JFK's historic civil rights speech revisited 50 years later

Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy delivered the second of back-to-back speeches; the first, delivered on June 10, 1963 was an impressive call to reverse the trajectory of an emergent Cold War with the Soviet Union. It was a potent call for peace from the precipice of the rising military industrial complex.

The second speech, delivered via television, a “Report to the American People on Civil Rights,” almost didn’t happen.

President Kennedy had planned for this speech to serve as a necessary intervention into then Alabama governor George Wallace’s threats to challenge the integration of the University of Alabama, but the governor’s bark was worse than his bite and the integration of the first two black students at the the school occurred without much incident – at least by the standards established by the violent resistance to the struggle for racial equality in Alabama circa 1963.

A reluctant advocate for civil rights

JFK credited the students of U of A “who met their responsibilities in a constructive way.”  Historians have noted that Kennedy was a reluctant champion of civil rights for both political and practical reasons.  Politically he understood the likelihood of losing southern constituents of the Democratic Party especially if he pushed too forcefully on racial equality.

And from a practical perspective, Kennedy believed that other national issues – the economy and the political and ideological conflicts with global communism – took precedence over America’s festering racial issues.

Listening to the speech now, JFK’s moral courage on racial issues as well as the heavy lifting still required to attain true racial equality in this nation become poignantly apparent. President Kennedy argued that “ . . . it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register to vote in a free election without interference . . .”

This particular assertion, along with the activism, blood, sweat, and tears of the civil rights movement, laid the groundwork for the diverse demographics of our modern Democratic party.

Establishing the need for racial equality

But this year, the Supreme Court has signaled its willingness to rule against the viability of Section 5 of the Voter Rights Act, the clause that compels voting districts to undergo a “pre-clearance” procedure before making any changes to district boundaries and/or local voting processes.  This aspect of the Voting Rights act is what Justice Antonin Scalia referred to as a “racial entitlement.”

Early on in the speech, President Kennedy establishes the need for racial equality by quantifying the inequality that existed between black and white Americans:

The Negro baby born in America today . . . has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is 7 years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much.

These were the cold hard facts of discrimination, white supremacy, and systematic injustice. Would President Kennedy think that as a nation we have made enough progress on these issues over the last five decades?

In 2008, 78 percent of white students graduated from high school while only about 57 percent of black and Hispanic students graduated.  Whites (ages 25 and older) are significantly more likely to have a college degree than their black and/or Hispanic counterparts.

And although, over time life expectancy for all has increased and it appears as if racial gaps are closing, white men, on average live to the age of 76 and black men live to the age of about 70, while white women live (the longest) until the age of about 81 and black women until the age of about 78. The median wealth of white families in 2009 was 265,000. For black families, median wealth was 28,500.

Current unemployment data by race indicates that black unemployment (13.5 percent) is just about double white unemployment (6.7 percent).

Unemployment rate by race/ethnicity

The unemployment rate by race time series goes back to 1954. With the exception of the Asian time series, all of the rates shown here are seasonally adjusted. Hispanics may be of any race.

Analyzing this data can’t diminish JFK’s courage at a key moment in this nation’s history. However, it should put into clear focus the work that must still be done if we are invested in the totality of the JFK legacy.

We should note the slow but steady progress where that progress has occurred – in educational attainment as Marc Morial and the Urban League pointed out in a report earlier this year and in life expectancy, which takes into account quality of life factors.  But we should also refuse to ignore the abysmal stagnation in other areas such as income inequality and unemployment.

Fifty years and this nation’s first black president are not enough to close the racial gaps in America.  As you read this, our representatives in Congress can not agree that we should not condemn undocumented immigrants (mostly brown and black) to over a decade more of second-class citizenship; the U.S. Supreme Court is weighing the viability of the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action, essentially at the same time; and while bourgeois libertarians on the right and the left have philosophical debates on privacy, poor folk of color who live under constant surveillance in America cry: Welcome to our world.

One of the more striking aspects of President Kennedy’s speech is his insistence that these matters of stark racism and inequality do not have to be settled “in the streets.”

JFK was all too familiar with the power of organized resistance.

When we consider what’s at stake in terms of our current government’s (that’s all three branches) reluctance to address the permanence of racism and the deleterious expansion of economic inequality, we can only hope that at some point today they will return to President Kennedy’s speech and hear these words: “[t]he heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities,  [AND} whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”

James Braxton Peterson is the Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University. He is also the founder of Hip Hop Scholars LLC, an association of hip-hop generation scholars dedicated to researching and developing the cultural and educational potential of hip-hop, urban and youth cultures. You can follow him on Twitter @DrJamesPeterson