wanted him to wear.
In a partially extemporized speech from the Oval Office, he told the nation, as no president before him had ever done, what was being fought over in the American South.
“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he said. “It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”
In subsequent years, when I saw Kennedy’s picture with Christ’s and King’s in humble homes, I understood why.
Kennedy’s youthful martyrdom, and his publicly expressed exasperation at recalcitrant racists, erased our dismay at his cautious fears about the civil rights movement.
John F. Kennedy was a hero in those homes.
Freedom Summer: What We Are Seeking
When asked about his accomplishments at SNCC, Bond pointed to the professional quality of the Student Voice as well as his office’s ability to help the organization survive and flourish. “I think part of the reason SNCC was able to get the money that it did get was because people were able to see the kind of work that we did,” he said. “I think a large part of the credit goes to the publicity department for making SNCC visible.”30
Bond also highlighted his office’s work during the 1964 Freedom Summer project, when about 1,000 students from the North were invited to join SNCC workers in the effort to register African American voters in rural Mississippi, advance the cause of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and create Freedom Schools where black children were taught basic skills in math and science, as well as lessons about their constitutional rights and the civil rights movement. Bond was especially proud that his office had “a traveling reporter with a camera who would go to a project, find out that there were people there from, say, Columbus, Ohio, and be able to send to their weekly papers long detailed stories, with photographs, of these kids in the field.”31
Although he enjoyed his work with SNCC, he also found it occasionally exasperating. “We always had a lot of trouble with the press . . . for two reasons,” Bond said. “People in the press were always suspicious of us—they thought we were either communists or crazy kids—and because their concern was with brutality, with the big sensationalism. They weren’t interested in writing about the day-to-day work that SNCC was undergoing from 1961 through ’64 and ’65.”32
When he was especially disturbed, Bond fired off letters of protest to reporters, columnists, and editors who maligned or falsely reported on SNCC personalities and actions. Below is his response to a column penned by conservative
