It should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America which has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live.
Theseare words from President John F. Kennedy’s “Unspoken Speech” he was on his way todeliver at the Dallas Citizens Council’s annual meeting when he was assassinatedin his motorcade on November 22, 1963.
I was a brand new law school graduate in my first months ofwork with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York City on that fatefulNovember day fifty years ago. I had begun the day visiting a young Black male deathrow client in a rural Georgia prison accused of killing a White farmer and hadreturned to Atlanta where I was sitting in a courthouse library researching howmany Blacks and Whites had been executed in Georgia’s history. When a White manburst in grinning and shouting loudly, “Hot damn, they got him,” it took me amoment to realize he was talking about President Kennedy. I rushed with othersto the nearest television set to see the news and could barely get away quicklyenough from the hateful glee of some of the White citizens surrounding me. Thememory of their celebration still makes me sick.
So much of the deep lingering sadness over PresidentKennedy’s assassination is about the unfinished promise: unspoken speeches, unfulfilledhopes, the wondering about what might have been. So many Americans feltinspired to do more and be better by the youthful optimism and challenges ofthe young President’s words, only to find him so incomprehensibly and suddenly silencedby violence and hate. I met President Kennedy only once, on the White Houselawn in the summer of 1961 after my first year of law school when I and many otheryoung leaders participating in Crossroads Africa, a precursor to the PeaceCorps, gathered to hear him and Reverend James Robinson, Crossroads Africa’svisionary leader, give us a send off to a summer of service in Africa.
Although the kind of venom I witnessed in Atlantasurrounding his death was stunning, many Black Americans felt his lossespecially deeply because it was hostility we recognized and had often felt inour daily segregated lives in the South. And as we have seen over and over, PresidentKennedy would not be the last leader or citizen who stood up for equal justice tobe slain. His death and others that followed remind us that our dreams andcommitment to justice cannot depend on a single leader or be destroyed if one,a few, or many are lost to acts of hate and violence. The Civil Rights Movementcontinued. We must always refill and ensure there is a critical mass of leadersand activists committed to nonviolence and racial and economic justice who willkeep seeding and building transforming movements. When one leader passes manymore must be ready to step up to the plate and keep working to ensure a more justAmerica and world.
When President Kennedy was elected, many Black Americans,like so many Americans, were captivated by his youth and energy and promise andwere especially hopeful that he might move the country in a new direction oncivil rights. In an era dominated by the Cold War, the Freedom Rides and theBirmingham nonviolent direct action movement challenging racial apartheid in oneof America’s toughest Southern cities seemed like a worrisome distraction tothe new Administration. But President Kennedy grew as he saw the massiveviolent resistance to change of some Southern Whites unfolding before him thatwould not go away and realized that the pent-up demand for freedom also wouldnot go away. The burning of a Greyhound bus in Alabama and attacks not only on FreedomRiders but on a federal government official forced his hand. And he, like somany other Americans, was repulsed by the scenes that flashed across televisionscreens of police dogs and fire hoses attacking Black children and youths who challengedBull Connor’s and the Birmingham establishment’s Jim Crow policies. We saw andmust not forget how courageous and sustained actions from ordinary citizens fedup with injustice can inspire, provoke, and push political leadership at thetop.
President Kennedy responded to the movement’s persistentand sacrificial actions with passion and major action of his own. He made an eloquentspeech to the nation on June 11, 1963 and sent a landmark civil rights bill toCongress one week later. The nationally televised speech he gave introducingthe bill once again inspired many Americans to share his vision that Americacould and must be better. His tragic death created a political climate that,combined with President Lyndon Johnson’s masterful political leadership, resultedin enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965-- the latter pushed by civil rights demonstrations in Selma.
Fifty years later, and after the deaths of Medgar Evers,Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner,and countless other nonviolent warriors for justice, the fight against intolerance,violence, and hatred in America is far from over. It’s not over for childrenwho are killed or injured by guns every half hour, or Black boys like Trayvon Martinwho can be felled simply for walking while Black, nor for our youngest who canbe slain as they sit in their classrooms or even bedrooms. But the message PresidentLincoln, President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and many othershave given their lives to ensure is that America can and must become the nationenvisaged in the Declaration of Independence sullied by Native Americangenocide, slavery, and exclusion of all women and non-propertied men, evenWhite men, from the democratic process.
So I hope, as we remember a young President who asked usnot to ask what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country,that we will renew our commitment to building with urgency and persistence ajust America where every child is valued and enabled to achieve their God givenpotential regardless of the lottery of birth. And we must determine not to letour children and grandchildren have to fight again the same battles for thesoul and future of America that earlier generations did. We must join togetherto squash the resurging racial and economic apartheid that threatens to slide usbackwards into a second post Reconstruction Era. And we must rededicateourselves to move America forward to realize our founding principles that allmen and women and children are created equal. Our true remembrance to PresidentKennedy is in our actions to honor the unspoken words and finish the unfinishedwork today and tomorrow and for as long as it takes.