John F. Kennedy: Civil Rights Address

Questions for Further Study

• 1. Compare Kennedy's responses to civil rights crises with those of President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, to the rise of massive resistance, and to the 1957 Little Rock crisis.
• 2. In referring to the Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan's concept of a color-blind Constitution, was President Kennedy concerned with ending systematic discrimination against African Americans or with eliminating any reference to race in American law and practice, or with both?
• 3. Kennedy highlighted economic disparities between whites and African Americans in his Civil Rights Address. Overcoming economic privation was one of the goals of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of August 28, 1963, and the goal of the Poor People's Campaign, which Martin Luther King, Jr., was leading at the time of his assassination. Examine the extent of economic disparities in society today. To what degree would the universal implementation of affirmation action or a program of reparations contribute to substantially closing racial socioeconomic gaps? Might a modern-day president committed to civil rights take other initiatives to eliminate such gaps?
• 4. In the 1990s a trend toward the resegregation of public schools began taking place. The 2007 Supreme Court decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 against the use of race in assigning students to schools further undermined the promise of the Brown v. Board of Education decision that schools would be equal and integrated. What measures might be taken today to restore the goal of establishing equal educational opportunity championed by Kennedy in his Civil Rights Address to the nation?