The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [361]
Bobby agreed to make his first major speech as attorney general on May 6, 1961, at the law day exercises at the University of Georgia School of Law. Even if he had not been confrontational by nature, this would have been the time and the place for him to talk about civil rights. He knew that words themselves were action, and he and his aides spent five weeks working on the address, weighing words and phrases, making sure he would say precisely what he wanted to say.
There had been racial rioting at the university in January to protest the admittance of two black students, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, and they had been reinstated only through a federal court order. As Bobby prepared to fly down to Atlanta, the FBI learned that the Ku Klux Klan was vowing to picket him and to drive through Athens with a loudspeaker shouting, “Yankee go home!”
Bobby’s law school audience that day was full of young people who would soon help define how the South reacted to the federal government’s push for the integration of the region’s public institutions, whether there would be blood and burning crosses or accommodation and goodwill. A measure of the challenge was that in the audience of sixteen hundred people there was only one black, Charlayne Hunter, who was there because she had press credentials.
Today as Bobby began his speech, he had a feeling about the injustice shown to black Americans that was more than an attempt to commandeer their votes and their allegiance. The previous fall, during the campaign, Bobby had flown into Savannah, Georgia, to give a dinner speech. On the drive into the gracious city he had asked how many blacks would be in attendance. When he was told none would be there at the segregated hotel, he said, “Well, we’re not going to have the dinner unless you get some blacks there, okay?” He was being what some considered his hectoring, impossible self, but he got his way that evening, and for the first time blacks sat in that hotel like other citizens.
Bobby did not inherit a deep concern for racial justice from his father. Nor did it come from his brother, the president. He had not learned it from his professors at Harvard or at the University of Virginia Law School. He seems to have somehow extrapolated this deep feeling out of his own experience. Bobby’s life could scarcely compare with the lives of most blacks in America. Yet he had struggled against those who thought him second-rate, and he could empathize with blacks as most other wealthy white scions of his generation could not. Injustice rankled him, especially when it was directed against American citizens of a different color.
Bobby was a man who not only wore his emotions on his sleeve but also forced them on those he confronted. Political figures are usually brokers, trading among various interests and constituencies. There was little of this in Bobby. Nor did he love humankind only in the abstract, stepping back from the podium where he had expressed universal love to avoid the touch of a single person. He loved people, though he embraced certain groups more than others and sometimes endowed them with qualities they did not always possess, but the man was no hypocrite. He respected ability, and by bringing aides into the Justice Department who were singular in their abilities, he infused much of the organization