The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [460]
Harry Belafonte listened to this rage with mounting disquiet. He cared as much about the civil rights of his people as anyone in the room, and in the years to come, no one there that evening would walk any further than he in searching for social justice. The singer knew that it would be a terrible thing to make an enemy of the second most powerful man in America. In his melodiously soothing voice, he began to tell the group about the hours he had spent at Hickory Hill talking to the attorney general about racial issues. Clarence Jones, the Reverend King’s attorney, brought up some of the ideas that King envisioned, such as the president making a Roosevelt-like fireside chat about civil rights and issuing a twentieth-century emancipation proclamation. These were good ideas, but the room was so fogged with anger and misunderstanding that the two groups could hardly see each other. A few minutes before, Bobby might well have seriously entertained such ideas. Now he dismissed them with disdainful laughter.
Hansberry walked out of the gathering with arrogant indifference, believing that in doing so she had accomplished something. And that was the end of an evening that the distinguished educator Kenneth Clark called “the most dramatic experience I have ever had.”
Bobby sat in the Oval Office talking with the president and other advisers about the civil rights situation. He had returned from New York City stunned by the level of vitriol. Baldwin betrayed the whole nature of the private discussion by telling the New York Times about the evening, saying that the attorney general had been “insensitive and unresponsive.” Privately, Bobby slammed Baldwin as a representative not of blacks but only of what Bobby considered Baldwin’s own depraved homosexual orientation. Yet he was not about to burn his brother’s presidency as well as his own political aspirations in the civil rights fire. He told his aides that if he had grown up black, he would have felt precisely like the blacks who had come to his New York apartment. That was probably a deeper insight into his own psyche than even he realized. If his skin had been Baldwin’s color, he probably would have fought against the evil that his people suffered and confronted racism in its very lair.
The president heard the footsteps in the night, and he knew that he could avoid a direct confrontation with the civil rights issue no longer. It was the Kennedys’ task to move the racial dialogue forward with speed and purpose, channeling that anger into engines of change.
“You know a black college graduate who applies for federal employment in the South can hope for nothing better than a job carrying mail,” Bobby said, suddenly seeing inequality where he had not seen it before.
“Pretty good job for a Negro in the South, though, letter carrier,” Kennedy said, quieting the room. Part of the problem was that the president’s sentiments were more like those of most white Americans than Bobby’s were. “I’d like to bet he had never met a black person in his life,” his friend Ben Bradlee noted. He was wrong about that—as a young man at Harvard, Kennedy had a black valet.
The president felt a stronger affinity with some of the southern politicians like Governor Patterson of Alabama than he did with many of the black activists. “My impression of President Kennedy was that he wanted to do everything he could for the blacks, for the minorities,” reflected former Governor Patterson. “He wanted to integrate them fully into our society. At the same time he recognized