Civil Rights Events

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1960 Presidential Election -- Part One

 

Before dawn, on Wednesday, October 26, 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. was sleeping in a prison cell in DeKalb County, Georgia, when sheriff deputies aimed their flashlight beams into his face and barked at him to get up. They handcuffed him, shackled his legs, and hustled him out of the cell. It was 4 a.m. Hurried along, he asked repeatedly for an explanation, but the men said nothing. With a terrible foreboding, King soon found himself seated in the back of a police car rolling into the night; the only light came from the headlamps piercing the darkness.

 

Like all black men, King feared the chilling portent of a late-night drive into the countryside; it had happened to others, the stories he’d heard were horrific.

 

At home in Atlanta, Coretta King knew nothing of her husband’s ominous ride. She was six months pregnant with their third child, and she had already had an emotional week.

 

King hadn’t wanted to join the student-led sit-in. But the band of youths, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, insisted. The SNCC was well-organized and impatient. Its target was one of Atlanta’s venerable institutions, Rich’s department store; its goal: to desegregate the store’s snack bars and restaurants. The young activists urged King to come along—and go to jail with them—to draw attention to their campaign. King advised the students to hold off until after the presidential election now just weeks away; but the students saw an opportunity to force the candidates to address the issue of segregation. If King were arrested with dozens of young protesters, then both contenders would have no choice but to speak out. “We thought that with Dr. King being involved in it,” said student leader Lonnie C. King, “we would really see where these guys stand.” The students’ passion—and conscience—were impossible for Martin Luther King Jr. to ignore (Levingston 1-2).

 

King and the SNCC demonstrators had been arrested at an Atlanta department store lunch counter, “and then, after all those arrested with him were released, held for violating the terms of his ‘probation’ for an earlier traffic violation: driving (while black) with an expired license.  The judge sentenced the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to six months’ hard labor” (Goodman 1).

 

On that early Wednesday morning, Martin Luther King Jr. had no idea where the two deputies were taking him. An hour passed, and he realized he was deep into “cracker” country where no one protested a lynching. By dawn, King discovered he had been granted a less evil fate as the squad car turned into the maximum security state prison in Reidsville.

 

But his danger was far from over. If he were put to hard labor, as the judge had ordered, he would work side by side in a road gang with ruthless white criminals, many of them killers who had nothing to lose and everything to gain—national notoriety and prison respect—by murdering a black celebrity.

 

On that same Wednesday morning, Senator John Kennedy phoned the governor of Georgia, Ernest Vandiver. Some quiet, back-channel way had to be found to free the civil rights leader. Kennedy was motivated by his outrage, by his sympathy for the King family, and by bald political calculation. In a meeting with Kennedy just weeks earlier, King had urged the senator to take some dramatic action to prove to blacks that his commitment to their cause was genuine. His moment had arrived. If Kennedy were able to play a decisive role in King’s release, the black community was likely to reward him with an outpouring of support. But if he acted on King’s behalf, he risked a vicious backlash from Southern whites. The senator had to walk a fine line: show decency to a black man without alienating the white community.

 

During the presidential campaign, Kennedy raised suspicions in the black community by his blatant courtship of Southern white support. After the Democratic National Convention in July, he began shoring up his reputation among Southern leaders, meeting privately with them to allay fears that he would be an aggressive civil rights president. Kennedy promised Governor Vandiver that as president he would never use federal troops to force Georgia to desegregate its schools. In return, Vandiver declared his preference for the senator and vowed to lead Georgia into the Kennedy column on Election Day.

 

Now, some three months later, early in the morning at the governor’s mansion in Atlanta, the telephone jangled on the bedside table, waking Vandiver and his wife. On the line was Senator John Kennedy speaking in his New England accent. “Governor,” he said, according to Vandiver’s recollection of the conversation, “is there any way that you think you could get Martin Luther King out of jail? It would be of tremendous benefit to me.”

 

“Senator, I don’t know whether we can get him released or not,” Vandiver replied.

 

“Would you try and see what you can do and call me back?” Kennedy said.

 

Working in secrecy, Vandiver swung into action for the senator.

 

As news of King’s jailing spread, both presidential candidates received a petition from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and nearly twenty other civil rights organizations demanding that they “speak out against the imprisonment” (Levingston 3-7).

 

King had developed a better relationship with Richard Nixon than he had developed with the Kennedys. 

 

King, when he was 28 and famous for his role in the Montgomery bus boycott, met Nixon in March 1957, in Africa, when Ghana celebrated its independence. They agreed to stay in touch and met three months later in Nixon’s office at the Capitol to discuss among other topics the 1957 Civil Rights Bill. That summer Nixon worked to strengthen the bill, taking on such powerful Southern Democrats as Richard Russell, who opposed it, and the Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson, who had been pushing for a weaker version of the voting-rights section.

 

“I will long remember the rich fellowship which we shared together and the fruitful discussion that we had,” Dr. King later wrote to the vice president, telling him “how deeply grateful all people of goodwill are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the Civil Rights Bill a reality… This is certainly an expression of your devotion to the highest mandates of the moral law.” Nixon replied in much the same spirit: “I am sure you know how much I appreciate your generous comments. My only regret is that I have been unable to do more than I have. Progress is understandably slow in this field, but we at least can be sure that we are moving steadily and surely ahead.” They talked frequently after that, and in September 1958, after a deranged black woman in Harlem stabbed Dr. King almost fatally, Nixon was among the first to write to him. He praised King’s “Christian spirit of tolerance,” which he said would ultimately win over “the great majority of American for the cause of equality and human dignity to which we are committed” (Frank 1).

 

In his book “The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy,” David Margolick opines that King and Bobby were never close. They were intermittent allies but never friends. They spoke infrequently. Almost never socialized together. Seldom did they candidly share their thinking with one another. According to Margolick: “Theirs was an uneven relationship, and for King, a slightly degrading one: he was the black man invariably asking for things, and Kennedy the white man doling them out. . . . King was the one to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ ” (Kennedy 1).

 

John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King shared an era and a cause, but they were not close allies …. They admired each other’s best qualities but were suspicious of the other’s flaws. On civil rights, they marched to different cadences (Grier 2).

 

In the Nixon camp, strategists calculated the political consequences and concluded the best course of action was silence. Nixon held fast to his decision even after a visit from his staunch supporter baseball hero and civil rights activist Jackie Robinson. As William Safire, then Nixon campaign aide and future New York Times columnist, told the story, Robinson came out of his ten-minute meeting with “tears of frustration in his eyes.” Complaining bitterly, he told Safire: “He thinks calling Martin would be ‘grandstanding.’” Robinson was so distraught he declared: “Nixon doesn’t deserve to win.” Yet, the baseball star continued to support the Republican and later said the outcome of the election had left him “terribly disappointed.”

 

In the Kennedy camp, the imprisoned preacher had two passionate proponents: White House aide Harris Wofford, a longtime friend of the Kings, and Sargent Shriver, the senator’s brother-in-law and head of the campaign’s Civil Rights Section. Because of their fervor for black rights, Wofford and Shriver were regarded as overly sentimental activists with impaired political judgment and were relegated to the periphery of the campaign. But the two men exerted a subtle yet powerful influence on the campaign: They forced a sense of conscience upon the political realists.

 

 Wofford phoned Louis Martin, a successful black businessman and newspaper publisher who had deep political roots and was helping the campaign reach out to the black community. Martin was concerned about King, and after commiserating, the two men batted around some ideas. “What Kennedy ought to do is something direct and personal,” Wofford told Martin, “like picking up the telephone and calling Coretta.” It would be enough, Wofford observed, for the candidate to show his sympathy for her.

 

“That’s it, that’s it!” Louis agreed. “That would be perfect.”

 

Now came the hard part: getting this idea to Kennedy, who was campaigning in Chicago, and persuading him to act on it. After his private call to Governor Vandiver in the morning, the candidate had attended a breakfast with fifty businessmen. Now he was in a hotel suite at O’Hare Airport waiting to leave town.

 

After several tries Wofford finally tracked down Sargent Shriver, who was also in Chicago but not with the Kennedy entourage out at the airport. Understanding the urgency, Shriver listened to Wofford then said, “I’ll go right straight out to the airport. I’ll put it to Jack right now. It’s not too late” (Levingston 8-10).

 

 

Works cited:

 

Frank, Jeffrey.  “When Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon Were Friends.”  Daily Beast.  January 21, 2013.  Web.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-martin-luther-king-jr-and-richard-nixon-were-friends

 

Goodman, James.  “How Martin Luther King Persuaded John Kennedy to Support the Civil Rights Cause.”  The New York Times.  June 29, 2017.  Web.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/books/review/kennedy-and-king-steven-levingston.html

 

Grier, Peter.  “Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy: civil rights' wary allies.”  The Christian Science Monitor.  January 20, 2014.  Web.  https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/DC-Decoder/2014/0120/Martin-Luther-King-Jr.-and-John-F.-Kennedy-civil-rights-wary-allies

 

Kennedy, Randall.  “Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy: a fraught relationship.”  The Washington Post.  April 27, 2018.  Web.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/martin-luther-king-and-robert-kennedy-a-fraught-relationship/2018/04/27/227e8f82-4712-11e8-8b5a-3b1697adcc2a_story.html?utm_term=.923d82f02fef

 

 

Levingston, Steven.  “John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Phone Call That Changed History.”  Time.  June 10, 2017.  Web.  http://time.com/4817240/martin-luther-king-john-kennedy-phone-call/