The Bystander

John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality

Bibliographic Data

ID10025970
AuthorsKathleen O’reilly (0000-0002-5887-9279, University of Alaska Anchorage, corresponding author), K O'Reilly
Year2007
Volume93
Issue4
Pages1319-1319
Publication date2007-03-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/25094745
OpenAlexW2321453408
LanguageEN
Citations received15

Racial polarization over the last forty years, Nick Bryant argues, can largely be traced to the New Frontier's “strategy of association,” a tack so ephemeral that “the black aide Kennedy spent most time [associating] with was George Thomas. His job each morning was to lay out the president's clothes” (p. 219). John F. Kennedy came around after Bull Connor and Birmingham in spring 1963, but “by then it was too late,” Bryant contends. The president had missed an eight hundred-day window to pursue “bolder federal policies [that] would almost certainly have had a calming effect” (pp. 473, 465). Instead, he piled “a policy of inaction” on his “strategy of association” to avoid “inflaming the South” and “splintering the Democratic Party.” This “miscalculation of immense scale ... encouraged white supremacists,” “provoked tens of thousands of black demonstrators,” and so inflamed and splintered southern whites that many of them would soon migrate to the Republican party (the de facto white man's party) (pp. 11, 12)

Art history · De facto · Democracy · Economic history · George (robot · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · White (mutation · History · Law · Public Administration · Race, History, and American Society

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