To better understand the civil rights issues facing the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, it is important to have a basic grasp of the history of race in America.
The main goal of African Americans in the early 1960’s was the achievement of legal equality. Previous to that time, both law and social custom relegated black people to a separate and inferior legal status. When John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, black Americans, especially those living in southern and border states, were denied legal equality and human dignity. They could not vote, were barred from public facilities, were subjected to routine insults and violence (often carried out by law enforcement officials), and could not expect justice from the courts. Blacks were second‑class citizens, and the white South was determined to keep it that way. In the North, black Americans also faced discrimination (although it was more subtle) in housing, employment, and education. Civil rights leaders would ultimately confront the fact that racism was not simply a southern problem. But, from 1961‑1963, the focus of civil rights activity was on the South. The fundamental prize sought by the civil rights movement of the early 1960’s was something that black America had never known: full legal equality.
The following brief history will recount how this system came to be.
Slavery and the Founding of the Nation: The Three-Fifths Compromise
When our nation was founded, despite the stirring claim that “all men are created equal,” enslaved blacks were not fully regarded as men and women, but were thought of instead as the legal property of their owners.
At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, fifteen of the fifty-five delegates who convened in Philadelphia to write a new Constitution for the American republic were slave owners. Slavery became a major issue when the delegates considered the apportioning of seats for the House of Representatives – which was calculated as one seat for every 30,000 inhabitants. Southern delegates insisted on full representation based on the free and slave populations of the South. Northern delegates argued that slaves were regarded as property not as citizens and, therefore, should not be counted toward apportioning seats in Congress. The issue threatened to break up the Convention until the 3/5 compromise was adopted: 50,000 slaves would be regarded as equivalent to 30,000 free persons. Or, put another way, one slave was, for the purposes of representation, 3/5 of a free person.
The South’s Increasing Reliance on Slavery
During the next half century, the economy of the South became increasingly dependent upon slavery. The invention of the cotton gin in 1794 opened the way to an increase in cotton production from 9,000 bales in 1791 to more than 5 million by 1860 – and the South relied on slave labor to harvest and pick this important cash crop.
In an attempt to tighten control over an increasingly valuable slave population, most slave states enacted Slave Codes which clearly defined the separate legal status of the enslaved population. Virtually every aspect of the slave's life was restricted by the underlying principle that slaves were property and not legal persons. Slaves had no standing in court and could neither bring a lawsuit nor be party to a lawsuit. They could not make contracts. Many states severely restricted or prohibited slaves from owning property. Slaves could not travel without written permission. They could not possess firearms or legally buy or sell goods. Slaves could not visit or entertain free blacks or whites. Their freedom of assembly was severely limited. In many states it was illegal to teach a slave to read or write.
The small population of free southern blacks (about 1% of the total black population) had their rights greatly restricted as well. Free blacks had to be registered, and without papers could be forced into slavery. Their free movement was curtailed, and many slave and free states prohibited the entry of free blacks. Like slaves, free blacks were forbidden free assembly and the right to bear arms. They could not serve on juries and, of course, could not vote.
Although slavery was abolished in the northern states during the first quarter of the 19th century, free northern blacks also had their rights severely restricted. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French observer who toured the United States in the 1830's, described the position of blacks in the North as follows:
If oppressed, they may bring an action at law, but they will find none but whites among their judges; and although they may legally serve as jurors, prejudice repels them from that office. The same schools do not receive the children of the black and of the European. In the theaters, gold cannot procure a seat for the servile race beside their former masters; in the hospitals they lie apart; and although they are allowed to invoke the same God as the whites, it must be at a different altar and in their own churches, with their own clergy… (T)hey are exposed to the tyranny of the laws and the intolerance of the people… they cannot claim possession of any part of the soil. Many of them perish miserably, and the rest congregate in the great towns, where they perform the meanest offices and lead a wretched and precarious existence. [1]
On the eve of the Civil War, 93% of free northern blacks lived in states which restricted or totally denied them the right to vote.
Western Expansion and the Question of Slavery
Since the North and the South seemed in essential agreement on the legal status of blacks, why did the nation eventually dissolve into civil war largely over slavery? There is little to suggest that the North opposed slavery on moral grounds—except for a small but vocal group of abolitionists. The North and the South came into conflict over a wide range of issues, but the question that proved most divisive concerned the spread of slavery into the western territories. As the American population moved steadily into the land west of the Mississippi, the central debate became whether the new territories and the resulting new states would be slave or free. By the 1850's, this issue threatened to wreck the entire political system. The North was determined to restrict slavery to the states in which it already existed—not to abolish it. The South was just as determined to secure the unrestricted expansion of slavery into the west.
The stakes in the territories and the new states were high, and they would, in the end, determine the political balance between free and slave states in the Congress and whether the future economic system of the U.S. would be based on the Northern free labor system or the Southern system based on the unpaid work of slaves.
The Dred Scott Decision
The precarious legal status of black Americans was confirmed as a result of a court case brought by Dred Scott, a Missouri slave, who had been brought into a free territory. With the aid of abolitionists, Scott sued for his freedom on the grounds that residence in a free territory had terminated his status as a slave. The Missouri Supreme Court ruled against Scott and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. In March 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, speaking for a 6‑3 majority, made two historic judgments: 1) he ruled that any attempt to restrict slavery was illegal since it deprived citizens of property – that is, slaves – without due process of law; and 2) he ruled that Scott could not sue at all because he was not a citizen and had no rights. The black race, the Chief Justice wrote,
were separated from the white by indelible marks and... were never thought of or spoken of except as property... They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.[2]