Episode 19: John F. Kennedy - a podcast by SMU Center for Presidential History

Today’s episode is all about John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States—a vigorous president forever young in our memory because tragedy snatched him too early from our view. Kennedy stands near the top of public rankings of presidential greatness, though professional historians tend to rank him slightly lower, a distinction that captures the way the Kennedy mystique, the Camelot White House, the fashionable president with an even more glamorous wife, retains a hold on our national psyche far beyond what his 1000 days in office produced.  

That dichotomy—what the public recalls, and what historians know—underlies today’s discussion of JFK and race. Several of the most momentous, and monstrous, events in modern Civil Rights history occurred on his watch. James Meredith tried to desegregate the University of Mississippi, whose governor unleashed what can only be described as a race riot in response.  Freedom Riders promoting voting rights swarmed the South during his presidency, kicking up violent reactions throughout the old Confederacy, and it was while Kennedy was in office that the famed March of Washington led a quarter million Americans to the national mall in a call for equal justice. This was the moment Martin Luther King famously declared, “I have a dream,” reinforcing to Kennedy’s decision, his too slow a decision some might argue, to submit a new Civil Rights bill to Congress during the summer of 1963. The grandchildren of slaves freed by Lincoln, Kennedy told the nation, “are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice.”

In this episode, we spoke with Dr. Peniel Joseph and Dr. Sharron Wilkins Conrad. Together these two great conversations boiled down to two critical themes. 

• Kennedy’s reluctant but growing support for civil rights over the course of his presidency and the activists pushed that transformation 
• How decolonization in Africa shaped civil rights in Kennedy’s America, placing the Movement in a global, human rights context

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