The World Watches…

PETER: In addition to Randolph, Rustin, and the other civil rights leaders who organized the March on Washington, there was one more key figure who had a stake in its success, President John F. Kennedy. Back in June, Kennedy had called a meeting with the march organizers. After saying hello and shaking hands, the president got straight to the point. He wanted the march canceled.

BRIAN: It might have seemed like a strange request coming from Kennedy. Just a week earlier, he had gone on TV to deliver an impassioned speech about race relations. For all its hopes and all its boasts, he said, America will not fully be free until all its citizens are free. And he announced he was introducing comprehensive civil rights legislation to Congress, legislation that would, among other things, ban discrimination in public accommodations.

PETER: But behind the scenes, Kennedy and his advisers knew the civil rights bill would be met with fierce resistance in Congress, especially from Southerners in his own party. And he feared that a mass protest by African-Americans would only hurt the bill’s chances.

BRIAN: Randolph and the others refused to cancel the march, and so Kennedy went to work behind the scenes to make the best of the situation. Here’s historian Thomas Jackson, who has written about what happened next.

THOMAS JACKSON: He and his brother deputized John R. Riley.

BRIAN: His brother, Robert Kennedy, the attorney general.

THOMAS JACKSON: That’s right, the attorney general, yeah. Deputized a man named John R. Riley, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department, to coordinate logistics with the DC police, to coordinate with the military Operation Steep Hill, which had 4,000 troops outside of the capital ready to invade and control, should this get out of hand.

He did some pretty zany things too. He made sure that the Army Signal Corps had control over the sound system so that, open quote, “can we cut it off?” close quote, in his own notes.

BRIAN: Wow.

THOMAS JACKSON: Yes.

BRIAN: Did they have a technical difficulties announcement prepared?

THOMAS JACKSON: He had an unopened record of Mahalia Jackson that he intended to put on, should some crazy or, quote unquote, “commie or Muslim” commandeer the microphone, stir up the crowd to the point of revolt.

BRIAN: The march ends up going very smoothly, and you’d think Kennedy’s off the hook. He’s certainly pleased with what has gone on. But the leaders of the march want to meet with him right after the march. Now, of course, Kennedy’s already proposed landmark legislation to end discrimination in public accommodations. What else were those civil rights leaders looking for?

THOMAS JACKSON: It’s such an interesting exchange. Sure, they wanted passage of a strong piece of legislation that would make Illegal the discrimination against blacks and others in public accommodations in the South. But beyond that, they wanted provisions that would reflect and benefit the safety of civil rights workers and the daily needs of blacks.

So they all wanted a fair employment practices commission, which was not in the bill. Eventually it would be in the bill after Kennedy’s assassination. Fair employment practices, Philip Randolph said, wouldn’t cure everything, but they would definitely open up the field for employment.

There had been three recessions since the 1956 election. Black unemployment was now double that of white. They wanted a raise in the minimum wage from $1.15 to $2 an hour. They wanted to extend the minimum wage to excluded workers, which meant domestics and farm workers.

BRIAN: Which were disproportionately black.

THOMAS JACKSON: Who were disproportionately black and female. So there were a whole set of concrete demands that would improve the daily lives of ordinary blacks, North and South. So Kennedy listens to and absorbs this. He doesn’t exactly stonewall, but he doesn’t engage the leadership.

The one thing he says after they make a series of presentations is that, well, this is kind of off-topic, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to urge black families to support their children’s education more, even though the family might be, quote unquote, “broken and all that,” end quote. So he’s trying to, in a way in the conversation, deflect some of the demands and to focus them on voluntary efforts in the black community.

BRIAN: Right. So if we take care of what goes on in public, it’s really up to black families themselves to deal with this so-called poverty issue.

THOMAS JACKSON: That’s right. Kennedy and his strategic advisers had decided that public accommodations was going to be the centerpiece. And that’s what they were going to push for.

BRIAN: Why do you think that is?

THOMAS JACKSON: I think it’s complicated, but they pretty much thought of race and racial inequality as a Southern problem. They thought that here was a glaring injustice that had now been made visible to the world, and that if you were going to align American ideals with American image of Free World leadership, that this kind of oppression that had given rise to such widespread protests, and such visible protests in the South, needed to be ended.

I think too he didn’t want to issue any housing orders they might alienate his Democratic Party base in the North.

BRIAN: So presumably Kennedy didn’t stop trying to control things once the march was done. Did he do anything to control the spin, as we would say today?

THOMAS JACKSON: His public statements very much spoke to this as an international advertisement for American democracy. He described it as an interracial vindication of American democracy, the freedom of assembly. And he said, this couldn’t happen elsewhere in the world. So he very much described it as a democratic achievement rather than a protest against the lack of democracy in America.

BRIAN: Thomas Jackson is an historian at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. He’s the author of From Civil Rights to Human Rights– Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice. You’ll be happy to know that there was a tape recorder rolling during the post-march meeting between JFK and the march organizers. You can listen to what that meeting sounded like on our website, backstoryradio.org.

ED: So Brian, did the world buy Kennedy’s spin on this? Pay no attention to the last 100 years of segregation and injustice, but look at this one march that other people organized. I mean, did the world buy it?

BRIAN: I think it depends on what part of the world you’re talking about. Certainly the Soviet Union did not buy it for a moment. They continued to emphasize the heinous examples of discrimination in the United States, focusing on the issue of hypocrisy.

But Kennedy didn’t hope to win over the hearts and minds of the Soviet Union. He was hoping to win over the hearts and minds of non-aligned nations. And many of those nations in Asia and Africa were filled with black and brown peoples. And they actually were watching what was going on, and I think willing to keep a relatively open mind about the possibility of the United States changing.

PETER: And Brian, it’s not just that the world is watching what’s happening in Washington. There’s a worldwide movement going on of decolonization. All of the colonies in Africa, in Asia, across the world, had been subordinate to the great European empires for a long time. And after World War II, there’s this last surge, a last episode in the history of peeling away of these empires and the emergence of new nations.

And Americans are watching these developments. I mean, African-Americans particularly are identifying with the freedom movements in Africa. And I think a lot of the energy in the summer of 1963 comes from the recognition of that worldwide movement. And I think there’s a sense that this is a real juncture, a real historic juncture in American history.

What kind of country is this going to be? Is the United States going to be another white imperial power resisting these great changes around the world? Or will it take the lead? Will it redeem the promise of its revolution? Will this be a nation of many peoples and many races, not simply another bastion of white European privilege and power?

ED: And, of course, it takes on even deeper resonance, Peter, because the very inspiration for King and his tactics and the Southern movement had been drawn on the decolonization movement in the first place. They had looked at Gandhi in India and had seen how you could bring down the most powerful empire in the world. So it is a wonderful, really rich conversation in which now the United States seems to be learning from the rest of the world and maybe giving back some inspiration to it.

[MUSIC – NINA SIMONE, “I WISH I KNEW HOW IT WOULD FEEL TO BE FREE”]

PETER: It’s time for another break. When we get back, the part of the “I Have a Dream” speech that we don’t learn about in school.

ED: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.