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60th Anniversary: JFK's Civil Rights Speech [1]

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Date: 2023-06-10

June 11, 1963, seemed like a good day to give a speech on civil rights. Hopeful signs of progress were emerging in the South. Alabama, where Birmingham had seen a brutal crackdown on demonstrators in April, and bombings and a riot in May— desegregated the University of Alabama over the strenuous protests of Governor George Wallace, without a riot (the previous year, the University of Mississippi had exploded in flames.) JFK felt relaxed enough to take a dig at Governor Wallace-- at least the students met their responsibility constructively -- then got down to discussing the problem, in a decidedly different way for a President.

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 will 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?

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

..

The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. Redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades, and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.

We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is time to act in the Congress, in your State and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives.

It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the fact that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.

The President went on to propose a legislative solution-- a Civil Rights Act to be passed through Congress, prohibiting discrimination in public places, schools and other public facilities, and employment. (This was eventually signed into law in 1964, creating a brand-new anti-discrimination monitor known as the EEOC.)

My fellow Americans, this is a problem which faces us all--in every city of the North as well as the South. Today there are Negroes unemployed, two or three times as many compared to whites, inadequate education, moving into the large cities, unable to find work, young people particularly out of work without hope, denied equal rights, denied the opportunity to eat at a restaurant or lunch counter or go to a movie theater, denied the right to a decent education, denied almost today the right to attend a State university even though qualified. It seems to me that these are matters which concern us all, not merely Presidents or Congressmen or Governors, but every citizen of the United States.

This is one country. It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents.

We cannot say to 10 percent of the population that you can't have that right; that your children cannot have the chance to develop whatever talents they have; that the only way that they are going to get their rights is to go into the streets and demonstrate. I think we owe them and we owe ourselves a better country than that.

….

This is what we are talking about and this is a matter which concerns this country and what it stands for, and in meeting it I ask the support of all our citizens.

As Kennedy was wrapping up his speech, NAACP organizer Medgar Evers was shot and killed in Mississippi. Three months later, 4 little girls were killed in the Birmingham church bombing. (Evers’s killer and the racist who bombed the church were eventually tried and convicted of murder.) And I don’t know if we’re down to the bitter-enders yet with the “Anti-Woke” crowd.

But the compassion at the center of this speech is a potent driver of social change. That he picked it as his main theme says a lot about him, and also what it means for us 60 years later.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/6/10/2174590/-60th-Anniversary-JFK-s-Civil-Rights-Speech

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