John F. Kennedy: Civil Rights Address

Context

The modern American civil rights movement, which began with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, was aimed at regaining the ground that had been achieved in the aftermath of the Civil War, such as through the enactment of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and of civil rights laws in 1866 and 1875, and moving toward the complete elimination of racial inequality in all its forms. Civil rights organizations pursued a variety of tactics, including lawsuits, boycotts, lobbying, sit-ins, freedom rides, street demonstrations, and marches, in attempts to demand freedom, equality, jobs, dignity, and an end to racial segregation, disfranchisement, and second-class citizenship.

Two sets of events in Alabama in the spring of 1963 brought the civil rights movement a new level of public attention. Television viewers witnessed the Birmingham sheriff Eugene “Bull” Connor's use of water hoses and dogs against demonstrators as young as nine years old who were seeking equal access to public accommodations as well as Governor George Wallace's campaign pledge to “stand in the schoolhouse door” to prevent the integration of any Alabama school. On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy ended Wallace's resistance by federalizing the Alabama National Guard to support the court-mandated entry of Vivian J. Malone and James A. Hood to the University of Alabama. The determination of civil rights demonstrators, the violent and repressive actions of Alabama authorities, the solidarity protests galvanized by national civil rights organizations, and widespread public sympathy for the cause led Kennedy to take dramatic action to support civil rights.

In taking to the television and radio airwaves later that same day (June 11, 1963) to support the civil rights cause, Kennedy abandoned his previous go-slow approach to the issue. Moreover, he departed radically from the silence held by the Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower when the Supreme Court handed down the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, overturning the Plessy v. Ferguson separate-but-equal precedent of 1896. Kennedy's speech was momentous because he called on the nation to support civil rights as a moral cause.