John F. Kennedy: Civil Rights Address

Impact

Civil rights movement leaders and activists were thrilled by President Kennedy's national address of June 11, 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr., immediately sent Kennedy a message praising the speech. The Kennedy administration had been lending assistance to the civil rights movement and was now staking its own political success on the achievement of fundamental reform in the civil rights arena; the administration acted as a good if imperfect ally of the movement. In fact, when civil rights leaders met with the president on June 22, 1963, the president acknowledged that he did not think that the planned march on Washington, D.C., was a good idea. The difference of opinion was resolved, and Kennedy ended up supporting the march. Although the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader John Lewis was pressured into modifying his address, the march of 250,000 people from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial was a great success and further expanded positive public attention for the movement.

The Kennedy administration did experience some immediate negative political repercussions after the address, as southern Congress members withdrew support from other administration proposals. Also, disagreements with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People occurred over the details of the civil rights bill, with the administration seeking a more moderate version than was sought by the civil rights coalition. Kennedy met with Democratic and Republican House leaders on October 23 to craft a compromise that proved stronger than the administration's bill. The House Judiciary Committee approved the civil rights bill on November 20, 1963, but whether the bill would be successfully processed by the House Rules Committee, chaired by the segregationist Howard W. Smith, was uncertain. Kennedy would not have the opportunity to work on that problem because of his assassination. President Lyndon B. Johnson took up the banner, however, and worked effectively to secure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As vice president, Johnson had urged Kennedy to take a moral stance on civil rights. As segregationists left the Democratic Party in the wake of the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the party's stance as an ally of the civil rights movement and of African Americans became a permanent fixture of the political landscape.