Farley

“All men are created equal.”

These words from the United States’ founding document are among the most famous in the world. They heralded a break with the British crown, which proclaimed the superiority of the king and the “noble born” above everyone else, and a new era of popular governance. But while the country governed itself after independence, in practice it recognized only whites as created equal. Sixty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson lobbied Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to rectify this injustice. President John F. Kennedy had proposed this legislation in 1963. What moved him to act makes an interesting story.

When JFK was elected in 1960, African-Americans had been denied the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence for well more than a century. They had long been enslaved as a source of free labor for the tobacco and cotton-growing southern states. The United States fought a civil war to prevent the spread of slavery, and President Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves in 1863. Three postwar constitutional amendments reaffirmed the principle of equality for all. But upon the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877, southern states enacted measures to deny African-Americans equality with whites in all aspects of life. Despite a challenge to the constitutionality of segregation, the Supreme Court upheld it in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson verdict. All men were created equal, it seemed, except for African-Americans.

This flaw in the fabric of the U.S. became glaringly apparent when African-Americans went to war in 1917 and 1941. They served in segregated units and performed only menial or dangerous jobs. This left the country open to charges of rank hypocrisy when it declared “the world must be made safe for democracy,” and then went to war to eradicate “Nazi racism.”

Things began to change with President Harry Truman’s executive order desegregating the military in 1948. The Supreme Court followed in 1954 with a ruling that segregation in schools was unconstitutional. African-American leaders recognized the time was right to launch a mass movement for full equality. The Rosa Parks-inspired bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, and the 1957 enrollment of African-American students in Little Rock Central High School represent two early milestones.

John F. Kennedy’s election to the presidency in 1960 coincided with the national debut of the Civil Rights movement. His inaugural address was full of rhetoric about freedom and democracy, as a contrast to Soviet Communism’s dictatorship and repression. But he could not ignore the repression in the American South, where angry whites attacked African-Americans sitting in at “whites only” lunch counters. “Freedom rides” challenged segregation by seating African-Americans together with whites on Greyhound buses, met by murder-minded mobs.

African-American student James Meredith required a phalanx of federal marshals to guarantee his safe enrollment in the University of Mississippi in October 1962 — after sustained rioting that left two people dead. There were quieter outrages, too. When African diplomats drove Maryland’s Highway 40 to and from Washington to the United Nations in New York, they were routinely denied entry to restaurants because of their color. This in a nation that trumpeted its commitment to human rights around the world?

President Kennedy was initially inclined to Band-Aid these incidents. He asked aides to get the freedom riders to stand down, lest they embarrass him in his meetings with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who loudly and gleefully charged the U.S. with hypocrisy over segregation. To protests from African diplomats about their treatment driving Highway 40, he advised flying instead. Like his predecessors, he shrank from taking entrenched discrimination head on for many reasons. But as time went on and opposition to the civil rights campaign reached a fever pitch, Kennedy began to contemplate fundamental change.

The result was the birth of Civil Rights Act of 1963, for which Kennedy made the case in a June 1963 address.

“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” Kennedy declared. “It is as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American constitution. The question is whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”

The president went on to propose federal legislation guaranteeing access for all citizens to public facilities and equal access to employment. Kennedy did not live to see the passage of the Civil Rights Act, whose anniversary we celebrate this coming July. President Lyndon Johnson shaped and shepherded it through a reluctant Congress. The nation owes a debt of gratitude to both men for helping the nation live up to the meaning of its creed.