MATT PORTER: The JFK35 podcast is produced by the JFK Library Foundation and made possible with the help of a generous grant from the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Welcome to "Let Us Begin," a special season from the team who brings you JFK35 at the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. I'm Jamie Richardson.
MATT PORTER: And I'm Matt Porter. As we approach the end of the 60th anniversary of John F Kennedy's presidency, this season will focus on some of his key trips and policy decisions from the final year of his time in office, and how they continue to live on today.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Join us for eight episodes as we travel with JFK to Germany and Ireland, go behind the scenes on policy decisions on civil rights and nuclear disarmament, and to Texas, where the Kennedy presidency would end abruptly, and understand how JFK's legacy lives on through today.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: All this will not be finished in the first 100 days, nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet, but let us begin.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JOHN F. KENNEDY: Good evening, my fellow citizens, this afternoon, following a series of threats...
JAMIE RICHARDSON: On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy addressed the nation after the successful integration of the University of Alabama, who had admitted its first Black students earlier that day. He confronted the hard truth of the civil rights movement for the first time on a national stage.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: This speech, considered one of the most powerful of his presidency, came almost two and a half years into his term and was the boldest statement he had yet made on civil rights.
And astonishingly, the speech was written in only a few hours.
Kennedy had wanted to speak to the American people about the issue and his desire for Congress to enact civil rights legislation. On June 11, after Vivian Malone and James Hood were successfully enrolled at the University of Alabama, JFK decided that was the right time for his address.
He and his advisors worked on the speech up until he was scheduled to go live on national television at 8:00 PM that night, editing and refining what the president would say.
Once on air, he referenced the integration in Alabama and appealed directly to the American people for all Americans to stop and examine their consciences and to consider why Black Americans were fighting for their rights.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?
JAMIE RICHARDSON: The speech came not only on the same day as the integration of the University of Alabama but also during a period in the spring of 1963 when civil rights protests spread in size and intensity across the South. To hear about the importance of this year and the struggle for civil rights, I'm pleased to speak with Dr. Peniel Joseph, the Barbara Jordan chair in ethics and political values and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas, Austin. Welcome, Dr. Joseph.
PENIEL JOSEPH: Thank you for having me.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: So in this episode, we're highlighting 1963 for being the last year of John F. Kennedy's presidency but as also a watershed moment for the Civil Rights movement, particularly in voting rights. What made that year so pivotal?
PENIEL JOSEPH: Well, yeah, you know, I mean, I think it's-- yeah, I think it's a transformative year. And I think it goes even beyond voting rights. So in 1963-- and I'm actually working on a book on 1963 right now-- when you-- and this is what we don't do. And I understand why Americans don't do what I'm about to suggest is that we don't really look at that year for its totality.
And unless you're a scholar, people don't have the time to really look and check what actually happened that year every single day, minute, hour that affected the United States, the world, but especially here, the Kennedy presidency. John F. Kennedy's president from the start of that year all the way to November 22 around 1:00 PM that year. So he's president for most of the year. And certainly, obviously, I understand his assassination is going to shape how we think about that year.
But we really should be thinking about that year more holistically. So for example, that year is the Centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. And so there's so many different civil rights activists who are talking about getting freedom beyond emancipation.
But the idea of civil rights and the struggle for Black citizenship and dignity really-- and Kennedy himself is going to realize this by May, by May of that year, but it cuts through everything. It cuts through nuclear disarmament. It cuts through ideas about employment and urban renewal and criminal justice. It cuts through domestic and foreign policy.
So by June of that year, he's saying civil rights touches everything, right? And this is because of Birmingham and everything that happens. But we have to think about that year-- this is beyond voting rights. It's really a year about American democratic transformation and renewal. And it's a year where civil rights activists and organizers, not just Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC, but really we're going to see demonstrations happening from coast to coast, you know, Philadelphia, California, New York, Boston, both in sympathy to what's going on in Birmingham and what's going on in Greenwood, Mississippi. But also as an acknowledgment that the struggle for Black citizenship and dignity has to be the beating heart of a transformed and renewed American democracy.
And I think the Kennedy administration, which has a really complicated relationship with civil rights because the two most powerful figures in that administration by far are the president and the attorney general. So when we think about that administration, it's really the first and only time in American history where the center of power is between a president and an attorney general because they trust each other so much. So very quickly, the attorney general becomes, really, a person who's right there with the president making the most important decisions for the country, including foreign and domestic policy. So it's quite extraordinary.
So when you think about the Kennedy presidency, if the president had not been assassinated, it's pretty axiomatic that Bobby Kennedy would have been the 1968 presidential nominee. I mean, there's just no way. And I teach at the Johnson School, but there's no way there's going to be a Johnson presidency.
Because one of the interesting parts about writing this book on 1963-- and Bobby Kennedy is one of my protagonists along with Jack and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but Medgar Evers, James Baldwin. It's a very interesting year-- Lorraine Hansberry [INAUDIBLE] --is that you really see the profiles on Bobby Kennedy. Like, I'm reading them.
And you see the-- so sometimes people talk about Camelot. And like, there's this myth-making. But some of that's untrue. Some of it is just reality, where if you look at by '63, people are saying, you know, Bobby Kennedy is the second person in charge.
And people are having a criticism and also saying he's very effective and impactful. So Kennedy-- both Kennedy brothers are iconic in their own time if you follow the evidence. So this is different from-- so that's what's so cool about being a historian is that you're right there in the archives. So this is just fact.
So people are seeing what an impactful person Bobby Kennedy is. But initially for the first two years plus of their administration, they are in a position of reacting to civil rights. They are reacting to the Freedom Rides in the spring of 1961. They are reacting to James Meredith and the crisis of Ole Miss in the fall of 1962.
And 1963 becomes the first time where, yes, they are reacting to events in Birmingham. But after the Mother's Day rebellion in Birmingham, where there are three bombs that racial terrorists explode in the evening of May 11, and by the early morning hours of May 12, 1963, there's three hours where there's an act of the first political rebellion of the 1960s occurs in Birmingham, where the Black community in Birmingham that is uninitiated in nonviolence so these are not the nonviolent demonstrators-- explode. And they explode because of a century of Jim Crow in Birmingham post-reconstruction.
So it's police brutality. It's Black people living in dilapidated housing. It's segregated schooling. It's high unemployment. It's deep indignity and humiliation.
And once that explosion happens, and by the way, Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, they call in the defense secretary. They're calling in Bob McNamara to say what are we gonna do about this? And we've got the-- I've got the White House, you know?
So this is real. This is real. The Army chief of staff is there at the meeting, too. This is real. People call up Burke Marshall at his home at 2:00 AM. And Burke Marshall, who is one of Bobby's lieutenants at the Justice Department, calls Bobby up. And they send a helicopter to get Burke Marshall to come to McLean, Virginia. This is all happening in the early morning hours. And Jack Kennedy is at Camp David and wakes up to the news that the whole world is on fire.
So now, civil rights goes from being on the margins to being, like, unless we solve this-- and you're going to see over the next month a lot of steps the administration is going to take really culminating in JFK's June 11 civil rights speech, this can undo both our administration and the country. And you start seeing them be very, very proactive. They're going to call a series of White House meetings. They're going to propose the Civil Rights legislation.
But also, on June 9, 10, and 11, I mean JFK has the speech at the mayoral conference in Hawaii and then the American University speech in Washington, DC. and then the evening address. And all three of those speeches are just civil rights speeches. Even though people misinterpret the June 10 speech, because the American University speech is not just a speech about nuclear disarmament. It's actually a speech about human rights.
And the reason why he's doing that speech, even if he doesn't realize it in his own mind, it's really about what's been happening in Birmingham and not just the Cuban Missile Crisis. So yeah, so '63 is everything. And there's a point where the president says after Medgar Evers has been shot that this issue has become everything.
What civil rights activists were always trying to tell him, and this is not just Bobby Kennedy. It's not just Martin King, but it's also Malcolm X. Because the cool thing is that Malcolm X is in DC by May 9 because he's shuttling between Harlem and DC in '63. And he's predicting a revolution and predicting that there's going to be-- and then two days after Malcolm X says all this stuff is going to blow up, Birmingham blows up.
But again-- and this is what I'm doing in my book-- most historians don't remember it that way. Because the whole thing is to understand the history, you've got to go day by day, page by page. Takes a lot of time. People are saying, hey, I don't have time to remember that and do all this stuff. But some of us were privileged enough to. So when you really look at it, it's quite an extraordinary year. But again, civil rights-- again, I would say this continues into 2023-- it's the center and not the margin.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Awesome. There's so much you covered there that I want to go back and talk about. But I wanted to talk a little bit contextualizing some of these moments and talking about getting to voting rights. Can you talk a bit about the barriers that were constructed against Black voters or potential voters? We had literacy tests, poll taxes, other methods to deter voting. Can you talk about those a bit?
PENIEL JOSEPH: Oh, yeah, I mean, when we think about-- I mean-- and remember, '63, there is no legislation that's going to be passed in '63. But certainly, the Kennedy administration has filed a number of-- they tried to put up in '62, '63 a literacy bill that would really greatly allow the Justice Department to sue municipalities that were utilizing literacy tests to preclude large numbers of Black people from voting.
But they don't-- even their civil rights bill that they propose is not going to be as comprehensive as the Voting Rights Act that you're going to get by '65. But certainly, Black people were precluded from voting ever since the Reconstruction period with a series of state laws that included the entire Confederacy and the border states that passed poll taxes and different litmus and literacy tests that precluded Black people from voting by concentrating the power in the hands of local officials. So basically, what local officials did was placed all white people, including illiterate white people, on the voting rolls. And so you had whites who could vote just by putting an x down on something. No voter ID, nothing.
And made sure that most Black people were denied the right to vote. And they were also physically intimidated. They were harassed. They were terrorized. Even in '63 in parts of Mississippi when Black people were trying to register to vote, people's homes were firebombed. And then the victims were then arrested, incarcerated. It took a Justice Department lawsuit to free those folks, including Bob Moses and Hartman Turnbow in Mississippi in 1963.
When we think about voting rights, voting rights was just the tip of the spear. The Kennedy administration erroneously thought that if civil rights activists, especially the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, activists, who were involved in sit-ins and Freedom Rides, if they shifted to voting rights, things would be more peaceful. That was a gross miscalculation because the Kennedy administration, including Bobby Kennedy at that point, didn't realize that the whole ballgame was just citizenship.
And citizenship encompassed everything. Citizenship encompassed access to wealth and land. It encompassed voting. It encompassed sitting in in public accommodations and going to parks and playgrounds. It encompassed going to any school you wanted to, having access to any and all employment. So citizenship was the whole ballgame.
So it wasn't that the demonstrations in lunch counters at Woolworth's were antagonizing whites. It was Black aspirations for citizenship and dignity that antagonized whites, right? So basically, there was-- we focus on voting, and voting is important for the connection with political power, but voting is just one part of citizenship.
So when you think about what most people wanted, they wanted citizenship and dignity. And that encompasses more than just the vote. That's like land. That's like wealth. That's like education. That's like being able to buy a house wherever you want, having employment, all those different things.
And like I said, the Kennedy administration initially thought that the Voter Education Project of 1962 that they poured a lot of money into would be the key. And certainly, that was a good project, the VEP, but it fomented massive, massive violence, what was called massive resistance in the 1950s but was what was really just a continuation of the politics and practices of white supremacy and anti-Black racism and anti-Black racial subjugation and subordination throughout 1963.
It's just that by the spring of 1963 with Birmingham-- and remember, Birmingham is like a five-week struggle, even more-- that drama becomes clear for the entire world to see.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Thank you. And then going back a tiny bit farther even, on the campaign trail, JFK-- folks had hoped that he would act boldly to address racism and discrimination. He made big promises. But in office, he didn't meet those expectations. So you kind of talked about his approach to civil rights and voting rights. And can you go a little bit more into that and kind of how people reacted against that?
PENIEL JOSEPH: Yeah. You know, JFK is really interested in foreign policy. Domestically, he's trying to run through a big tax cut by 1963 to stimulate the economy. His congressional coalition is filled with Dixiecrats who have vowed if he tries to do anything for civil rights, they're going to sink his whole program. He feels hamstrung. Now, what he doesn't do, as well, is he had promised to do a bunch of executive orders ending segregation in federal contracts and federal housing, some of which don't happen until '63. And even then, a lot of civil rights activists are going to say there's not enough teeth in these executive orders.
So in a lot of ways-- one, Bobby Kennedy is the president's point person on civil rights. So one, he's getting his interest in civil rights through Bobby. And Bobby certainly does do transformative things in the Justice Department. They hire a bunch of Black lawyers. They file lawsuits for desegregation of different public schools, including there are whole school systems that are shut down in Virginia after the Brown decision. And they're filing lawsuits against that.
They file suits to protect civil rights activists. There's a lot of things that they're trying to do. But for the most part, there's real criticism of Kennedy for not using-- like James Baldwin says, you know, he's not using the great moral power of the presidency and the bully pulpit. Martin Luther King, Jr. in back-to-back articles in The Nation in '62 and '62 says the same thing.
So-- and I also think that when you think about President Kennedy's statement in the fall of 1962 during the Ole Miss crisis, it's all very technical. And it's not very passionate. So I think until Birmingham and the aftermath of Birmingham-- and there's the point He does a four-day tour of these different universities, including Southern states Vanderbilt and other places-- that he-- and he's very, very reticent.
You think about Birmingham. Birmingham, when we look at those pictures of the German shepherds and the fire hoses, you know, Malcolm X is correct in the sense that those pictures make the front page of The New York Times May 4, and the Mother's Day Rebellion doesn't happen until May 12-13. And he doesn't send-- he doesn't meet with the defense secretary and think about sending in troops and think about federalizing the National Guard and having battalions on the ready to defend Black lives in Birmingham after the German shepherds.
He does it after the Black folks and in the parlance of the time, there's a Negro revolt, and they're saying it's a riot. And really, it's not a riot. Like, I would argue that it's an urban rebellion in Birmingham that's based on years and decades and centuries of racial oppression, but it's only once that happens.
And there's a point where Wyatt T. Walker, who's one of Dr. King's lieutenants, is telling the young people and the people who are-- they end up burning down six stores and one two-story building. And he's telling them to go home. Dr. King wouldn't like this. And they scream back at Wyatt Walker, "they started it."
And because the three bombs-- what people don't get, the three bombs were targeted. One was an assassination effort against A.D. King, Martin Luther King, Jr's younger brother who was a pastor at a local suburban Birmingham church who was a big part of the movement. But the other was an assassination attempt on King. If King had stayed in the second floor meeting room at the A.G. Gaston Motel for 30 more minutes, he would have been dead in 1963.
So the outrage was the understanding of that. There was an understanding this was a concerted effort to decapitate the movement, the entire civil rights movement nationally. And it's very interesting that when we think about the urban rebellions of the 1960s, historians and the public always erroneously starts it in Harlem.
Because when you start it in Harlem, it sets up a false narrative that these were big problems of big Northeastern urban cities and on the West Coast, Los Angeles. The first urban rebellion is not Watts in Los Angeles. It's not Harlem, Brooklyn. It's not Detroit or Newark. It's Birmingham, Alabama. It's in Birmingham, Alabama.
So what that shows you is the national problem that we have. So as we'll see throughout that next decade, there's going to be York, Pennsylvania, Plainfield, New Jersey. There's going to be these civil disturbances in hundreds of places, some of which is chronicled in the 1968 Kerner Commission, right? And the LA uprising is chronicled in the McCone Report. There's a Harlem report. And really, the first ever such report was after the Chicago white riot against Black people in 1919. That's the first-- that's when a municipality produces a first-ever report on these kinds of uprisings.
And so it's very, very interesting when we think about '63 in terms of JFK. He sends the troops in, and eventually they don't have to go in, but he's doing all this military preparedness only after Black people. And again, I'll say this clearly so we understand. It's the community in Birmingham that responds, but it's not the community of folks who are nonviolent demonstrators. Because there's more people than that in Birmingham, right?
So when we think about the Children's Crusade, and they jailed 4,000 or 5,000 people, and many of those are children, there were more people than that. So there were bystanders. There were people who were not interested in the discipline of nonviolence but who were local residents who were very, very angry with what was going on.
And one thing we have to say, too, is when we think about Birmingham, we're going to see hundreds and thousands of demonstrations all across the United States-- in Nashville, Tennessee and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in Oakland. We're going to see rabbis and rabbinical groups and Catholic groups and Baptist groups come down to Birmingham. We're going to see Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of Kenya, sends Kennedy a note criticizing the United States and standing in solidarity with Black folks and the people in Birmingham.
So Birmingham becomes everything. And it becomes a metaphor for this second Reconstruction. But Birmingham also becomes a metaphor for not just racial division and the prospects of reconciliation but political and ideological divisions because there are so many different right wing groups that are saying, both in Birmingham with Bull Connor, saying that this racial integration is a federal trap and a federal scheme. And we're being invaded.
So the same-- we see a re-litigation of the same language that was thrown around during Reconstruction. And we're going to see-- when you think about the John Bircherites, and when you think about this extreme right wing, one of-- people ask Kennedy a question at his May 8, 1963 press conference, which he does. I mean, I think it's his 55th press conference of his presidency. You know, 4:00 PM, State Department auditorium.
You know, what about these right wingers who are saying that 12 states have passed legislation making it easier to amend the Constitution and making it easier to try to curtail the power of the Supreme Court? Because in '63, they felt the court was an activist court that was too pro-Black, right? And they felt the Kennedy administration was an activist administration, even as civil rights activists felt the opposite, right?
So it's so interesting. We see the rise in '63 of a right wing that's going to congeal in so many different ways with think tanks. It's going to congeal with the Federalists, different Federalist societies. It's going to congeal with the shaping of the Supreme Court, the shaping of gerrymandering, the shaping of all three branches of federal government, but also with the way the public's memory and the media. So it's there in '63, the seeds of all that we're experiencing today. So it's really extraordinary.
In California in February of '63, the head of the Young Republicans, the person who's elected in California, is a member of the John Birch Society, which is an extremely right wing pro-authoritarian. And Kennedy thought of somebody like Barry Goldwater, somebody who wasn't very smart and was sort of this nut job. But that Goldwaterfication of not just the GOP and the Republican Party but really, our national political discourse, you see the seeds of that in '63.
And that's why after the president-- even before the president is assassinated in Dallas, there were right wing conspiracy theorists in Dallas who were making the claim that Kennedy was actually a communist. JFK is probably the most anti-communist president in American history. I would say even surpassing in certain ways Ronald Reagan but having different tactics in terms of his anti-communism and not the same kind of bellicose rhetoric as Reagan. And being more of a peacemaker than Reagan. But obviously, JFK was not a communist or some kind of subversive, but they're saying that in '63.
So it's really extraordinary to see that year unfold and the reverberations of that year. I think it's the most important year of the 1960s is 1963.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: We wanted to talk about his June 11 speech, where he talks about systemic racism. He talks about the bill he wants to pass in Congress. How was that significant? And did that help shift any perspectives in the country? You just talked about the kind of conspiracy theorists out there about JFK, or people who maybe were less on board with civil rights as a whole.
PENIEL JOSEPH: Yeah, now, this I think is really Kennedy's finest moment as president. I've written that before. And I get deep into it in this book. I think what you see in '63 is really a culmination of a learning process for both Jack and Bobby Kennedy, the entire administration. I think he really leans into this idea that civil rights is a moral issue. He leans into this idea that a revolution is happening, and we're really seeing it all across the country.
There's a period in the spring of '63, where 15,000 people are arrested. There's almost 1,000 different demonstrations. This as the White House is getting all these reports about what's happening.
And I think that speech is extraordinary in the sense that he says the revolution is at hand, one that can be violent or peaceful. Those who do nothing invite shame and violence. And those who act boldly, recognize right, as well as reality.
Those are really important words. And I think in a lot of ways he's channeling aspects of what Martin Luther King, Jr. had been trying to articulate in personal meetings but also through his organizing, that this was not a regional issue or a sectional issue. This was about the democratic future of America. And that if some of us were unfree, all of us were unfree.
And I think in that speech when he talks about the social economic indicators, and he talks about rates of Black babies mortality, and he talks about the income gaps and the equity gaps and the college and high school gaps, I think it's really an extraordinary speech. And I think that speech is very, very impactful. I think that speech has a global impact. I mean, if you look at the Kennedy archives, the number of letters they're getting from around the world and around the country praising that speech, right?
And that's where you start to see just more clear leadership and using the presidential bully pulpit within the context of those times. So I do think June 11 is really, really important, especially on the heels of the American University speech and of the Honolulu speech at the Conference of Mayors a couple of days before. And in a way, I think he comes to better realize how central this idea of racial justice and Black citizenship and dignity is to the country and really to his own presidency, right? To his own presidency because there was a chance, if not for Nelson Rockefeller's remarriage, where he was going to face Rockefeller in '64.
And Rockefeller could have sort of run to his left on civil rights. You know? Like, Rockefeller had a clear record. Obviously, that match-up doesn't happen because of the assassination and also Goldwater comes in there. But that's only because of Rockefeller's remarriage. And 60 years ago, it was a no-no to get divorced, even if you got remarried. And so that actually hurt him in terms of his seeking the Republican nomination.
But no, the June 11 speech is really great. And I do think that it provides-- it's a learning moment for JFK. It's a learning moment for Bobby Kennedy, too. And in a way, we're going to see so much of what happens after '63 and into '64. Yes, it's based on the president's assassination in part, but some of the rhetoric that we're going to see in the Great Society was beginning to be used already within the Kennedy administration by 1963.
And people like Ted Sorensen and other people will say that. And I think they're right. I actually think they're right. And I do think the president was thinking about poverty and anti-poverty. I think the president was thinking about a number of different issues.
But I do think that the Civil Rights speech of '63 has been lost because of the assassination and lost because of so many other things that occurred, but I think it's a huge, huge very, very impactful speech and a point where the Kennedy brothers were able to start taking the lead and behaving proactively. Because for too long, there was the feeling that if they tried to do this, it was going to upend everything else they were attempting to do. And those contradictions and the juxtapositions of saying we're the new frontier, and we've got this segregated society at the same time, I think they become overwhelming.
And I think once you saw so much grassroots protest and external domestic criticism, because, remember, Birmingham is where you've got French language newspapers showing the violence in Birmingham. And their headline is saying, you know, sauvage, right? They're saying savage. And they're not calling the Black folks the savages. They're calling the white folks in Birmingham savages, right? And that's extraordinary. Like, that had really never happened in global history before. That had just never happened, right?
And so that's a lot of pressure. That's a lot of pressure. So Kennedy-- and then in that speech "as clear as the Constitution, as old as the scriptures," he's talking about-- and Kennedy wasn't a person that's constantly talking about religion, but he's saying we have this great moral issue at hand. And I think that's really extraordinary because King-- I think King was right, where King always knew, yeah, you could do policies and laws and legislations, all that stuff had to change. But you had to change people. You had to actually literally change minds and hearts so that you could solidify the other change.
And I still think that's true to the present, right? Like, you've got to-- you can't have great social change and say we're for women, or we're for queer folks, or we're for immigrants and not change people's minds and hearts so that people aren't also resentful of that change, right? Because that's what happened in Birmingham. They had a peace accord, and then three bombs were exploded a day later, right?
And so the whole idea of saying that this is a moral issue really, really important, really, really profound. And I think that that was Kennedy's finest moment, but again, I still think it's unbeknownst to the president because these are folks who, at the time, they're thinking my finest moment is going to be nuclear disarmament, some big treaty with Russia, you know? Like, the American University speech.
And again, as we've seen 60 years later, it's kind of like really, no, the most important thing is people, right? The most important thing is human beings, so anything you can do on behalf of that, that's the real origins of the democratic project. The democratic project is supposed to be-- and by democratic project, I mean small-d democracy. No parties. It's supposed to be how do we help the most people while providing them the most input in their lives, right? Which is the opposite of authoritarianism, which is why it can get messy because you've got to listen. You've got to listen to a lot of people.
And in a democracy, even if one person is injured, you're supposed to be listening because we're supposed to protect the rights of the minority in a democracy. That's the key, right? Like, so we don't oppress-- the winners don't oppress the people who are not in the majority, right?
And so I think Kennedy comes a long way, but I don't think that at his death he understood that the biggest things of this presidency are what are you doing on behalf of people who he still thought of as Negro and not even Black because he doesn't live long enough for Black Power and all these different things, right? But again, I mean, Bobby as well. I think you see by the time Bobby is running for president, the reason why Bobby has so many Black people who love Bobby Kennedy is because of what's going on starting in '63. Because I think they both end up in a much different place from where they started on these issues. And that's a credit to the movement, and it's a credit to them.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Excellent. Thank you so much, Peniel. This has been such a great conversation. And I appreciate your time speaking with us about--
PENIEL JOSEPH: Oh, yeah.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: --the 1963 era.
PENIEL JOSEPH: OK, thank you so much.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: All right. Thanks, bye.
PENIEL JOSEPH: OK, bye bye.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Equality and dignity for Black Americans was not a new issue in 1963. And it is still an urgent ongoing fight today now, 60 years after the integration of the University of Alabama and President Kennedy's civil rights address. And as we look ahead to the 2024 election, I'm delighted now to speak with JaTaune Bosby Gilchrist, the executive director of the ACLU of Alabama. Thank you for joining me.
JATAUNE BOSBY GILCHRIST: Thank you so much for having me, Jamie.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And we are heading now into the 2024 presidential election, and a lot has changed, not only since President Kennedy called for strengthening voting rights laws in 1963, but even since the past presidential election. Where is the country at this point in terms of providing access to the ballot for all Americans?
JATAUNE BOSBY GILCHRIST: Providing access to the ballot is critical. We saw so much happen and quite literally transform in the 2020 election, from voter suppression to, quite honestly, I think a shift in political power when we look at what folks deem as battleground states. That was prevalent in Georgia. And so what you had is this, not just a resurgence, but I think this deep energy, particularly of Black Power in the deep South.
And it was a time in which access to the ballot, which has traditionally been very limited, actually opened up because of the pandemic. So for example, a state like Alabama, who does not have early voting, who has very limited access to the ballot was required to provide options for folks to ensure that they got to the polls. So they provided absentee balloting before election day.
There was a point in which we had ballot drop-offs for folks to be able to take their ballot and drop it off due to limitations that they may have, folks who may be immunocompromised and could not go to a polling place in person. And I think that that opportunity really not just enlightened but demonstrated a necessity for us to ensure access to the ballot. And then right after that, you saw state legislatures being so diligent in trying to roll that back. You saw many, many voter suppression policies enacted that following legislative session, unfortunately. But 2020 has taught us a lot and I think has prepared us from an organizing standpoint what to consider for 2024.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Excellent. And you mentioned voter suppression. Why is it that voter suppression efforts are so successful, especially now and accepted by a lot of people?
JATAUNE BOSBY GILCHRIST: Yeah, I think that it's important to name, and I want to be very clear about place where I'm situated. So the executive director of the ACLU of Alabama, but I am based in Montgomery, Alabama, which is the birthplace of civil rights. And one thing that I think is important is for us to talk about democracy, and how democracy is very much a new construct in the deep South.
When you have a region of the country built upon the structure of white supremacy and, quite literally, this nation, it is almost embedded in the policies, the structures, the laws, how things are done, or how things aren't done. And I think that that is important to state before we talk about voter suppression. So if democracy is a new construct in a particular region, voter suppression is innate in that. And so I think that that's a key piece to this. So you cannot think about access and providing opportunities for everyone if you don't think everyone deserves opportunities in the most layman terms. So I think that that's why it is so prevalent.
And we talk about voter suppression and voter subversion or election subversion. And those are two different things. And so I think that election subversion, in which you are denying that an election is real, or voters who have selected representatives, a president, a legislator, a congressman to represent them, that it undermines their voice. So I think that there are two things at play. And I think the distinction of those two things are important as we talk about the access to the ballot and limits in that, particularly for Black Americans.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: So going to talking with the Supreme Court a little bit. It's been 10 years since they stripped a significant part of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby vs. Holder. What effect has that ruling had on communities that the VRA was designed to protect?
JATAUNE BOSBY GILCHRIST: Yeah, so this is, of course, I talk about-- when you talk about voting rights in this country, you have to begin in Alabama. And when we talk about the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Bloody Sunday, Selma, Alabama, that 54-mile trek, understanding the history of that I think is important. Knowing that folks went one time and tried, were beaten back by the state. And then once, from a national standpoint, people saw that there were individuals being limited in their voting rights, that's when it became prevalent. That's when all eyes were on Alabama.
And so to answer your question, what did Shelby do? What Shelby did was, I think, strip us of that understanding. When all of a sudden 58 years ago people were so invested and knowing and understood what Black folks were doing to get their rights to vote, what Shelby did was tell us we are post-racial. We are no longer in this space. So it stripped Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the 4(b) formula.
And essentially what that was preclearance. So before you can change a polling place or change something within a particular city or community as it relates to access, you actually had to go through the federal government to get that approved. But what Shelby said was, or the decision in that, essentially said, hey, we are in a post-racial society. So if people are making changes, it is not to restrict or suppress a vote.
And the challenges in that is that it absolutely does. And what Shelby did was, I think, demonstrate that we are not in a post-racial society. Immediately after that, we saw an onslaught of voter suppression tactics. We saw voter ID laws. We saw the purging of voters from the rolls. We saw the closing of polling places. Particularly in 2015, they closed several DMVs in the Black Belt in rural Alabama where people could get their actual IDs to vote. That is a form of suppression.
And so now, we're 10 years later. I say we remember Shelby, but we celebrate Milligan. It's important to understand the bookends of what that has done particularly for the Voting Rights Act. So it stripped us of Section 5, which Shelby did. And 10 years later, we are still dealing with the deep repercussions of that decision.
But of course, June of this year, we won in Milligan to preserve Section 2. But that doesn't mean that the Voting Rights Act is strong. We need to strengthen it. And we only get to do that by federal government's understanding the necessity. So Congress passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. That's going to be critical for strengthening the VRA generally and providing us, I think, a new plane for how we look at voter access in this country.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: So I did want to touch on Milligan that you mentioned. There have been some surprising good news out of the Supreme Court for voting rights in Alabama, North Carolina.
JATAUNE BOSBY GILCHRIST: I think that those decisions are really representative of where we are. And it is, as I stated, a bookend, right? We started with Shelby and the rolling back of the Voting Rights Act. And now, we're here with Milligan with the preserving of Section 2. And let me give a little background on how we got here.
In 2020, it starts with the 2020 census. We saw an increase of nearly half a million people in the state of Alabama. That is largely contributed to people of color. We also saw a shift in where Black folks were living in Alabama. And so that needed to be demonstrated in the reapportionment or redistricting process as a state legislature is obligated to redraw lines.
So we make up-- there are 27% voting age populations for Black folks. And that 27% needed to be represented in a congressional map. Unfortunately, the state legislature passed a map that was unconstitutional.
We took it to our federal court, and at the state level, a three-judge panel, they agreed that it was indeed unconstitutional and violated Section 2. The state appealed that. We went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court's decision.
And so now, we are at a critical space. So this summer, the state legislature, again, went into a special session. They had public hearings. We presented a map that represented two strong Black districts in the state of Alabama. But unfortunately, the state legislature essentially voted on a map that, again, violates the Voting Rights Act.
And people were like, well, how did that happen again? You have to consider the majority, right? And so while-- the truth of the matter is our state legislature has a conservative majority. That's just the bottom line.
And so now, we're waiting until our next hearing, August 14, where we will go again to the federal court and say, hey. They drew and passed another map that is unconstitutional. And the hope is that there's a remedy to that. So they will appoint a special master, who operates as a mediator, and that person will help hire a demographer or cartographer who will redraw this map that is indeed constitutional, represents the 27% of Black voters within the state. And that is upheld by the court so people can vote on a constitutional map in 2024. That is the expectation.
And so what does Milligan do? Milligan helps set a precedent that you cannot just decide, or elected officials can't pick their voters. Voters have to be able to select their elected officials. And they have to do it in a constitutional way, in a way that is fair and equitable. And I think that that's what is so important because we are not even 60 years yet outside of the Voting Rights Act. And yet, we are still fighting for representation in Alabama and throughout the deep South.
And so Milligan has done a lot to unearth and, I think, to bring light to so many of these factors. And when we talk about voting, and we talk about-- well people are like, all right, redistricting. What does that mean? When you talk about your libraries, your schools, your playgrounds, your community centers, that matters. These are federal dollars that are going into communities. And people need to be able to vote on those things that affect their day to day.
And I'm so grateful for the work that has been done with our partners, such as LDF. But honestly, it really speaks to the organizing that goes on in this work around Milligan. Evan Milligan, the lead plaintiff in this, is a true leader in civic engagement work in the state, as well as the other plaintiffs-- Letitia Jackson, Khadidah Stone, Shalela Dowdy, Greater Birmingham Ministries, and of course, the Alabama conference of the NAACP was also a plaintiff in Shelby. So this is an arc of the work.
And so 10 years since Shelby, and now, on that anniversary or in the same year of the anniversary, we have Milligan. I think it speaks to the strength of the people but also what is required in this road to equity and access and Black political power but moreover, in trying to save democracy. And that really does happen in the South. We often talk about change originating in the South. And that's what Milligan-- that's what Shelby has done. It's brought light to a lot of things.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: That's awesome. Thank You I also did want to talk about-- we've talked a lot about the courts and decisions, and they have a lot of power in what happens and who gets to vote, how gets to vote, but you mentioned other groups that were key organizers in getting to that point. Can you talk a little bit more about what kind of the grassroots or other organizing that happens in the Black political power spaces you talked about?
JATAUNE BOSBY GILCHRIST: Yeah, what's important is that folks-- during these election cycles, it's easy for parties or individuals or organizations to parachute in. But you have so many organizations throughout the state that are really invested in making sure that people just know what's at stake. And so you know, I think about folks like Kynesha Brown in Montgomery, who leads an initiative called Rolling to the Polls. And they're really focused on local elections.
And they do exactly what their name says. They roll people to the polls. They put people in vans. They take them to the polls. They ensure that there are community forums in which elected officials come and have conversations and tell the community, hey, this is what I stand for.
I think about Birmingham, Alabama. And I think about Commissioner Sheila Tyson, who has been a stalwart in voting rights in the state particularly, also leading the Black Women's Roundtable. Letitia Jackson, who is a plaintiff in the case, is also very steeped in this work throughout the state. You have Beverley Cooper and Stand Up Mobile, who leads Stand Up Mobile in South Alabama, who is very invested in civic engagement work. Shillelagh Dowdy is a part of that organization as well.
And then you have folks in the northern part of the state that are also very invested in voting rights and are doing kind of intersectional work. You have folks who are really elevating certain things, like Camille Bennett, who was very, very steeped in understanding and naming history in Florence, Alabama as it relates to Confederate monuments, right? So all of this work, when I'm talking about these different people and these different areas of the state, they're all very invested in this movement work because it's a part of who we are.
And I have learned a great deal from their work. I have learned a great deal from seeing how invested folks like President Bernard Simelton, who leads the NAACP chapter, is. Like, they don't falter. They don't parachute in. They are consistently engaged in organizing work.
And I also think about all of the other organizations. We talk about voting, but when you talk about criminal legal reform, when you talk about reproductive health access, and abortion rights, and LGBTQ rights, particularly for Black trans folks in the state, it all matters. And there are individuals doing this work statewide. And we are really working towards a collective vision of building a stronger and more inclusive Alabama. But that's really going to build a stronger, more inclusive democracy for this nation.
So that is a bit of what I wanted to name, but it comes with a level of investment and coalition building. So we don't do these-- I named several different individuals. But all of this is really about us coming together and working in coalition together. And that's what we do. Across all these issue areas, we work in coalition together.
And we'll be frank. That doesn't mean we always agree on everything, but we are working towards a collective vision. And historically, we already have the blueprint for what that looks like. We're just shifting it in a way, retooling it in a way that answers the call for the time that is now.
And the time that is now is, yes, with more accesses, more obligations, because people will try to remove that or shift that or change that in the state legislature. But we have to be even more incisive in how we talk about the issues, and how we hold legislators accountable. And how we are really building a sense of organizing campaign structures in our local communities. It's a comprehensive perspective when we talk about organizing and groundwork.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: I just have one final question. How do you view the next-- I mean, things are moving so quickly in the Voting Rights movement or area, but what the next few months or up to the next presidential election, how do you see voting rights shaping up? Do you have any hope for how things will work out?
JATAUNE BOSBY GILCHRIST: Yeah, I think that folks have a level of consciousness of what's at stake. We are not [INAUDIBLE]. This is a fight for democracy, a fight for a stronger democracy, and a fight to not just to hang on to what we have but to build stronger what we have. I often call this time the next iteration of the civil rights movement. Other folks and some-- and I don't disagree-- may call this time that we are currently in and the time that we are actually coming from, when you think about the January 6 insurrection, of a nadir, when we are in one of the lowest times of a nation, where there is so much polarization.
And so I have to remain optimistic because I know the history of what movement building does. It starts in community. It starts at the front lines, at the grassroots level. Milligan is indicative of that. The named plaintiffs are community fulfilled.
And I think that the focus on community building and the focus on understanding that all of the things that we do and all of the things that are at stake are at the forefront of what we are trying to save and expand and to give and to build people up so they are also included in this democracy is what gives me hope, right? We dare to create a more perfect union. That's a quip of the ACLU. But I think about it, right?
I wasn't a person who was in mind when our forefathers wrote the US Constitution, but their words-- that is what we are striving to do. We are actively striving to make this country greater and stronger and more inclusive. And we do so by not just fighting but by standing up. And so we have to consider that some of these fights and some of these things and some of these distractions are just that.
And right now, it is imperative that we invest in people who make our country stronger and greater and better, and who are at the forefront of leading all types of folks from all different walks of life in marginalized lived experiences. Those are the folks that I look to lead because they inform, and they demonstrate the greatness of what we can be. And I believe that cases like Milligan and examples like Shelby provide a bit of a roadmap.
But I'm very optimistic about what will happen. It's going to take time. We're not going to get-- it took a long time to take away-- to gain abortion rights and to take it away. It's going to take a while for us to gain abortion rights back fully in the state of Alabama, but this is decades' long work. You got to be in this for a long haul.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Thank you so much for that perspective, as well as the long view. It's not going to happen tomorrow or the day after but maybe in a few more years. But I definitely want to thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your passion for the work that you do and the people you work with. It's been a great interview. Thank you so much.
JATAUNE BOSBY GILCHRIST: Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JAMIE RICHARDSON: As we approach another presidential election and the impacts of the steps taken in 1963 to give the vote to all Americans continued to be felt, we close with this answer President Kennedy gave in a 1962 press conference about violence towards Black Americans in the South who were trying to register to vote.
JOHN F KENNEDY: The right to vote is very basic. If we're going to neglect that right, then all of our talk about freedom is hollow. And therefore, we shall give every protection that we can to anybody seeking to vote. I hope everybody will register in this country. I hope they will vote.
I commend those who are making the effort to register every citizen. They deserve the protection of the United States government, the protection of the states, the protection of local communities. And we shall do everything we possibly can to make sure that protection is assured. And if it requires extra legislation, an extra force, we shall do that.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Next time on "Let Us Begin," President Kennedy confronts the existential fear over a global nuclear war with the Soviet Union and looks to map out a path towards lasting peace.
JOHN F KENNEDY: But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace, where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we must labor on, not towards a strategy of annihilation, but towards a strategy of peace.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: We'll look closely at President Kennedy's final actions towards establishing a nuclear peace that has lasted for more than half a century after his administration.
[MUSIC PLAYING]