What did you do in the Civil Rights movement, daddy?

I picked up Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle Over Civil Rights by Steven Levingston because I'm revising my novel which is set in the period right after the time this history covers. My book begins with JFK's assassination; Levingston's book ends just before it with the August 1963 March on Washington and King's: "I have a dream that little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the color of their character."

Levingston spends the first chapters covering Kennedy's and King's biographies to put the rest of the book into a context. The bulk of the text, however, is a history of their activities and their evolving relationship between the 1960 presidential campaign and the March. This is history, but at times it reads like a novel as, just one example, a white crowd follows a Greyhound Bus with Freedom Riders out of Anniston, Alabama. The Freedom Riders planned to eat at interstate terminals that were, in theory, protected by Federal law under the Interstate Commerce Commission Act. The bus is forced off the road, windows are smashed, a Molotov cocktail is thrown inside, and the mob blocks the exit. Fortunately, the bus passengers included two armed undercover Alabama state police who, however they felt about outside agitators, were not willing to die and helped the riders leave the bus where the Freedom Riders were beaten by the mob.

In 1961 I was the editor of The Columbia OWL, and the school newspaper
organized a fund-raiser for Dr. King where I met him. 

Because so much time has passed but not so much time that everyone involved is beyond being interviewed (pace John Lewis), Levingston is able to read the slanders about King that Herbert Hoover was able to put in front of Kennedy. As Senator and later as President, John F. Kennedy did not regard the Civil Rights as a major interest. He cared, but he also cared about Southern votes in congress and did not want to offend them. He seems to have felt that while Jim Crow was a bad thing, it would eventually go away and that sit-ins, Freedom Rides, marches and demonstrations were just making a bad situation worse. 

JFK was more interested in international affairs, was scalded by the Bay of Pigs debacle, and during this period had to confront Russian missiles in Cuba. He did want Black votes and he courted King before the 1960 presidential election. King did not endorse Kennedy or Nixon, however, feeling that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference should keep out of presidential politics. JFK's brother Robert, the Attorney General, was delegated to deal with the situation in the South. Robert seems to have become more sympathetic over time to black aspirations and impatient with implacable southern official like Sheriff "Bull" Connor and Governor George Wallace.

The book covers—sometimes almost hour-by-hour—the Montgomery bus boycott, the Albany Movement, the "Letter from Birmingham jail," the police dogs' attack on peaceful protestors about which Robert Kennedy said, "The dogs and the [fire] hoses and the pictures with the Negroes [being attacked in Birmingham, AL] is what created a feeling in the United States that more needed to be done." 

We read about the involvement of Harry Belafonte, Jackie Robinson, James Baldwin, Wyatt Walker, Nicholas Katzenbach, Harris Wofford, and more, and more. Fortunately the book comes with an index, notes, and an extensive bibliography.

It's an interesting history to read at this moment. The country continues to struggle with its racial history. On the one hand, Kennedy and King indicates how far we've come: no more segregated lunch counters, white-only drinking fountains, poll taxes and preposterous literary tests to register to vote. On the other hand, how far we have yet to go when we can watch a white police officer murder a black man on the street. We're not where King (or Kennedy for that matter) would want us to be, but Levingston's history can help us see where we've come from.