Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (18 page)

The voices of the high-profile artists of the day were very much in evidence. Needless to say, when that was pulled off with such great success, the windfall of good that came from that moment in our history
did an awful lot to convince the Kennedys and certain forces within the Democratic Party that we were much better at the game than anybody had imagined. For us to be able to pull that off—the unification of labor, show business, artists, workers, blacks, and across the entire spectrum of American society, all in evidence in harmony—gave them greater faith for the future that was yet to come but was to be filled with so much tragedy, with the murder of [John] Kennedy, Dr. King, and Bobby, even people like Medgar Evers. The worst was yet to come.

When the president was shot, I was in Europe. I had just embarked on the first of several missions to ascertain the climate in Europe for our movement. We did it for two reasons: not only to broaden the base of international information on what our struggle was about but also because we were desperate for resources. We were drying up very quickly. Too much bail money, too much was being expended. It was a very costly movement. Too many bodies to move, too many cars to hire, too many people in different areas that needed funding for our cause. We needed to find other frontiers. There were a lot in the civil rights movement who resisted the idea of going to Europe. For some it was the edge of a betrayal that we took a domestic issue, as they called it, and put it into the camp of a neighbor’s purview for them to have a commentary on.

But there were others of us who felt very strongly that betrayal was falsely concluded, that our mission had far more meaning than that narrow sphere of betraying the family. If there’s a cruelty to the extent that black people were experiencing America’s animosity toward us, what family were we supposed to be protecting?

On November 22nd I was in Paris reaching out to the arts community, and we eventually made a successful showing there. I was having a meeting with Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Jules Dassin, and Melina Mercouri. They were in Paris shooting the film
Topkapi
, and I’d gone to the studio to watch them shoot. Afterward we were going to James Michener’s house for a kind of a cocktail evening. Word came while we were at the studio that John Kennedy had been shot. We weren’t quite sure of the accuracy of the information or what the details were. Some said he
had died, and some said he was just gravely wounded. When we got the information, we were absolutely stunned, like the whole world was. And by the time we retired to the cocktail party, everybody was caught up in the news. It was on television, French television, and fortunately a lot of people spoke fluent French who could translate the details for those who were not so fluent. At that very moment, I tried to reach Dr. King. I tried to reach Andy Young. I tried to reach Stan Levinson, who was a real close friend and confidante on issues. I called Coretta King. We were not only caught up in the great tragedy of the moment but were desperate for information as to who did and what caused it. Our great concern was that someone of color may have done this thing. Certainly the mood and the anger and the rage that the black community was feeling suggested that somewhere in our midst there may have been an individual or a group that stepped into the space to have this act of vengeance. I needed to get back immediately and was able to get a plane that very evening, Air France, to get back to the United States and hook up with Dr. King. But I remember that I was in that environment, with these artists and friends, when the information came.

What made me concerned was that a little group had just been formed called the SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) in which I had played an important part. Ella Baker, who was one of the leaders in our movement, had reached out to me to talk about this young group, that they deserved to be funded and to be recognized and that most of them would perhaps be breakaways from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Dr. King’s movement.

When I met these young people, most of them were teenagers, some in their very early twenties, and some younger, like Julian Bond, John Lewis, and Diane Nash. She was seventeen years old and with child. These are all young people, but in their midst is a group of very angry street guys. They belonged to different groups and were the earliest mobilization toward what became known as the Black Panthers. I was concerned that SNCC and some disgruntled young man brandishing a rifle, who
had always said, “An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,” would be found to be the assassin. So for us, there was a visceral, deep energy to quickly find who this was and how to prepare ourselves for it. We had a meeting with Dr. King, Andy Young, and others to discuss what happened if this turned out to be in our camp. For what this meant to our movement, meant to our people, and meant to America, I don’t think we ever would have been forgiven had it turned out that a person of color had done that.

Regarding the assassination itself, something sticks in my mind that’s almost indelible. Bill Moyers interviewed one of the high-ranking officials, if not the head, of the CIA, and in that interview, way back—I think color television hadn’t even been fully introduced—Bill Moyers asked about assassinations and about foreign policy and the relationship to assassinations. The interviewee said that in the CIA and in the work they did, they couldn’t be distracted just with political or moral consequence. When Bill evoked the moral question, the interviewee said, “We have no moral questions in the work we do,” and Moyers asked, “But what happens if you get caught?” I’ll never forget the interviewee. He said, “We’ll never get caught.” Bill pressed the point: “But what happens if somewhere the—” The guy looked at him, very calmly and very precisely, and said, “We will never get caught.”

I don’t know that what Malcolm [X] said—“The chickens have come home to roost”—had to do specifically with the vindictiveness of the moment, that you’re finally getting paid back. I thought it was far more visceral. I don’t think it was just a view of history. Malcolm was somewhere else. He saw it as an act of vengeance. He was also speaking, I think, for what is still a characteristic in American foreign policy. We are killing off a lot of innocent people, and there’s a price being paid that Americans know nothing about because we’re not in the middle of the anguish of daily losing innocent victims. When we do experience it, we go ballistic, correctly so, whether it’s the Twin Towers or whether it’s what just recently happened in Boston. When it happens to America, we are most passionate in our response. This goes on every day in the lives of tens of thousands of people, all over this globe. This goes on, and there’s a deep
hurt, a deep resentment and a great political loss for America. These things happen, and even back then I think what Malcolm was alluding to was that somehow justice was being meted out.

What saddens me is that America was made to witness its vulnerability as a nation that believes it’s on a righteous course, that says it is morally powerful, morally precise. Those deaths did an awful lot to jolt us into a new space of thinking about ourselves as a people, as a nation, as a force. What is deeply saddening is that we don’t seem to have learned much from that fact. Although other characteristics attest that we are on a correct path in the decisions we’re making that affect human conduct and the personality of our country politically, we have still given much too much space to the mischief makers. We still give much too much in this country to those who would willingly put America into a bloodbath and are holding onto their impression of others. America is as deeply racist today as it was then. It only plays out that theme very differently because the success of our journey has been to change the law, to force the law to be enforced by the vigilant, but by and large there are still those who are quite willing and quite eager to put this country into a bloodbath because they feel theirs is the only cause and theirs is the correct mission for America. Racism is very much alive and very much at play.

I also think a lot of the criticism being laid out against Barack Obama that is ascribed solely to political differences is infinitely deeper than that. I feel a lot of it is precisely the fact that a big part of America has never been able to accept that a man of color sits at the head of our government, leading us to decisions they must abide by. That sticks in their craw. They’re
fiercely angry. Those Southern forces who were defeated during the days of Kennedy and Johnson have never forgiven the Democratic Party and the Dixiecrats. The Democratic hierarchy fled and became the new [conservative] wing of the Republican Party—that’s being played out today. The hostage America became to those forces in the South that were deeply angered by that new experience is very much at play today. They haven’t lost that sting yet.

Andrew Young

In 1963 Andrew Young was a thirty-one-year-old pastor and civil rights leader, about to be named executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Started by Martin Luther King Jr., the nonviolent SCLC aimed to end segregation in the South. Young’s work in coordinating many of the key protests in the early ’60s proved fundamental to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Young went on to become a US congressman, ambassador to the UN, and mayor of Atlanta. In 2003 he created the Andrew Young Foundation to support and promote education, health, leadership, and human rights in America, Africa, and the Caribbean.

I
was in Chicago, and Kennedy was making a speech in a black playground on the South Side. I went, and I have never seen anybody light up a crowd like that. People didn’t campaign in the black community very much before him, but the fact that he was there, and to see him and the response—I thought that was a new day.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and Kennedy made a call to Coretta, nothing like that had ever happened before. For somebody running for president, being concerned about the wife of Dr. King—and he wasn’t even thought of necessarily as a great civil rights leader yet; King was just a black man in prison—that Kennedy made a call got him elected. That plus Chicago. Dick Gregory used to say that people voted in Chicago like they’d never voted before. It was the turnout in Chicago that actually swung that election. Those two events helped make him president.

Kennedy was a man of vision, the vision that America has got to lead the world. That was at the end of the Second World War. I remind people
all the time that what the Second World War did was stabilize the world, which had been destabilized by the printing press in the fourteenth century. When they printed the Bible in German and Latin and English—every time the printing press reprinted the Bible somewhere, you had a revolution and a new nation. It took the Second World War, the New Deal, the Great Society, and the Marshall Plan to make all that work. For the first time in five hundred years, by the 1960s the world was on a level playing field. Every nation on the planet was growing at 6 to 10 percent, and it looked like we really had it together. Then came the combination of assassinations, which took away the visionary leadership, and technology. If it hadn’t been for that generation of television journalists reporting on our civil rights movement, we wouldn’t have had a civil rights movement.

We didn’t expect a lot from him. Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton grew up in the South. They had black friends as children. But the Kennedys really had no contact with black people; they even had Irish maids. We knew their hearts were in the right place, but they just didn’t know any better. It was mostly in the interaction with Bobby Kennedy. But the president and Dr. King always related very well. Whenever Martin went to visit him, he said that when you meet with President Kennedy, he asks you questions for an hour. If you meet with President Johnson, he talks for an hour. The truth of it was that Kennedy was a seeker in the
human rights area. This wasn’t naturally a part of his background, except that growing up Irish they’d had to fight through discrimination in New England when he and when his father were growing up, but they’d sort of come through that.

Once Kennedy came on the scene, he represented the future. I never missed a Kennedy speech. When the president spoke, everything stopped. It was like Joe Lewis fighting or Jackie Robinson starting in baseball. We hung on the words of the president just because he talked about civil rights, acknowledging it as something he was aware of as a deep-seated American problem. I saw pictures of John Kennedy and Dr. King in households in Kenya and in the artisan shacks of the carvers in Zimbabwe and Tanzania. The world identified with these men. They had a vision that could unite the planet. Now there were competing visions at the same time, and the Cold War view was competing with this global, universal vision.

I was at a training conference for voter registration workers in Frogmore, South Carolina, at the Penn Community Center. Septima Clark had developed a literacy program. We were teaching people to read and write, to register to vote. Dorothy Cotton and I were the staff, and we had fifty people from across the South, from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama; these were the leaders we were training, who later became the voter registration leaders. Their children became the elected officials, and for me that was the heart of the civil rights movement.

When we heard the news, everybody immediately stopped and got on their knees—those people, they were what the Bible calls “the salt of
the earth.” They were not educated. When they prayed, it wasn’t so much in words as in chants and song; and when we heard that he had died, the prayer continued for America. Dr. King was coming there. He was really shaken. He said, “If the hundreds of Secret Service men can’t protect the president, then anytime they want us we’ve got to be ready to go, because there is no protection.” He took the president’s death as a sign of his own assassination. We preachers try to make something good out of every tragedy, and there’s an old expression, “There’s no remission of sins without the shedding of innocent blood.”

Lyndon Johnson was ready, but we felt that Kennedy gave his life for us. It was the moral mandate that America had to change. I don’t think anybody else could’ve done what Lyndon Johnson did. I’m almost ashamed to say that I doubt Kennedy could’ve gotten a civil rights bill through Congress, and yet without Kennedy’s life and death, Lyndon Johnson couldn’t have gotten it through. So in many respects, together they saved America.

The conversations between Lyndon Johnson and Richard Russell are classic; the one thing Lyndon Johnson said that I disagree with was,
“This will cost us the South for generations.” In a way that’s true, except that he became president, Jimmy Carter became president, and Bill Clinton became president. Eisenhower’s judges really paved the way for the civil rights movement, from the Supreme Court right on down to the Fifth Circuit, but that period gave us a lift. It gave us a challenge. It set the stage for modern America, for a modern world. At the same time, it led to the end of what you call the Greatest Generation.

I don’t think it drained hope; I think it produced a new generation. Bill Clinton will say it was John Kennedy who inspired him, Jimmy Carter, from rural Georgia. There is from the Southland, and from the struggles we’ve had, an emergence of leadership and vision that was strengthened, the revolutionary vision that all men are endowed by the Creator—not by their wealth, not by their education or their color, but by the Creator. We have the need. We have the technology, and we actually have the money. There is no deficit in the global economy, but nobody’s giving us the vision or has put together the vision that would enable us to bring this money to meet human needs in a safe, secure, and profitable way.

All of the pieces are there; we just don’t have the kind of vision that would’ve come out of a Kennedy—if he’d lived another fifty years or another forty years—or Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or any of the leaders who were taken from us too soon. Each of these men stood for something, and though they were killed, I say that the assassins’ bullets just freed the spirits. The spirit of John Kennedy is very much alive. The strength of this country is that we do represent the whole world, and these men somehow captured that vision.