This posts is about the 60th anniversary of President John Kennedy’s assassination, which was three days ago. This would have been more timely if I had posted it on the anniversary. But I wanted you to read this so I waited until after the holiday. Who reads a newsletter on Thanksgiving, right?
President John Kennedy was murdered 60 years and three days ago. If you’re too young to recall that time, then it’s probably not possible to describe the sad mood of the nation. I was in 9th grade Latin Class waiting for Mr. Badalatto to travel the 3 miles from MASH - the Milford Area Senior High school - down to the junior high while silently reciting my mantra; “Latin is a dead language, dead as dead can be. First it killed the Romans, and now it’s killing me.” I was not a ‘star student’.
Mr. Badalatto was late so we students had begun to act up a bit. These were the days before swearing was common and it was totally unheard of from a teacher. Mr. Badalatto was a Catholic, as was President Kennedy. The issue of Catholicism was huge in those days and it had been a very difficult issue for Kennedy to overcome. You can see the eloquent and moving speech that Kennedy gave to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association 63 years ago during his campaign in an attempt to quell the controversy of his religion. Sadly, almost all the issues he touched on are still issues of relevance today. So there was likely an affection from Mr. Badalatto for the president. At any rate, he strode into the noisy classroom and said simply but loudly, “Shut the fuck up” and being stunned into silence, we obeyed. Then, with tears rolling down his cheeks, he told us that President Kennedy had been shot dead.
President Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline were visiting Texas, the home state of his vice president Lyndon Johnson and his wife Lady Bird, to try to heal a rift in the democratic party. The White supremacists who made up the base of the party’s southern wing despised the Kennedy administration because of its support for the rights of Black Americans.
The base had turned on Kennedy when he and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had backed the decision of the US Court of Appeals in the fall of 1962 saying that Black army veteran James Meredith had the right to enroll at the University of Mississippi, more commonly known as Ole Miss.
When the department of justice ordered officials at Ole Miss to register Meredith, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett physically barred Meredith from entering the building and vowed to defend segregation and states’ rights - a post Civil War euphemism then and now for racism.
So the Department of Justice, formed in 1870 largely to protect the lives and rights of newly freed Black Americans, detailed dozens of US Marshals to escort Meredith to the registrar and put more than 500 law-enforcement officers on the campus. White supremacists rushed to meet them there. That night Governor Barnett told a radio audience, “We will never surrender!” The rioters, becoming increasingly violent, destroyed property, and under the cover of darkness, fired at reporters and federal marshals, killing two and wounding several others.
The riot ended when Kennedy sent 20,000 troops to the campus and on October 1, 1962, after 186 years of having been created equal, James Meredith became the first Black American to enroll at the University of Mississippi. It directly cost at least two people their lives.
The Kennedys had made it clear that the federal government would stand behind civil rights for Black Americans. White supremacists joined right-wing Republicans in insisting that the Kennedy’s stance proved that they were communists. Using a strong federal government to protect civil rights would take tax dollars from White Americans for the benefit of Black and Brown people – a belief that many people hold to this day. A bumper sticker produced during the Mississippi crisis claimed that “The Castro brothers attended Ole Miss” - equating the Kennedys with the communist revolutionaries in Cuba. That conflation of Black rights and communism stoked such anger in the southern right wing that in order to try to mend fences in the state democratic party Kennedy felt obliged to travel to Dallas where he was promptly shot to death for defending Black rights and Black equality.[1]
America’s Thing With Race - the primary trouble spot you’ve been reading and hearing about your entire lives, your parents’ entire lives, your grandparents’ and their parents’ entire lives - has been going on for a very, very long time. The country has other problems for sure. The degradation of the environment is a concern and the first Earth Day was 1970 – 53 years ago. Scientist have been warning us about the dangers of a warming climate for 65 years. But America’s problem with Black people? Since 1619. Four hundred and four years.
We’ve fought a war over it. And won! 158 years ago that war was supposed to bestow equality on all Americans. Three years later the 14th amendment granting citizenship was supposed to grant equal protection under the law. Both the first Civil Rights Act in 1866 and the second one in 1964 were supposed to ensure access to the Promise of America for all of its citizens and gradually create a society free of racism. And yet here we still are. 7 years ago a real estate mogul ran a thoroughly racist campaign and America voted him into office! What did I do? I cried. And then I started The Civil Conversations Project.
The Civil Conversations Project needs you in the fight. I need you in the fight. The country needs you in the fight.
We need you to send these post to your community. The issue needs you to call out racism no matter where or when you hear it. No matter who it is. We need you to know who your representative is and to call them when issues of a fair and equitable America or state come up. Your country and your community needs you to attend school board meetings and speak up against book and history banning. And The Civil Conversations Project needs your financial support. We’re small but mighty. We’re on the front lines every day conducting seminars, writing, working with our partner organizations, and talking with people one on one.
We travel, we have two paid part-time staff people and me, full-time all the time. We have software, a bookkeeper, an accountant, and numerous other unavoidable expenses. We have plans and a strong desire to hire an Executive Director to help us become more prominent, more influential and more mighty while we continue to stay small. We’re building a movement, not an empire.
I don’t know if we can become the country that we originally and continue to profess to be. But I now we can do better. But we need your help.
You can now donate monthly and of course, one time. Or several times. You can donate here, or the top of this page. Please help us help our country. We need your meaningful support and I am so grateful to all of you who have helped fund this project and this crazy idea that we can end racism and make this a better country and for allowing us to enter our fourth year this month.
Wayne
[1] Much of the above in Italics was taken from a post on 11.22.2023 by Heather Cox Richardson in tribute to JFK, with much editing by me
Thanks for your heartfelt note Molly. I feel your sadness. “We took care of all that (racism) years ago.” A few years ago I had a brilliant doctor, an infectious disease specialist, say to me in bewilderment’ “Why are you doing this work? Haven’t we solved all those problems? Isn’t everything ok now?” Legally…sorta. But there’s the problem right there. Ignorance is a terrible thing.
I read this morning that, thanks to the loss of affirmative action, companies and institutions are increasingly, actively shying away from DEI. Such a sea change from what felt perhaps momentarily like a renewed opportunity for forward movement in the wake of George Floyd’s death. In hindsight, those protests were so fleeting and ephemeral. I feel like we driven by force to forget the most important issues by a news cycle suffering from serious attention deficit disorder, and yet browbeaten by the same frenetic news cycle into not being allowed to have a break from unimportant-at-this-very-moment topics like the presidential election cycle. Americans are never allowed a break from being told to train their eyes always and forever on that top seat, above all else, and overlook the suffering and injustice of our fellow Americans because we are all supposed to worship the “democratic process”. I’m so weary of their notions: always pay attention to the humble, or not so humble, white guys who want to preside over you. Do not concern yourselves with “Racism”. Sure, we took care of all that legally years ago anyway.
I’ve shared this post, and will keep sharing. And I will be sure that I, a child of privilege, steps up beside my cousins for what is just. Thank you for this project, Wayne.