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JOHN F. KENNEDY: I am today announcing my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: While Senator John F. Kennedy was formally launching his run for president at the start of 1960, another movement was gathering steam.
TIM NAFTALI: There was a lot going on in the '50s. But what happens in 1960 is a group of young men in Greensboro, North Carolina decide to integrate a lunch counter.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: In Greensboro, four Black college students took action to protest racist laws enacted during the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War. These laws enforced racial segregation in the South in order to uphold white supremacy. Historian Tim Naftali explains.
TIM NAFTALI: There were laws on the books from the late 1880s and 1890s and thereafter that criminalized integration in public areas and in places known as public accommodations, in restaurants, bus stations, pools. And these young men in 1960-- on their own, they did not represent a political party, there was no master instigator-- these were people on their own who decided enough is enough.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Their movement to integrate public accommodations spread around the country. And protesters were often met with violent resistance. Georgia Congressman John Lewis, who was a college student at the time, describes his experience at sit ins his oral history interview at the JFK Library.
JOHN LEWIS: But we were there, sitting in. And we came out. And some guy just punched me in the mouth. And our lips, because they're sensitive, big, and they just start bleeding.
And then another time, we went in a store. And I saw this young man. On Monday night, I was back in Nashville. We went in Kristal's and the owner locked us up there and started fumigating the place.
RICHARD NIXON: While it is dangerous to see nothing wrong in America, it is just as wrong to refuse to recognize what is right about America.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: Today our concern must be with that future. For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do. It is time, in short, for a new generation of leadership.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: In today's episode, we will discuss how racist Jim Crow laws in the South prevented Black citizens from voting with a look to where we are today. And we'll find out how the emerging modern Civil Rights Movement affected Kennedy's and Nixon's campaign strategies and see how Kennedy worked to win over Black voters who were skeptical of his commitment to civil rights. This isSixty/Twenty.
One quick note about language in this episode. We're using oral history interviews recorded in the mid to late 1960s, a time when the term "Negro" referred to Black or African-American people. This was commonly used and accepted at the time, whereas now it's outdated and can be deemed derogatory.
As the 1960 campaign approached, civil rights groups weren't just protesting laws that denied equal access to public accommodations. Southern states that had once made up the old Confederacy also had laws and extralegal means to deny Black Americans their right to vote.
TIM NAFTALI: They imposed a tax to be able to vote. You had to pay a poll tax. In other words, to be able to go to a poll, you had to pay a tax. It was a literacy test.
And that test was completely arbitrary. It wasn't a state tax. It was the local poll administrator who would decide what test to give you. And of course, they would play a game. They would make the test extremely hard for an African-American and then make it extremely easy or even give the answers to a white person.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: By limiting Black voters' access to the ballot box, these racist laws and policies affected who would be represented in state and local governments. And as a result, this preserved the power structure in the South set up during Reconstruction.
TIM NAFTALI: And as a result, the number of African-Americans who actually could vote in the South was much, much smaller than their number. The white elite of those states had no interest in altering the balance of power. And the federal government wasn't able, because Congress wasn't willing and presidents weren't willing, wasn't willing to go to bat for African-Americans in the South, to fight those state governments, and to fight the apartheid that they had instituted since the 1870s.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And while the poll tax was eliminated with the 24th amendment and the Johnson administration would pass sweeping voting rights legislation, universal suffrage continues to be an issue today. New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie explains.
JAMELLE BOUIE: The extent to which we have not made progress, I think, is twofold. The first is that there still actually isn't a national bipartisan consensus over free access to the ballot, that we’re still fighting political battles over whether citizens can vote and vote easily and vote without too many obstacles. So in the past couple elections, presidential elections, at least, there have been stories of two, three, four hour voting lines, which are themselves a form of voter disenfranchisement, you could say.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Difficulty in voting, whether it's long lines, fewer polling places, voter purges, ID laws, these tend to affect people of color at higher rates than white people. Stacey Abrams served in theGeorgia House of Representatives and is the founder of Fair Fight, which addresses voter suppression. At a Kennedy Library forum, she gave some examples of voting laws that impact people of color.
STACEY ABRAMS: Arizona, since 2005, has shut down 85% of their polling places, which largely affects Native Americans who live on reservations. Instead of being able to go five miles outside of the reservation to go and vote, they have to go 50 miles. In Wisconsin, they have one of the most restrictive voter IDs. It requires an original birth certificate. And so if you're a Black woman who wasn’t allowed to be born in the hospital, you may have to jump through multiple hoops to get a certificate that they will validate as one that allows you to get a license that lets you vote.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Today, the two major political parties are sharply divided on the issues of voting rights. The Republican Party tends to prefer higher barriers to access voting and the Democratic party fewer. In 1960, coming out of the Republican and Democratic national conventions, both parties wrote civil rights, including voting rights, into their official platforms. At that moment in history, each party recognized that denying Black Americans their constitutional rights was not something that should continue.
TIM NAFTALI: Both parties understood the enormous political peril that this issue presented to them. And indeed, it was a bigger threat to the unity of the Democratic party at that point than it was to the Republican Party.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: At that time, the Republican Party was still seen by Black Americans as the party of Lincoln, who believed Republicans would still more reliably work toward civil rights. On the other hand, the Democratic party needed to raise its profile among Black voters without turning off Southern white Democrats.
At the 1948 Democratic Convention, the Southern delegation bolted rather than endorse their party's civil rights plank. Instead, they formed the Dixiecrat party. That party didn't last. But a tentative approach to civil rights within the Democratic party would. Historian Jill Lepore explains.
JILL LEPORE: Remember in the 1950s, the Democrats were very far behind Republicans in favoring civil rights. The party had divided into the Dixiecrats. When Stevenson ran in 1952, he had a segregationist on the ticket from Alabama as his running mate. He kept telling African-American audiences that he favored a gradual, slow approach to equal rights. And he just was terrible on civil rights.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And fast forward to the 1960 conventions, both the Republican and Democratic parties endorsed similar civil rights planks. Both parties supported desegregating schools and increased efforts at expanding voting rights. And though these planks became part of both parties' platforms, this didn't mean everyone in John F. Kennedy's and Richard Nixon's parties was on board.
TIM NAFTALI: The issue of civil rights was controversial within their own parties. And they had to send different messages in different parts of the country to be plausible national leaders at that time.And that was shameful. It was part of the rules of the game. But it's not something we should look back on with pride as Americans.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Kennedy and Nixon both needed to court the states that made up the former Confederacy. And because few Black citizens were registered to vote, most voters were white, and by and large supported segregationist policies and candidates. Tim Naftali says that, given the number of electoral votes the South had, both candidates needed to go after voters there.
TIM NAFTALI: And because of our electoral college system, their electors really mattered. And so both parties, at the top, engaged in a Faustian bargain with segregationists. It's one of the tragedies and one of the stains of American political history.
The Democratic party could only win the White House if it kept white elites happy in the South, while at the same time, keeping African-Americans happy in the North and union leaders happy in theNorth and mayors happy in the North. How do you do that? How do you balance this complete contradiction, the spirit of the Democratic party in the North was completely different from the spirit of the Democratic party in the South. And it was the same party. And they had one nominee.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Coming up next having to balance moral considerations with these realities of winning electoral votes, how did the candidates respond? We'll join John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon on the campaign trail and see how they were prepared, or not, to take on the issues.
MATT PORTER: Are you enjoying the Sixty/Twenty podcast? This podcast is just one of many initiatives, programs, and resources supported by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. The JFK LibraryFoundation is a nonprofit that provides financial support, staffing, and creative resources for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Learn more about the JFK Library and Foundation atJFKLibrary.org.
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JOHN F. KENNEDY: There have been only six cases brought by this attorney-general under the voting bill passed in 1957 and the voting bill passed in 1960. The right to vote is basic. I do not believe that this administration has implemented those bills which represent the will of the majority of the Congress on two occasions with vigor.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: At the second debate in October, both Kennedy and Nixon were asked to sum up their intentions in the field of civil rights if they became president.
DEBATE MODERATOR: With both North and South listening and watching, would you sum up your own intentions in the field of civil rights if you become president?
RICHARD NIXON: My intentions in the field of civil rights have been spelled out in the Republican platform.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: There is a very strong moral basis for this concept of equality before the law, not only equality before the law, but also equality of opportunity.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Both discussed the role of the federal government and presidential leadership. And as may be expected, accused the other of not having done enough in their respective roles as members of the executive and legislative branches. But what was the reality of the situation? What had both men done in their careers that could convince voters that they would take real meaningful action on civil rights? As vice president, Tim Naftali explains how Nixon had made overtures to prominent Black leaders.
TIM NAFTALI: Richard Nixon had tried his best to expand the Republican Party's support among African-Americans. He had reached out to Martin Luther King. He had developed a real friendship, or at least an alliance, with Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play in the major league baseball. He had been Dwight Eisenhower's representative at the independence ceremonies of some of the first African nations to leave colonial domination in the 1950s.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Simeon Booker was a Black journalist who wrote about civil rights and covered the 1960 campaign. In his oral history at the JFK Library, he agreed that Nixon as vice president had won the respect of Black voters and was attentive to the Black press. However, James Farmer, who was the founder of the civil rights group the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, said in his oral history that he saw Nixon differently.
JAMES FARMER: We were fighting with Nixon. And I personally was. I remembered far too well his history and record in California politics, where he had been very close to the extreme rightists.And Nixon was wholly unacceptable.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: But in the eyes of Farmer and other Black leaders, John F. Kennedy, a wealthy white man from New England, didn't have much experience in the area of civil rights.
JAMES FARMER: I mean, he had a feeling for it. But not the knowledge or acquaintance with it. I felt that he did not know much about Negroes or their struggle because his life had been pretty much isolated from it up until that point.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Simeon Booker also noted that Kennedy wasn't familiar with the more nuanced aspects of civil rights issues. He needed to be briefed frequently before speaking to Black groups and wasn't able to answer questions in any depth.
As a congressman and Senator, JFK's voting record shows his contradictory support of civil and voting rights. In 1947, he voted with progressive members of his party and supported anti-poll tax legislation. But then 10 years later, he sided with more conservative Southern Democrats in supporting a watered down version of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Historian Fredrik Logevall describes Kennedy's inconsistent support of civil rights legislation.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: And so in fact, if you think of it as a sort of zigzag or a kind of roller coaster, there is a growing support on Kennedy's part early in his career for civil rights. And then a diminution, a slackening, I think it's fair to say, in that support. So that by the time we get into '58, I think there is unhappiness with Kennedy on the part of civil rights leaders, some of them who are very vocal about their unhappiness.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: One person who was a vocal was NAACP leader Roy Wilkins. He publicly called out JFK's associations with known white supremacists and segregationists.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: And then I think there was also a broader frustration on Wilkins' part with what Jack Kennedy did in the aftermath of the '57 act in terms of the speeches that he gave, including in the South, the people he was seen with and photographed with, who included some white supremacist politicians in the South. Wilkins made very clear, I see what you're doing. I do not accept this,Mr. Kennedy. And you will not have my support.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: With so much criticism coming from influential Black leaders, Kennedy knew that he needed to clean up his image with Black voters if he wanted to be re-elected to the Senate in 1958and then later run for the White House. He got in touch with Belford and Marjorie Lawson, two Black lawyers from Washington, DC who supported the senator from Massachusetts.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: So the Lawsons were a socially well-connected couple in the African-American community in Washington. They were attorneys by trade. Mr. Lawson, I believe, had actually argued cases before the US Supreme Court. So they were formidable individuals.
She was also a columnist for a African-American newspaper in Pittsburgh, The Pittsburgh Courier. And so they were well-connected. And what they sought to do was to improve Kennedy's standing within the African-American community.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Knowing that JFK's 1958 senate campaign would be a launching pad for his 1960 presidential run, Marjorie Lawson had two demands for the campaign. One, that it would be a desegregated operation with Black and white staff working together, and two, that the campaign events his mother and sisters organized around the state would also be desegregated.
In August 1960, the Kennedy campaign officially formed its civil rights division with Lawson as a director. Because of groundwork laid two years earlier, she felt she could use that to show Black voters that Kennedy cared about them and their vote. We discussed in Episode 1 how Lawson was key in securing Black votes for JFK in West Virginia. Louis Martin, who consulted on JFK's White House run and would be called the Godfather of Black politics, described the other roles Lawson had in the campaign.
LOUIS MARTIN: She was one of the best known Negroes who, for two years prior to the convention, had been publicly assisting the campaign and the candidate. She apparently had done a very effective job of introducing him to different groups and arranging meetings with Negro leaders of the civic and fraternal and religious organizations.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Lawson's work was critical to getting Black voters across the nation on Kennedy's side. However, it wasn't always easy for her to convince members of JFK's inner circle to get on board.She recounted in her oral history interview that she often had to fight against others in the campaign who didn't see the Black vote or her abilities in securing it as valuable priorities.
At the Democratic convention in July, she initially wasn't given a pass to the floor or a hotel room with the rest of the Kennedy campaign, where she knew delegates would be looking for her. Sargent Shriver was JFK's brother-in-law and one of the more progressive members of his family. He was a liaison between Kennedy and the Civil Rights Division for the campaign.
According to Lawson, however, he wanted to change its structure. He suggested demoting Lawson to a role of secretary, giving her less power and influence with the candidate. Lawson said she suspected that he and others would have preferred to have the proposed civil rights committee act more as a facade rather than allow her to use her contacts to make the inroads she wanted to make. Louis Martin also recounts a run in with JFK's brother and campaign manager, Robert Kennedy, about funding civil rights operations.
LOUIS MARTIN: Well, I explained the needs of our group, and that we didn't have enough money, and I was wondering whether we even wanted the Negro vote. And I said if you want it, you can get it. But you're going to have to work for it. You're going to have to fight for it. And you're going to have to spend money and so forth and so on. And I was not trying to impress him or anything other than facts that anyone would have from having had the experiences of the past that they're trying to do something in a national way.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: While people like Marjorie Lawson and Louis Martin had been making connections in the Black community for Senator Kennedy, they also understood that he had to walk a very tight line not to alienate Southern white voters who were opposed to civil rights reforms. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon both knew they could lose votes in certain areas of the country if they publicized their support of their party's civil rights planks.
TIM NAFTALI: Both Vice President Nixon and Senator Kennedy as politicians felt they had to navigate this issue so that they could still win Southern states even though South had an apartheid regime. And the only way to win Southern states was to manage to appeal to white voters, many of whom supported-- in fact, it appears most of whom supported the racist apartheid regime at the time.That was the awful dilemma that both candidates faced.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: It's a tricky path for Kennedy to walk in 1960. And we could say that, you know, it doesn't speak well of him that he wants to walk this path. That's a fair argument. But again, in terms of his thinking as a candidate and a desire to maximize his vote, which is what candidates do, we have to say that he tries to walk a very fine line.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Because a Democrat cannot win without the South in 1960, Kennedy needed to court white voters in the South.
TIM NAFTALI: John F. Kennedy's Southern campaign was organized by his friend and civil rights opponent, George Smathers of Florida. Smathers put together a campaign that would remind voters that John F. Kennedy was the Northern politician that Southerners could trust. And that was simply because John F. Kennedy had not stuck out his neck for civil rights as a politician.
And Smathers deployed Johnson to campaign in the South. Kennedy campaigned a little in the South. But his message in the South was carried by Lyndon Johnson. And so this was a way of squaring the circle.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: As election day grew closer, Kennedy would show Black voters signs that he could be a positive force for civil rights if elected president. That's up next.
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MATT PORTER: Are you listening to our podcast, wondering if there's more to the story? Of course there is. If you want to learn more about what you've heard today, we have links to resources from the JFKLibrary's archives, including photos, films, and primary source documents. We also have oral history interviews from some of the key members of Kennedy's campaign. VisitJFKLibrary.org/SixtyTwenty to get started.
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JAMIE RICHARDSON: Howard University is an historically Black university in Washington, DC, founded after the Civil War. In early October of 1960, with less than a month to go until election day, Kennedy and Nixon both found themselves invited to speak at the school. Kennedy accepted. And Nixon did not. Louis Martin described how Kennedy, who was accompanied by his wife Jacqueline, benefited by having the stage to himself so he could explain his views on civil rights.
LOUIS MARTIN: He said as follows, quote, "I think we cannot afford in 1960 to waste any talent which we have. It is a matter of our national survival as well as a matter of national principle. Now I believe that the President of the United States must take the leadership in setting the moral tone, the unfinished business in setting the sights of Americans to the goal of realizing the talents in an equal way of every American."
The senator and his wife were mobbed following the meeting. And from a public relations point of view, he had scored quite a significant thing. Because every college trained Negro in America got the message. It was at a place that tradition had made important to them. And Nixon had failed to show.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Five days later, on October 12, Kennedy attended the National Conference on Constitutional Rights and American Freedom in New York City. While Nixon wasn't invited to this event,Louis Martin says it was a nonpartisan event and other Republicans were there. Other civil rights organizations and leading liberal and progressive figures, like Eleanor Roosevelt, Representative Adam Clayton Powell, and JFK's former rival in the primaries, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey were also in attendance.
The conference focused on what the next president could do in the area of civil rights and housing, education, and employment. JFK spoke of the need for moral leadership to ensure equality for allAmericans. After that convention, he and Mrs. Kennedy made a stop in Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell's district. Here he spoke at an outdoor rally about the need for the country to extend constitutional rights to all its citizens and practice at home what the US preached abroad in terms of equality.
LOUIS MARTIN: I think this speech was a turning point in the election, in a sense -- rather, the whole rally, the Constitutional Convention coupled with the outdoor speech. I think I referred earlier to the significance we attached to it with the constitutional meeting just about wrapped up the Negro leadership for us. And this rally was, of course, the icing on the cake.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: A key figure in the civil rights movement that Kennedy had yet to convince of his bona fides was Martin Luther King, Jr. According to Fredrik Logevall, Marjorie Lawson was in touch with King and had tried to set up a meeting between him and Kennedy.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: She tried already in 1959. She approached King in '59 and basically said to him, and I'm paraphrasing, look, this is a candidate, Senator Kennedy, that you should get to meet.And it's true that he does not have a particularly strong record on civil rights. It's true that he has not made a particular mark. He hasn't been as outspoken as Humphrey, as Kefauver, as various other candidates have been. But you should meet with him.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: The two would meet before the Democratic National Convention in June, though King left the meeting unimpressed with Kennedy. But Kennedy would have a chance to change King’s view of him fewer than two weeks before election day. At a sit in in Atlanta, Georgia, King and other student protesters were arrested. Everyone but King was released from jail. And Tim Naftali explains what his sudden transfer to a maximum security prison days later meant.
TIM NAFTALI: There was real concern when he was moved to that county jail that something bad would happen to him, that he was in physical danger.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Fredrik Logevall says that Sargent Shriver and Harris Wofford, who had worked on the US Commission for Civil Rights and now worked on the Kennedy campaign, were able to get this news to Kennedy.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: So it's a very dramatic story at a key point in the campaign in which King is imprisoned and Kennedy is convinced. I won't say he's feeling strongly about this in personal terms, in fact, Wofford and Shriver, I think, struggle to get his attention. But they basically prevail upon him to call Mrs. King, which he does.
The phone call probably lasts two minutes. It's not a long call, but it sets in motion an extraordinary set of developments that, I think, has an important bearing on the outcome.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: After John F. Kennedy's call to Coretta Scott King, Robert F. Kennedy called the judge who put King in. Jail This call, and one to the governor of Georgia, ultimately caused King to be released from prison.
TIM NAFTALI: So it's not simply the humanity of the call. It's the effectiveness of the intervention that matters. John Kennedy showed in that instance that he was willing to take risks to help a Black leader. By that intervention in Atlanta, John F. Kennedy was showing African-Americans for the first time that he's willing to take some risks to help them and to help their most important leader.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: While the Kennedy campaign took risks reaching out to the Black community, Richard Nixon avoided it.
TIM NAFTALI: He doesn't want to lose the vote of African-Americans. But he's not trying hard for that vote. He had a chance to revive the reputation of the Republican Party's commitment to civil rights when Martin Luther King was imprisoned. But he didn't show courage and opted not to do anything.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And now the Kennedy campaign wanted to get the word out to the Black community about their candidate's action and Nixon's silence.
TIM NAFTALI: The leadership thing is important. But he needed that message to get out to many, many African-Americans. Well, the Kennedy's had the money to print out a pamphlet which they called the Blue Bomb, to print 500,000 copies of this pamphlet, which included statements by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and others, supporting Kennedy, responding to Kennedy's call sympathetic call to Coretta Scott King, responding to Bobby Kennedy's role in getting the Rev. Dr. King out of jail.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Louis Martin was among those who worked on the Blue Bomb, which got its name from the blue paper it was printed on.
LOUIS MARTIN: There were millions and millions of pieces of literature on it, requiring the whole sequence, the call, what the president-- what the candidate said, what Mr. King said, and so forth. We did everything we knew to dramatize it. We talked to every influential person and organization. In fact, we sent out about 300 or 400 telegrams in addition to these phone calls, in addition to press release, in addition to leaflets.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: The pamphlet was titled The Case of Martin Luther King and carried the message of, quote, "No Comment Nixon versus a candidate with heart, Senator Kennedy." Unquote. Inside the pamphlet were quotes from Coretta Scott King, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Dr. Gardner Taylor, Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as his father Martin Luther King, Sr.
King Sr. was a prominent minister who had been a part of civil rights activism in Georgia for many years and had been a vocal supporter of Nixon. But now, in light of what JFK did, he said, "I've got all my votes and I've got a suitcase. And I'm going to take them up there and dump them in his lap."
Fredrick Logevall said publicizing JFK's intervention with Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn't without risk. And that's why Robert Kennedy remained cautious.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: I think that was Robert Kennedy's consuming fear and why he was initially so upset. You know? And I think it's to John F. Kennedy's credit that he overlooked that. Or he thought, well, if it hurts us to some extent, it can help us in other respects. And by the way, this is also the right thing to do. He proceeded. But yes, that concern about how this would be received in theSouth in particular I think was palpable, at least on the part of some aides.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: We'll never know exactly how much support from Black voters JFK gained or Nixon lost in these last few weeks of the election. Was it JFK's appearance at Howard University or Nixon’s absence that convinced voters? Was it the Constitutional Convention?
Or was it JFK's actions when Martin Luther King was imprisoned, both the phone calls his campaign made and the subsequent publicity? Louis Martin, in his oral history, confessed the Kennedy campaign wasn't entirely sure.
LOUIS MARTIN: Now it is true that the King phone call was that dramatic last minute touch that did help electrify the electorate, the Negro voters. But I think we would have gotten most of those votes had we not had the King call. But nobody-- it's one of those hypothetical things. Nobody will every know. And we never took any chances, anyway. We went for everything.
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JAMIE RICHARDSON: Voting data by race wasn't available until 1964, though the NAACP estimates that no more than 5 million Black people voted in 1960. It's generally believed that JFK won 68% of that vote and Nixon 32. In an election that rested on a margin of fewer than 120,000 votes, support from the Black community helped JFK into the White House.
The labor of Black campaign staff, journalists, and political operatives, as well as that of white allies within the campaign, pushed JFK to take a stronger stand on civil rights. And there would be gains made in voting rights and abolishing legal segregation in the years to come. But issues discussed in the 1960 campaign on equal housing, employment, and education, what JFK looked at as unfinished business, are questions that he himself had trouble with as president. And 60 years later, these are questions that still need answers.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: These are the questions, in these areas, that the North and the Southeast and West are entitled to know. What would be the leadership of the president in these areas, provide equality of opportunity for employment, equality of opportunity in the field of housing, which could be done in all federal supported housing by a stroke of the president's pen? What will be done to provide equality of education in all sections of the United States? Those are the questions to which the president must establish a moral tone and moral leadership. And I can assure you that if I’m elected president, we will do so.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Thank you for listening to this episode of Sixty/Twenty. Along with Matt Porter and myself, Sixty/Twenty is made possible with help from our co-producer Rick King. Thank you to our research assistants, Meghan McKee and Cassie Marando.
Special thanks to our Foundation colleagues, in particular, Meghan Hall and Executive Director Rachel Floor. Our music is composed by Blue Dot Sessions and artwork by Brian Kang. We also thank all of our guests for lending their voices and expertise to this podcast. And of course, none of this would be possible without the work by archivists and other staff at the JFK Library and Museum, who make much of the material discussed available to all online and to visiting researchers.