City of hate: Dallas still deals with its JFK legacy
Dallas still bears the scars of John F. Kennedy’s assassination
For Eva McMillan, 92, the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy 50 years ago showed Dallas for what it was: a city of hate. “Dallas was a racist city,” she said, delivering her indictment in a graceful southern accent. She added: “That, it was.”
Among the city’s most prominent African-American civil rights workers, McMillan fought through long years to bring equality to a city whose white power elite had ignored federal laws to desegregate its schools, public services, businesses and stores. Dallas today may fancy itself a cowboy town, a gateway to the American West, but at that time it was very much anchored in the Deep South.
African-Americans, Latinos and white Liberals expected a lot from Kennedy. He was the first 20th-century U.S. president to speak openly the language of civil rights and to campaign for equality and more powerful laws. The first U.S. president born in the 20th century, he was regarded as America’s first modern leader.
“Our hopes were high,” McMillan said in an interview in her suburban bungalow. “He seemed very promising. I remember talking to white people and they would say ‘Your president this, your president that.’ I said ‘Yes he is my president’ and I felt that he was. I believed in the whole Kennedy clan.”
Which is why when she first learned of Kennedy’s death in a phone call from her motherin-law, the hysterical voice that came over the line did not say “Kennedy’s been shot” or “Somebody shot Kennedy,” but rather “They killed him. They killed him.” “They” being the white racists.
So it was, McMillan said, that the assassination shocked her but did not surprise.
“I remembered so many rightwing people and organizations were in Dallas at that time,” she said.
Led by men such as Texas billionaire H.L. Hunt, they produced a flow of strident pamphlets and radio, TV and newspaper ads denouncing Kennedy as a communist and traitor. They issued “Wanted” posters bearing Kennedy’s name. Republican congressman Bruce Alger and his following of wealthy Dallas women spat on Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, during a visit in 1963. The women also struck him with a picket sign and then, when stopped by police, claimed two black men had pushed them into Stevenson. They also jostled vice-president Lyndon Johnson and his wife Lady Bird as they left a Dallas hotel.
“So all of this created an atmosphere in Dallas,” she recalled. “The second call I got after the assassination was from my twin sister and her very words were ‘What is wrong with you people in Dallas?’ The city of hate, it was.”
Fifty years ago on Nov. 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. Kennedy was shot dead by Lee Harvey Oswald as Kennedy’s motorcade slowly rolled through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. Three presidents had been assassinated before Kennedy, but none of these killings was linked in any way to the city where they took place. Nobody blamed Washington for killing Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield, or Buffalo for killing William McKinley. Not so for Dallas. Dallas became the city that killed Kennedy.
Dallas has since grown and prospered into America’s fourthlargest market. Mayor Mike Rawlings has said the city is better known for the popular television character J.R. Ewing than for the Kennedy assassination. But as the city prepares for what Rawlings said would be “a very simple commemorative ceremony” on Nov. 22, the thousands of tourists visiting Dallas from around the world this year say otherwise. The open wound still festers. A certain penance is still expected even as blame fades.
Eva McMillan was 42 when Kennedy was killed. She is among the estimated five per cent of Dallas residents who were alive at that time. Asked what the longterm legacy has been on the city, she replied: “It’s something Dallas will never lose, I know that. It’s a lasting indictment against them. I think maybe even though it’s a sad thing to have that incident to happen here and for the Kennedy family, it might have helped them in the future, Dallas people, to see their mistake. Maybe. I don’t know.”
Lydia Simpson, a white woman
‘I think maybe even though it’s a sad thing to have that incident to happen here and for the Kennedy family, it might have helped them in the future, Dallas people, to see their mistake.’ EVA MCMILLAN
of Mexican descent, was 20 years old when she watched the Kennedy parade from the roof of an office building. She remembers a different side of Dallas.
“There were lots of people downtown,” she said. “It was almost like a tickertape parade. It was a happy place to be. Everybody was excited and giddy to see the president and his wife.” Lydia said Jackie Kennedy was “her idol.”
“I used to always wear my hair long and I started wearing it in a little bob. And in my wedding I had the pillbox on my veil. Having dark hair and dark eyes like her and being olive, you know, I did sort of resemble her in a way. Not 100 per cent. But the style was there. I wanted to be like her.”
After the parade drove by, she hurried to an art store to buy school supplies. She never heard the shots, but back on the street, she knew immediately that something had happened. “You could hear a pin drop downtown. The cars weren’t moving. The buses weren’t moving. It was kind of like the world stood still. People were standing around huddled in little groups, holding transistor radios listening to something and I thought, ‘Oh s---, you know, is the world coming to an end or did someone declare war on us?’ That’s what went through my mind.”
Simpson, 70, said the assassination brought “shame” to the city. “Any time I had packages coming to Dallas — and that was not just me but a lot of people ... invariably you would get the package with a little hate note on it from somebody disgruntled at the post office: ‘Killers.’ ”
Donald Payton was in the 10th grade when the news came over the PA system in his school.
“People were in a shock,” he said. “It was like, ‘No that can’t be.’ It set our community in a fog. It was like losing a relative and not believing it. Seeing and hearing but not believing.”
Payton, 66, is African-American. A historian and retired museum curator, he has traced his ancestry from the pre-revolution days of slavery. Three of his ancestors were lynched in 1860 close to where Kennedy was shot. There is no memorial for them.
“We loved Kennedy,” Payton said during an interview in his garden.
“He looked good. He sounded good. He wasn’t one of those old Dixiecrats that we had been so used to seeing and hearing as our local politicians were, old men who were just one generation of wearing overalls ... So now we have a smooth talker from Boston and he was going to make everything all right. And once he got killed, it was almost like ‘Where do we go from here?’ ‘Who do we turn to from here?’ ... Here this guy is who was here to help everybody and the people in Dallas killed him.”
Latinos also felt a deep loss. Kennedy was the first Catholic U.S. president. “That was big,” Rosemary Hinojosa, MexicanAmerican, recalled. “That was like President (Barack) Obama becoming the first African-American president to African-Americans. For Catholics I think that was the same sentiment.”
Hinojosa, who is a retired high school teacher, was 12 when Kennedy
‘You hear that there was a group of people that despised him so much that they actually yelled and clapped when they heard he was assassinated. The country looked down upon the city as the city of hate and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m not like that.’’ ROSEMARY HINOJOSA, above. A Mexican-American who was 12 years old when Kennedy was killed.
was shot. She had just come in from recess when her teacher delivered the news.
“You hear that there was a group of people that despised him so much that they actually yelled and clapped when they heard he was assassinated,” she said. “The country looked down upon the city as the city of hate and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m not like that.’ ”
She said Dallas was a city run by white racists. “I think it was run similarly like we are seeing now with the right-wing group in Congress,” she said. “A small minority ... but so vocal it just might seem to everybody on the outside that they truly are the majority.”
But Dallas is changing, she said. “Hispanics and African-Americans are growing not only in population but in power, in political power and financial power. It remains to be seen how the city continues to respond in the future when you see the leadership change a little bit more toward more minority representation and the minority becoming the majority.”