San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Fight for civil rights must continue
The young president’s words, delivered from the Oval Office the night of June 11, 1963, weren’t enough to save the life of the young civil rights leader later pulling into his driveway in Jackson, Miss.
As he exited his car, 37-yearold Medgar Evers was already in the crosshairs of his assassin, as 46-year-old John F. Kennedy, five months later, would be in the crosshairs of his assassin while riding in a car in Dallas.
The assassination of Evers, the NAACP’s first field officer in Mississippi, would be the first of the political assassinations that rocked America during the 1960s.
Evers’ murder concluded one of the most significant dates of the civil rights movement. One which began with Alabama Gov. George Wallace attempting to stop the integration of the University of Alabama by infamously “standing in the schoolhouse door,” defying U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, federal marshals and the Alabama National Guard sent by Kennedy.
After blathering through a speech defending states’ rights and denouncing the federal government, Wallace removed
himself from the doorway, before he could be forcibly removed. Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood enrolled as some of the first Black students at the university.
That night, Kennedy addressed the nation in the most forceful advocacy of civil and human rights for Black Americans delivered by a president up until then.
“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” said Kennedy. “It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot 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? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”
The speech came the day after Kennedy delivered another of his most famous addresses, his American University commencement speech in which he sought to ease the Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union by calling for negotiations that would lead to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
The two speeches offered solutions to the two most critical issues facing the United States: the nuclear arms race and civil rights.
Kennedy had been lukewarm in his support of the civil rights movement, lacking the urgency of now. But speaking to the nation, he confronted American hypocrisy when he said, “We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other, that this is a land of the free except for the negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race except with respect to negroes?”
Hours after Kennedy’s speech, which was watched by Evers’ wife and children, Evers, an Army veteran, was shot in the back.
On the day of Evers’ burial at Arlington National Cemetery, Kennedy delivered to Congress the legislation that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The next day, he welcomed Evers’ family to the White House, where he presented them with a copy of the legislation.
Sixty years have passed, and remarkable progress has been made, but civil rights for all people are not secure; treating all people with dignity is not assured.
Securing those rights and assuring that dignity remains a moral issue.