What did Kennedy do to advance the cause of civil rights?

He put pressure on federal government organizations to employ more African Americans in America’s equivalent of Britain’s Civil Service. Any who were employed were usually in the lowest paid posts and in jobs that had little prospect of professional progress. The FBI only employed 48 African Americans out of a total of 13,649 and these 48 were nearly all chauffeurs. Kennedy did more than any president before him to have more African Americans appointed to federal government posts. In total, he appointed 40 to senior federal positions including five as federal judges

Kennedy appointed his brother (Robert) as Attorney General which put him at the head of the Justice Department. Their tactic was to use the law courts as a way of enforcing already passed civil rights legislation. No southern court could really argue against laws that were already in print. The Justice Department brought 57 law suits against local officials for obstructing African Americans who wished to register their right to vote. Local officials from Louisiana were threatened with prison for contempt when they refused to hand over money to newly desegregated schools. Such a threat prompted others in Atlanta, Memphis and New Orleans to hand over finance without too many problems - few if any, were willing to experience the American penal system, which had a policy of punishment then as opposed to reforming prisoners.

Kennedy was very good at what would appear to be small gestures. In American football, the Washington Redskins were the last of the big teams to refuse to sign African Americans. Their stadium was federally funded and Kennedy ordered that they were no longer allowed to use the stadium and would have to find a new one. The team very quickly signed up African American players.

Kennedy created the CEEO (Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity). Its job was to ensure that all people employed with the federal government had equal employment opportunities; it also required all those firms that had contracts with the federal government to do the same if they were to win further federal contracts. However, the CEEO was only concerned with those already employed (though it did encourage firms to employ African Americans) and it did nothing to actively get employment opportunities for African Americans. The CEEO was concerned with those in employment within the federal government, not the unemployed.


In June 1963, when Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama prevented two blacks from enrolling at the University of Alabama, Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard to enforce the law. The students were enrolled at the university. Three months later, Kennedy again used the National Guard to prevent Wallace from interfering with integration in the public schools of Birmingham, Tuskegee, and Mobile.

Kennedy also asked Congress to pass a civil rights bill that would guarantee blacks the right to vote, to attend public school, to have equal access to jobs, and to have access to public accommodations. Kennedy told the American people,

“Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promises ... to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.”
Public opinion polls showed that Kennedy was losing popularity because of his advocacy of civil rights. Privately, he began to assume that the South would oppose him in the next election, but he continued to speak out against segregation, the practice of separating people of different races. To a group of students in Nashville, Tennessee, he said,

“No one can deny the complexity of the problem involved in assuring all of our citizens their full rights as Americans. But no one can gainsay the fact that the determination to secure those rights is in the highest tradition of American freedom.”

David Hu
Us history
3rd period