50 years ago, the president gave his now-famous Civil Rights Address. But it was Martin Luther King Jr. and the Birmingham protesters who deserved the credit.

JONATHAN RIEDER   JUN 11, 2013

“Can you believe that white man not only stepped up to the plate, he hit it over the fence!” That was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s private verdict on President John F. Kennedy’s famous Civil Rights Address, delivered fifty years ago on June 11, 1963.

If King’s elation made sense, so did his incredulity. Kennedy had hardly been a beacon of moral resolve on civil rights. It required the Birmingham civil rights movement — and the tough-minded theory of social change that King spelled out in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” — to provoke his speech into being. And once pushed into taking a stand with the address, Kennedy and his speechwriter Theodore Sorensen filled it with rhetoric often remarkably similar to King’s. Though the address came, ostensibly, in response to a different event — the fight over the integration at the University of Alabama — it was full of echoes of “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In a powerful sense, King and the movement were the authors of the president’s oratory.
The speech was a dramatic moment in a season jammed with dramatic events, as America staggered toward non-racial democracy. In his fiery inaugural speech in January of 1963, the new governor of Alabama, George Wallace had pledged, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” In defiance of Wallace, King and the local movement launched civil rights protests in April in the furiously racist city of Birmingham. With the movement faltering, King decided to violate an injunction banning protests of any sort, and was, as a result, jailed on Good Friday, April 12.

Kennedy’s speech constituted an about-face, and King grasped that the Birmingham campaign had instigated it.
While in jail, King read a statement by eight of the leading moderate white clergy in Alabama, condemning the protests and branding King an extremist. The indignant, frazzled leader poured his rejoinder onto newspaper margins and toilet tissue. The iconic document that emerged from those jottings, the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” was always more than a spirited defense of civil disobedience. It was an indictment of white indifference. “Few members of the oppressor race,” King insisted, “can understand the … passionate yearnings of the oppressed race.” It was also a declaration of black self-sufficiency (“If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail.”) and a stirring refusal of patience. “The word ‘Wait!'” wrote King, “rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity.” The “Letter” was radical in the scope of its rebuke. King’s key targets were not the Klan and Wallace but the very core of American culture, every sort of moderate “who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

Neither King’s sacrificial act nor his roiling anger was enough to jumpstart the movement, even after he got out of jail on April 20. But in early May, the city’s black youth renewed the insurgency. After singing rousing verses of “I Woke Up With My Mind Stayed on Freedom,” they burst through the doors of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and faced down Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses. Within days, an agreement was forged to desegregate the city. The nation had begun its lurch toward the March on Washington, King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Meanwhile, the federal court-ordered integration of the University of Alabama loomed on June 11. Governor Wallace vowed to stand in the schoolhouse door to block the mixing of races. Kennedy’s speech, the one that so impressed and surprised King, came just hours after forcing Wallace to step aside. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he declared. “It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” The president was finally using language the demonstrators could appreciate: “We preach freedom around the world,” he said, “but are we to say to the world, and . . .to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes …?”

Throughout the speech Kennedy seemed to be channeling the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” King had invited white people to put themselves in a black person’s shoes: “When you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will,” or ” when your first name becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name becomes ‘boy,’ … then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” Kennedy, too, used the place-trading device: “If a Negro can’t enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”
The president’s address also resembled King’s “Letter” in rejecting the idea that blacks should have to wait for equality. “Who among us,” Kennedy demanded, “would then be content with counsels of patience and delay?” He mimicked King’s critique of “appalling silence”: “Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence.” The president even picked up the mass meeting chant — “Now is the time!” Said Kennedy, “Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise.”

Despite that drumbeat of immediacy, Kennedy’s call to conscience was belated as well as brave. The president had long epitomized the moderates whom King had blasted in the “Letter” as the true “stumbling block” to justice. In his inaugural address, Kennedy promised to “pay any price” to spread freedom around the globe but he hadn’t been willing to do that for black people in the United States. Kennedy, the ever risk-averse pragmatist, kept telling King to “wait” — exactly the reaction King deplored in the “Letter.” When Attorney General Robert Kennedy, afraid that a black child might be maimed in the protests, called King to get him to call off the insurgency of the young, King retorted, “[Black children] are hurt every day.”

So Kennedy’s speech constituted an about-face, and King grasped that the Birmingham campaign had instigated it. In the May 10 mass meeting at which the victory in Birmingham was announced, a jubilant, downhome King recounted,

Those business and professional leaders were sayin’, “We’re tired of these niggers, and there’s nothing to do but tell the government to send the National Guard here and get this thing under martial law. . . . These niggers are just not gonna stop.” And when they got out for lunch, and saw all those Negroes standing on the sidewalk singing “We shall overcome” and they “Won’t let nobody turn me round,” I heard that when they got back in there after the lunch hour, they started sayin’, “Now, let’s see, I think we could grant part one,” and they moved down to part two and extended that.

King had no doubt that the protests were working the same magic on the president and nudging him toward a more energetic stance on civil rights. “When things started happening down here, Mr. Kennedy got disturbed . . . He is battling for the minds and the hearts of men in Asia and Africa. . . And they’re not gonna respect the United States of America if she deprives men and women of the basic rights of life because of the color of their skin. Mr. Kennedy knows this.” On May 3, a photographer captured the iconic image of a German Shepherd that seemed to be lunging to bite a young black boy. “And when that picture went all over Asia and Africa and England and France, Mr. Kennedy said, ‘Bobby, you better get your assistant down there and look into this matter. It’s a dangerous situation for our image abroad.'”

The truth went further than King imagined, though. The picture had in fact aroused something in Kennedy beyond concerns about America’s image. At a private but recorded White House meeting on May 4, he said the picture “made him sick.” Kennedy sounds befuddled: he decries the black situation in Birmingham as “intolerable”; he exudes frustration (“what law can you pass to do anything about [local] police power”); he concedes “we have done not enough [on civil rights]”; yet he careens, “but we have shoved and pushed . . . and there’s nothing my brother’s given more time to.”

“If I were a Negro, I would be awfully sore,” the president acknowledged. And then, as if responding to King’s argument in the “Letter” that when whites said “wait” they really meant “never,” Kennedy added: “I’m not saying anybody ought to be patient.”
In the end, Kennedy’s turn-about vindicated the key premise of the “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: Blacks could not bank on moral appeal or empathy alone, let alone some intrinsic force of “American exceptionalism,” to awaken the conscience of whites. The unruliness of “creative tension” was required to galvanize the state to act on behalf of the suffering. As the president put it on June 4, “And this may be the only way these things come to a head. We’re going to end up with the National Guard in there and all sorts of trouble.”

“All sorts of trouble” underscores an ironic, unsettling truth: the white fear of violence pushed events forward too. In his June 11 address, President Kennedy observed, “The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South … Redress is sought in the streets. . .which create[s] tensions and threaten[s] violence.” Surely, that specter of mayhem ran counter to King’s faith in nonviolence. And yet its power to transfix a president confirmed the “Letter’s” recognition: “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Fifty years ago today, as the president delivered his address, Martin Luther King, Jr., celebrated a victory wrought by that hardboiled truth.

*The recording of Martin Luther King Jr.’s remarks on May 10, celebrating the victory in Birmingham, is posted here courtesy of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. The recording was made by Reverend C. Herbert Oliver.

Reverend C. Herbert Oliver was a pioneering activist for racial justice in Birmingham beginning in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the Inter-Citizens Committee, which gathered affidavits to document racist violence and police brutality. He was preparing to testify before the United States Commission on Civil Rights at hearings scheduled for late April 1963, which were cancelled when the SCLC-ACMHR campaign was launched.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JONATHAN RIEDER is a professor of sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the author of the recently published Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter From Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation and The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr.