Calculated Re-vision: Kennedy, Johnson and African American Views of Their Civil Rights Legacies

Abstract

Since the 1960s, there has been broad scholarly interest in the civil rights legacies of President John Kennedy and his successor, President Lyndon Johnson. Examinations have emerged from a wide range of disciplines, but it has been almost thirty years since the only book-length study of this subject appeared. Mark Stern’s Calculating Visions: Kennedy, Johnson and Civil Rights (1992) argued that neither Kennedy nor Johnson was particularly committed to civil rights when they joined forces on the Democratic Party ticket in 1960, and both were political moderates who eventually succumbed to the pressure applied by civil rights idealists. Stern’s analysis, with its heavy reliance on presidential administration records and former staff members’ memoirs and interviews, overlooked a key question. If both Kennedy and Johnson were viewed as political moderates, why have they been understood so differently by the African American communities most impacted by their civil rights policies? This dissertation addresses that question by focusing on African American responses to the civil rights strategies of Kennedy and Johnson. Mining African American oral histories, memoirs, letters, speeches, telegrams, essays, material culture, newspaper and magazine articles, polling data, song lyrics, visual art, and filmed portrayals, it traces how perceptions about these leaders’ civil rights records developed in the 1960s and continue to circulate today. The resulting analysis highlights the trajectory by which Kennedy emerged as a civil rights hero for black Americans while Johnson became a figure of relative contempt and mistrust. It explores the ways African Americans aligned themselves with Kennedy’s memory over Johnson’s reality as a form of black countermemory, drawing an invisible dividing line between the time many believed integrated, government-led, non-violent social change was possible, and when many no longer maintained that hope. A central component of this research deals with the manner by which John Kennedy has been mourned as a civil rights martyr within the black community. African Americans have imbued Kennedy’s image with a meaning that serves their ongoing, everyday struggle for racial equality, affording him a privileged presence in their homes. The portraits of Kennedy in black households operated as hidden transcripts that communicated his unique value to future generations. Despite Lyndon Johnson’s effort to enact historic civil rights legislation that many African Americans acknowledge went further than anything John Kennedy likely would have supported, Johnson never achieved sustained personal affection from black voters. Although African Americans were vital to Johnson’s landslide reelection victory in 1964, they continued to believe that his support for civil rights was motivated by political self-interest rather than a sincere commitment to racial equality. Representations of Johnson in recent civil rights films perpetuate a narrow view of him as a racist manipulator. The passage of fifty years warrants a calculated re-visioning of these two presidents’ civil rights legacies, and how they have been perceived by African Americans in their own time and since. This effort challenges long-held perceptions of the roles John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson retain in both the Civil Rights Movement and in the African American imagination