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WARREN KOZAK IS AUTHOR OF ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS ON WW2 THAT I EVER READ:
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LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay by Warren Kozak (Oct 17, 2011)
Fifty years ago, on June 11, 1963, the United States opened a new chapter regarding a pivotal matter—race—that had been a source of contention from the nation’s beginning. At the center of this watershed moment for America were the president, a governor, two 18-year-old college students and one of the leading civil-rights activists of that era. The dramatic 24 hours played out in three separate locales, with repercussions that are still felt half a century later.
The day began in sweltering heat at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, when two black students, James Hood and Vivian Malone, tried to enter Foster Auditorium to register for classes. They couldn’t because the governor of the state, George Wallace, physically blocked the door in a desperate attempt to stoke the dying embers of the segregated South.
Television news cameras were rolling when Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, from the Justice Department, asked Wallace to step aside. He refused. But President Kennedy, foreseeing Wallace’s refusal, had federalized the Alabama National Guard. Gen. Henry Graham, the head of the Alabama Guard, ordered the governor, who was essentially his commander, to move.
Before the governor grudgingly surrendered, he delivered a thinly veiled racist speech for the TV cameras in which he denounced the “unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted and force-induced intrusion . . . by the central government.” The moment established Wallace on the national stage, and he would go on to make four racially charged runs for president.
In Ted Sorensen’s 1965 Kennedy biography, the writer described JFK as mildly and quietly in favor of civil-rights legislation as a senator in the 1950s. But Kennedy’s own views had evolved by the early 1960s, and he became a major force in the struggle. At risk to his political career, he had decided to send a federal civil-rights bill to Congress. Kennedy asked the three TV networks for time on the evening of June 11 to announce it to the nation.
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Governor George Wallace speaks in the doorway of a campus building at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, publicly refusing to allow African-American students entry to the school despite a federal mandate.
The president, who faced re-election the following year, understood that the bill would cost him the Southern states. Since he was elected by the thinnest of margins in 1960, giving up five or six states could mean no second term.
In one of the strongest speeches of his presidency, Kennedy laid out the case for ending all forms of racial segregation in America. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” Kennedy said. “It is as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.”
Some of his arguments were practical. How could the U.S. promote freedom abroad, the president asked, when millions of its own citizens were by law less than free?
