Kennedy Civil Rights Quotes

If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties-someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal", then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal.

You see, women have been essential to every great move of God. Yes, Moses led the Isaelites out of Egypt, but only after his mother risked her life to save him! Closer to our time, Clara Barton was instrumental in starting the Red Cross. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin put fire into people's heart to end slavery in the United States. Rosa Parks kicked the Civil Rights movement into gear with her quiet act of courage. Eunice Kennedy Shriver created the Special Olympics. Mother Teresa inspired the world by bringing love to countless thought unlovable. And millions of other women quietly change the world every day by bringing the love of God to those around them.

He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights... it had to be some silly little Communist.

States' rights, as our forefathers conceived it, was a protection of the right of the individual citizen. Those who preach most frequently about states' rights today are not seeking the protection of the individual citizen, but his exploitation. . . . The time is long past - if indeed it ever existed - when we should permit the noble concept of States' rights to be betrayed and corrupted into a slogan to hide the bald denial of American rights, of civil rights, and of human rights.

Hey! All you peoples draggin along here. Stop and come stick your ass on a Night of Joy stool," he started again. "Night of Joy got genuine color peoples workin below the minimal wage. Whoa! Guarantee plantation atmosphere, got cotton growin right on the stage right in front your eyeball, got a civil right worker gettin his ass beat up between show. Hey!

There is more than one way to be Kluxed, and we need to think about ourselves and the kind of people we elect into public office.

A lot of people get upset when you say ‘shit’ or something like that. But do you realize that almost our entire country sat still while they barbecued people in Los Angeles, firebombed a house, burned the people to death? …and you see, this is part of the pathology of people who are so sensitive to some kinds of stylistic offensiveness, and so callous to real cruelty and brutality.

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then ... we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal.

I recall Ghandi said ultimately all things devolve into the political, but I'd argue that all things devolve into pro-people and anti-people. And I can pose the question, which side are you on?

I asked her who he was and she said, “He was a man ahead of his time.” She actually liked Malcolm X. She put him in nearly the same category as her other civil rights heroes, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys—any Kennedy. When Malcolm X talked about “the white devil” Mommy simply felt those references didn’t apply to her.

The bed sheet brigade is bad enough, but the real threat to Americans and human rights today is the plain clothes Klux in the halls of government and certain black-robed Klux on court benches.

From time to time our national history has been marred by forgetfulness of the Jeffersonian principle that restraint is at the heart of liberty. In 1789 the Federalists adopted Alien and Sedition Acts in a shabby political effort to isolate the Republic from the world and to punish political criticism as seditious libel. In 1865 the Radical Republicans sought to snare private conscience in a web of oaths and affirmations of loyalty. Spokesmen for the South did service for the Nation in resisting the petty tyranny of distrustful vengeance. In the 1920's the Attorney General of the United States degraded his office by hunting political radicals as if they were Salem witches. The Nation's only gain from his efforts were the classic dissents of Holmes and Brandeis. In our own times, the old blunt instruments have again been put to work. The States have followed in the footsteps of the Federalists and have put Alien and Sedition Acts upon their statute books. An epidemic of loyalty oaths has spread across the Nation until no town or village seems to feel secure until its servants have purged themselves of all suspicion of non-conformity by swearing to their political cleanliness. Those who love the twilight speak as if public education must be training in conformity, and government support of science be public aid of caution. We have also seen a sharpening and refinement of abusive power. The legislative investigation, designed and often exercised for the achievement of high ends, has too frequently been used by the Nation and the States as a means for effecting the disgrace and degradation of private persons. Unscrupulous demagogues have used the power to investigate as tyrants of an earlier day used the bill of attainder. The architects of fear have converted a wholesome law against conspiracy into an instrument for making association a crime. Pretending to fear government they have asked government to outlaw private protest. They glorify "togetherness" when it is theirs, and call it conspiracy when it is that of others. In listing these abuses I do not mean to condemn our central effort to protect the Nation's security. The dangers that surround us have been very great, and many of our measures of vigilance have ample justification. Yet there are few among us who do not share a portion of the blame for not recognizing soon enough the dark tendency towards excess of caution.

This nation was founded by many men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened. John F. Kennedy, Radio and television report to the American people in civil rights, June 11, 1963 35th president of US 1961-1963 (1917 - 1963) ― John F. Kennedy

Separate but Not Equal The only places on earth not to provide free public education are communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak, Singapore, British Honduras—and Prince Edward County, Virginia. —US ATTORNEY GENERAL ROBERT F. KENNEDY, MARCH 19, 1963, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY

King had to overcome White House mistrust, disregard, and stonewalling before his message sank in. As he observed: “It’s a difficult thing to teach a president.

Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It’s all in Jimi’s absurd and delirious guitar riffs.

She threw him a bone about the movement: 'Lyndon Johnson's carrying on President Kennedy's civil rights bill. And if that good old boy is doing right, you know things is changing. Be a whole different thing when you come home, Elwood.

I am reminded of something President Kennedy said to me at the White House following the signing of the Birmingham agreement. “Our judgment of Bull Connor should not be too harsh,” he commented. “After all, in his way, he has done a good deal for civil-rights legislation this year.

Merger Evers/John F. Kennedy/Malcolm X/Martin Luther King/Robert Kennedy/Che Guevara/Patrice Lamumba/George Jackson/Cynthia Wesley/Addie Mae Collins/Denise McNair/Carole Robertson/Viola Liuzzo It was a decade marked by death. Violent and inevitable. Funerals became engraved on the brain, intensifying the ephemeral nature of life. For many in the South it was a decade reminiscent of earlier times, when oak trees sighed over their burdens in the wind; Spanish moss draggled blood to the ground; amen corners creaked with grief; and the thrill of being able, once again, to endure unendurable loss produced so profound an ecstasy in mourners that they strutted, without noticing their feet, along the thin backs of benches: their piercing shouts of anguish and joy never interrupted by an inglorious fall. They shared rituals for the dead to be remembered.

Ah, but let’s consider Communion for a moment,” he replied. “What’s odd is that these early followers of Jesus didn’t get together to celebrate his teachings or how wonderful he was. They came together regularly to have a celebration meal for one reason: to remember that Jesus had been publicly slaughtered in a grotesque and humiliating way. “Think about this in modern terms. If a group of people loved John F. Kennedy, they might meet regularly to remember his confrontation with Russia, his promotion of civil rights, and his charismatic personality. But they’re not going to celebrate the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered him!

You know,' Russell said, 'we could have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights, but not Lyndon Johnson.' There was a pause. A man was perhaps contemplating the end of a way of life he cherished. He was perhaps contemplating the fact that he had played a large role - perhaps the largest role - in raising to power the man who was going to end that way of life. But when, a moment later, Richard Russell spoke again, it was only to repeat the remark. 'We could have beaten Kennedy on civil rights, but we can't Lyndon.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. —Galatians 3:28 (ESV) On June 16, 1963, in the middle of an epic struggle for civil rights in America, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel sent a powerful telegram to President John F. Kennedy: We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate Negroes. . . . The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity. When we demean, humiliate, debase God’s beloved creation, the rabbi said, we forfeit our very right to worship God.

the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who saw Bobby Kennedy’s constellation of contradictions not as old versus new but as good versus bad. He called his schizophrenic senator the “Bobby twins,” explaining that “the Good Bobby is a courageous reformer. The Bad Bobby makes deals. The Good Bobby sent federal troops down south to enforce civil rights. The Bad Bobby appointed racist judges down South to enforce civil rights. The Good Bobby is a fervent civil libertarian. The Bad Bobby is a fervent wire tapper. The Good Bobby is ill at ease with liberals. The Bad Bobby is ill at ease with grownups.

In 1963 activists demanding racial justice forced President Kennedy to come out for civil rights legislation. Within a year and a half of Kennedy's assassination in November 1963—a shocking act that intensified the pressures for change—reformers in Congress managed to enact a spate of liberal legislation, including a "war on poverty," federal aid to education, Medicare for the aged, Medicaid for the poor, reform of immigration law, creation of the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, and two historic civil rights laws that would have seemed almost unimaginable a few years earlier.

Ellison, Gates, and the other members of this government/industry collaboration used the lockdown to accelerate construction of their 5G network54 of satellites, antennae, biometric facial recognition, and “track and trace” infrastructure that they, and their government and intelligence agency partners, can use to mine and monetize our data, further suppress dissent, to compel obedience to arbitrary dictates, and to manage the rage that comes as Americans finally wake up to the fact that this outlaw gang has stolen our democracy, our civil rights, our country, and our way of life—while we huddled in orchestrated fear from a flu-like virus.

The First Amendment was never going to lose this battle on Kennedy’s desk. But the way Kennedy decided to make it win solved nothing. Kennedy refused to decide whether Phillips had a constitutional right to bigotry under the free exercise clause. Instead, he ruled that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which punished Phillips under the CADA, was insufficiently respectful of Phillips’s religious objections. That’s right: Kennedy wouldn’t call Phillips illegally bigoted against gay couples; instead he called the Colorado board illegally bigoted against religious people. It was a punk move, done by a man who was sick of history having its eyes on him. Kennedy peaced out less than two months later and gave Brett Kavanaugh his job.

Generation after generation, this lack of institutional support paves the way for alternative, supernaturally-minded group to surge. This pattern of American unrest was also responsible for the rise of cultish movements throughout the 1960s and 70s, when the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the Kennedy assassination knocked US citizens unsteady. At the time, spiritual practice was spiking but the overt Traditional Protestantism was declining so new movements rose to quench that cultural thirst. These included everything from Christian offshoots like Jews for Jesus and Children of God; to eastern-derived fellowships like 3H0 and Shambala Buddhism, to pagan groups like the Covenant of the Goddess and the Church of Aphrodite, to sci-fiesque ones like Scientology and Heaven's Gate. Some scholars refer to this as the fourth great awakening.

In the year of your lord 1963, August 27, I was in a hotel room with John Lewis and three other members of SNCC and I was livid. I had provided several lines to John’s speech and they were being removed. I remember the lines. The first was, If the dogs of the South continue unchained, then we will bite back, we will move on those tender parts that bleed so readily, that bleed so profusely. Okay, I said, understanding that there was a lot of blood in the statement—rather, threat—and so I added the word nonviolently. This was not satisfactory. The next line was, The Kennedy administration does not even talk a good game, failing to support voters’ rights while paying mere lip service to civil rights, as if there is a difference. We say fuck the administration that still walks hand in hand with Jim Crow. Well, I could see that the word fuck was a bit strong and so I suggested screw and then 45 screw nonviolently. I was never much of a player in the politics of the day after that evening.

we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future.

It is a scene which combines the worst of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis; it is mechanized Negro slavery; it represents the progress which the Negro has made from picking cotton to tailoring it. (Were they in the picking stage of their evolution, they would at least be in the healthful outdoors singing and eating watermelons [as they are, I believe, supposed to do when in groups alfresco].) My intense and deeply felt convictions concerning social injustice were aroused. My valve threw in a hearty response. (In connection with the watermelons, I must say, lest some professional civil rights organization be offended, that I have never been an observer of American folk customs. I may be wrong. I would imagine that today people grasp for the cotton with one hand while the other hand presses a transistor radio to the sides of their heads so that it can spew bulletins about used cars and Sofstyle Hair Relaxer and Royal Crown Hair Dressing and Gallo wine about their eardrums, a filtered menthol cigarette dangling from their lips and threatening to set the entire cotton field ablaze. Although residing along the Mississippi River [This river is famed in atrocious song and verse; the most prevalent motif is one which attempts to make of the river an ersatz father figure. Actually, the Mississippi River is a

The assassination of President Kennedy killed not only a man but a complex of illusions. It demolished the myth that hate and violence can be confined in an airtight chamber to be employed against but a few. Suddenly the truth was revealed that hate is a contagion; that it grows and spreads as a disease; that no society is so healthy that it can automatically maintain its immunity. If a smallpox epidemic had been raging in the South, President Kennedy would have been urged to avoid the area. There was a plague afflicting the South, but its perils were not perceived. Negroes tragically know political assassination well. In the life of Negro civil-rights leaders, the whine of the bullet from ambush, the roar of the bomb have all too often broken the night's silence. They have replaced lynching as a political weapon. More than a decade ago, sudden death came to Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore, N.A.A.C.P. leaders in Florida. The Reverend George Lee of Belzoni, Mississippi, was shot to death on the steps of a rural courthouse. The bombings multiplied. Nineteen sixty-three was a year of assassinations. Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi; William Moore in Alabama; six Negro children in Birmingham—and who could doubt that these too were political assassinations? The unforgivable default of our society has been its failure to apprehend the assassins. It is a harsh judgment, but undeniably true, that the cause of the indifference was the identity of the victims. Nearly all were Negroes. And so the plague spread until it claimed the most eminent American, a warmly loved and respected president. The words of Jesus "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" were more than a figurative expression; they were a literal prophecy. We were all involved in the death of John Kennedy. We tolerated hate; we tolerated the sick stimulation of violence in all walks of life; and we tolerated the differential application of law, which said that a man’s life was sacred only if we agreed with his views. This may explain the cascading grief that flooded the country in late November. We mourned a man who had become the pride of the nation, but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick.

Quoting page 63: Business interests not surprisingly supported the [1965 immigration reform] bill as well, but were not a driving force behind it. Because the baby boom was pouring new workers into the economy, and the assault on racial discrimination promised to feed millions of underemployed blacks into the workforce as well, employers did not seem to be looking for workers overseas. Even the growers were quiet. Sponsors of the Bracero farm worker program that had imported hundreds of thousands of mostly Mexican contract workers since 1942—the program averaged 430,000 guestworkers a year from Mexico during its peak 1955-60 years—the growers had been attacked by organized labor, religious, and civil rights organization for exploiting foreign workers and depressing labor standards. The same liberal coalition that backed the civil rights and immigration reforms of 1964-65 had persuaded Congress to terminate the Bracero program in 1964. … The Wall Street Journal, commenting on the conservative nature of the immigration reform, noted on October 4, 1965, that the family preference priorities would ensure that “the new immigration system would not stray radically from the old one.” The historically restrictionist American Legion Magazine agreed, reassured by the promises of continuity. As Senator Edward Kennedy had pledged in the Senate hearings on immigration, first, “Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same,” and second, “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.

The founding conference of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was held in May 1963 while the world’s press was saturated with reports of the savage police response to the civil rights marches in Birmingham, Alabama. The assembled African leaders sent President John Kennedy an eloquent message: “The Negroes who, even while the [OAU] Conference was in session, have been subjected to the most inhuman treatment, who have been blasted with fire hoses cranked up to such

Jimmy and his activist friends were there to tell Bobby about the suffering that had scarred each black person in that room; that had scarred or killed people they loved; that had buried their communities in poverty; that had withheld their right to vote; that had lynched their grandfathers, raped their grandmothers, set the dogs on their children, called them “nigger” for daring to sit at a lunch counter; that had tried to deprive their children of education, their mothers of dignity in domestic labor, their fathers the dignity of being called “sir” and not “boy” at the age of 60. Bobby did not want the responsibility of bearing witness to their pain and their rage. Witness often exposes the unspoken claims of whiteness—its privilege to hide, its ability to deflect black suffering into comparatively sterile discussions of policy that take the heat off of “me” and put it on “that.

In the first half of the 60s, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson started moving the nation toward social justice, passing civil rights laws in opposition to the well-known racism of the Dixiecrats. That bunch got mighty irascible. The idea that they might have to abandon their racism, parochialism, anti-federalism, and ignorant religion to continue living in a nation of decent people just got their blood a’boilin’.

THE PROTESTS CHANGED national sentiment. Before Birmingham, only 4 percent of Americans polled believed civil rights was the country’s most urgent issue; after Birmingham, that figure jumped to 52 percent.

In the past, Jack was noticeably tense around his father. In Joe’s presence the son fidgeted, tapped his front teeth and stroked his jaw, signs of his anxiety that were familiar to friends and associates. Now the president was as tender with his father as he was with his children; if Caroline and John Jr. taught Jack to express affection in surprising new ways, his father’s debility stirred unexpected depths of consideration and empathy.

despite the inconvenience, the blacks stayed off of public transport; they took to their feet or to car pools. As one seventy-year-old woman famously sighed, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.

Schwartz’s chilling document goes on to predict that citizens terrified by germs and orchestrated propaganda willingly relinquish their civil and constitutional rights. The population, Schwartz predicts, will not start rebelling against the new tyranny and authoritarian clampdowns for more than ten years.

They practiced techniques for ruthlessly controlling dissent, expression, and movement, and degrading civil rights, autonomy, and sovereignty. The Gates simulation focused on deploying the usual psyops retinue of propaganda, surveillance, censorship, isolation, and political and social control to manage the pandemic.

Three years later, the civil rights lawyer vividly recalled that day: “In his straightforward way, Yablonski told me that he had decided to run for the presidency of the UMWA, that he would probably be killed before the fight was over, but that he had to do it.” Rauh knew Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy well, but he always said that Jock Yablonski’s decision to risk his life for the country’s coal miners was the greatest act of courage and moral fiber he ever saw.

My hope, dear reader, is that you will examine Loretta’s story, measure it against today’s issues, and come to your own conclusions. Whether you are a person of faith or not, violence and a general lack of understanding, undercut by fear, are as rife today as they were in the 1950s and ’60s, during the Civil Rights Movement and Women’s Rights Movement. With new draconian laws and policies targeting women, minorities, and those of us in the LGBTQ+ community being established almost daily, it takes all of us who are willing to listen and take action to make a difference. The biggest threat to liberty is our own hypocrisy and indifference. Thank you so much for reading.

I was talking to a group of college students recently. One...posed the "what's the point?" question. I was born into an America where most couldn't sit in a classroom with someone of a different race and women could not attend many of our universities. When I was five I saw my mom crying in front of the TV because our president had been assassinated. I read newspapers every day with stories about Civil Rights protests and the Vietnam War, where 60,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were killed. When I was 10, I saw the TV news bulletin about Martin Luther King's assassination and then, two months later, the murder of Bobby Kennedy. Kids not much older than me were gunned down by the National Guard and law and law envorcement at Kent State and Jackson State. We accepted the possibility of nuclear war as a fact of life. When I was 16, a president resighned to avoid impeachment because of his corruption. I felt just like you do - that the adults had really screwed the world up. But I saw how young people marching helped bring about better civil rights laws, and how young people protesting helped end the Vietnam War. So when I turned eighteen, I registered to vote as fast as I could to make things better, in my state and in the country. And...I've seen a lot of things get better in my state and my country. Now you see things that make you angry. Good! They'll get better if you throw yourself into solving them in your own way.

In the South during the civil rights era, Brown v. Board of Education prompted the racially motivated firings of tens of thousands of black teachers, as the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations looked the other way. Then, at the height of the Black Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s, it was inner-city white teachers who were vilified, for failing to embrace parental control of schools and Afrocentric pedagogical theories.

Meanwhile, angered by white violence in the South and inspired by the gigantic June 23 march in Detroit, grassroots people on the streets all over the country had begun talking about marching on Washington. “It scared the white power structure in Washington, D.C. to death,” as Malcolm put it in his “Message to the Grassroots” and in his Autobiography.6 So the White House called in the Big Six national Negro leaders and arranged for them to be given the money to control the march. The result was what Malcolm called the “Farce on Washington” on August 28, 1963. John Lewis, then chairman of SNCC and fresh from the battlefields of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama where hundreds of blacks and their white student allies were being beaten and murdered simply for trying to register blacks to vote, was forced to delete references to the revolution and power from his speech and, specifically, to take out the sentence, “We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.” Marchers were instructed to carry only official signs and to sing only one song, “We Shall Overcome.” As a result, many rank-and-file SNCC militants refused to participate.7 Meanwhile, conscious of the tensions that were developing around preparations for the march on Washington and in order to provide a national rallying point for the independent black movement, Conrad Lynn and William Worthy, veterans in the struggle and old friends of ours, issued a call on the day of the march for an all-black Freedom Now Party. Lynn, a militant civil rights and civil liberties lawyer, had participated in the first Freedom Ride from Richmond, Virginia, to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1947 and was one of Robert Williams’s attorneys.8 Worthy, a Baltimore Afro-American reporter and a 1936–37 Nieman Fellow, had distinguished himself by his courageous actions in defense of freedom of the press, including spending forty-one days in the Peoples Republic of China in 1957 in defiance of the U.S. travel ban (for which his passport was lifted) and traveling to Cuba without a passport following the Bay of Pigs invasion in order to help produce a documentary. The prospect of a black independent party terrified the Democratic Party. Following the call for the Freedom Now Party, Kennedy twice told the press that a political division between whites and blacks would be “fatal.

By August 1963, 78 percent of White Americans believed that racial discrimination had harmed the US reputation abroad. But not many inside (or outside) of the Kennedy administration were willing to admit that the growing groundswell of support in Washington for strong civil rights legislation had more to do with winning the Cold War in Africa and Asia than with helping African Americans. Southern

Kennedy’s influence was cut short by the assassination, but he weighed in with a memo to LBJ. The problem, Kennedy explained on January 16, was that “most federal programs are directed at only a single aspect of the problem. They are sometimes competitive and frequently aimed at only a temporary solution or provide for only a minimum level of subsistence. These programs are always planned for the poor—not with the poor.” Kennedy’s solution was a new cabinet-level committee to coordinate comprehensive, local programs that “[involve] the cooperation of the poor” Kennedy listed six cities where local “coordinating mechanisms” were strong enough that pilot programs might be operational by fall. “In my judgment,” he added prophetically, “the anti-poverty program could actually retard the solution of these problems, unless we use the basic approach outlined above.” If there was such a thing as a “classical” vision of community action, Kennedy’s memo was its epitaph. On February 1, while Kennedy was in East Asia, Johnson appointed Sargent Shriver to head the war on poverty. It was an important signal that the president would be running the program his way, not Bobby’s. It was also a canny personal slap at RFK—who, according to Ted Sorensen, had “seriously consider[ed] heading” the antipoverty effort. Viewed in this light, Johnson’s choice of Shriver was particularly shrewd. Not only was Shriver hardworking and dynamic—a great salesman—but he was a Kennedy in-law, married to Bobby’s sister Eunice. In Kennedy family photos Shriver stood barrel-chested and beaming, a member of the inner circle, every bit as vigorous, handsome, Catholic, and aristocratic as the rest. By placing Shriver at the helm of the war on poverty, Johnson demonstrated his fealty to the dead president. But LBJ and Bobby both understood that Shriver was very much his own man. After the assassination Shriver signaled his independence from the Kennedys by slipping the new president a note card delineating “What Bobby Thinks.” In 1964, Shriver’s status as a quasi-Kennedy made him Bobby’s rival for the vice presidency, but even before then their relationship was hardly fraternal. Within the Kennedy family Shriver was gently mocked. His liberalism on civil rights earned him the monikers “Boy Scout,” “house Communist,” and “too-liberal in-law.” Bobby’s unease was returned in kind. “Believe me,” RFK’s Senate aide Adam Walinsky observed, “Sarge was no close pal brother-in-law and he wasn’t giving Robert Kennedy any extra breaks.” If Shriver’s loyalty was divided, it was split between Johnson and himself, not Johnson and Kennedy.

is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights—the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation—the right to breathe air as nature provided it—the right of future generations to a healthy existence?10 Kennedy

Political issues were interlinked more closely than he had previously imagined. He had always thought that problems such as Berlin and Cuba were separate from each other and had little connection with such issues as civil rights and health care. But President Kennedy had been unable to deal with the Cuban missile crisis without thinking of the repercussions in Germany. And if he had failed to deal with Cuba, the imminent midterm elections would have crippled his domestic program, and made it impossible for him to pass a civil rights bill. Everything was connected.

Ted helped pass major social and civil rights legislation. His efforts include the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Child Care Act (both passed in 1990), and the Ryan White AIDS Care Act of 1990; he increased funding for the National Institutes of Health and many more educational, housing, medical, and support-services programs. The ADA specifically prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability, forcing the inclusion of millions of people with disabilities in education, housing, employment, sports, and more. Hatch said that even though he and Kennedy differed much on policy and philosophy, he “never doubted for a minute [Ted’s] commitment to help the elderly, the ill, and those Americans who have been on the outside looking in for far too long.

Some readers found my depiction of Lyndon Johnson the man as stunning. Johnson was a course, crude, loudmouthed bully with an insatiable appetite for cigarettes, alcohol, and women. Far from the civil rights-crusading statesman that the media likes to portray, Johnson was epically corrupt, greedy, vain, manipulative, ambitious, vindictive, and nasty. LBJ was a sadist who enjoyed the discomfort of the people who worked for him and reveled in being viciously abusive to his rabidly loyal staff. Richard

The man on the other end of the wire was a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union. He asked if Mr. Olds knew whether the civil rights of Oswald had been protected. Olds said he knew nothing about the case.

Building on the Pentagon’s anthrax simulation (1999) and the intelligence agency’s “Dark Winter” (2001), Atlantic Storm (2003, 2005), Global Mercury (2003), Schwartz’s “Lockstep” Scenario Document (2010), and MARS (2017), the Gates-funded SPARS scenario war-gamed a bioterrorist attack that precipitated a global coronavirus epidemic lasting from 2025 to 2028, culminating in coercive mass vaccination of the global population. And, as Gates had promised, the preparations were analogous to “preparing for war.”191 Under the code name “SPARS Pandemic,” Gates presided over a sinister summer school for globalists, spooks, and technocrats in Baltimore. The panelists role-played strategies for co-opting the world’s most influential political institutions, subverting democratic governance, and positioning themselves as unelected rulers of the emerging authoritarian regime. They practiced techniques for ruthlessly controlling dissent, expression, and movement, and degrading civil rights, autonomy, and sovereignty. The Gates simulation focused on deploying the usual psyops retinue of propaganda, surveillance, censorship, isolation, and political and social control to manage the pandemic. The official eighty-nine-page summary is a miracle of fortune-telling—an uncannily precise month-by-month prediction of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as it actually unfolded.192 Looked at another way, when it erupted five years later, the 2020 COVID-19 contagion faithfully followed the SPARS blueprint. Practically the only thing Gates and his planners got wrong was the year. Gates’s simulation instructs public health officials and other collaborators in the global vaccine cartel exactly what to expect and how to behave during the upcoming plague. Reading through the eighty-nine pages, it’s difficult not to interpret this stunningly prescient document as a planning, signaling, and training exercise for replacing democracy with a new regimen of militarized global medical tyranny. The scenario directs participants to deploy fear-driven propaganda narratives to induce mass psychosis and to direct the public toward unquestioning obedience to the emerging social and economic order. According to the scenario narrative, a so-called “SPARS” coronavirus ignites in the United States in January 2025 (the COVID-19 pandemic began in January 2020). As the WHO declares a global emergency, the federal government contracts a fictional firm that resembles Moderna. Consistent with Gates’s seeming preference for diabolical cognomens, the firm is dubbed “CynBio” (Sin-Bio) to develop an innovative vaccine using new “plug-and-play” technology. In the scenario, and now in real life, Federal health officials invoke the PREP Act to provide vaccine makers liability protection.

Quoting page 115: The Hispanic civil rights organizations were heavily financed by the Ford Foundation, whose president from the late 1960s through the 1970s was McGeorge Bundy, Harvard alumni veteran of the Kennedy White House and tower of the nation’s eastern liberal establishment. In 1968 Ford had created MALDEF, as a Latino version of the NAACP, with a $2.2 million founding grant. La Raza, given a similar birthing grant of $630,000 by Ford in 1968, received $1,953,700 two years later. Between 1970 and 1999, Ford gave MALDEF $27.9 million and La Raza $21.5 million. In 1981 Ford started funding LULAC, the oldest Hispanic association. Noted since its origins in Texas in 1929 for espousing patriotism, political moderation, self-help ethnic, support for English language mastery, and bourgeois civic boosterism, LULAC in the 1970s adopted the strident tone of Chicano nationalism common to La Raza and MALDEF. In 1983 the Ford Foundation, led by Ford’s first African-American president, Franklin A. Thomas, began funding the National Immigration Forum, an umbrella association modeled on the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, to coordinate lobbying against [immigration] restrictionist organizations such as FAIR. LULAC, although joining the racialized agenda of MALDEF and La Raza in the 1970s, retained its character as a membership-based organization rooted in the Hispanic (mainly Mexican-American) community. But the constituency represented by MALDEF and La Raza was essentially the Ford Foundation and the tightly networking community of Latino political careerists.

...there is no satisfaction, in my view, that dares to compete with the ability to make social change...the ultimate realization is social change, and anybody who isn't into that, and who is trying to be something, is falling short

A clear strategic objective for Gates and Fauci was the repetition of the message that a global pandemic was inevitable, that only mandatory vaccines could avert catastrophe, and that obliteration of civil rights will be required. Most astonishing was their capacity to mobilize the obliging global media to uncritically swallow and promote these propositions in complete contradiction of all previously accepted science and history.

Blacks were “not yet freed from the bonds of injustice,” Kennedy observed. They were “not yet freed from social and economic oppression.” Then he added an insight that Black abolitionists, civil rights activists, and organizers had advocated for centuries: “And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

The Times celebration of Brown as confirming constitutional color blindness was widely shared in America. In the debates over the Kennedy-Johnson civil rights bill in 1963 and 1964, the bipartisan congressional leadership appealed to the classical liberal model of color-blind justice, leaning over backwards to deny charges by southern opponents that the law could lead to quotas or other forms of preference for minorities. Indeed, the legislative history of the Civil Rights Act shows what John David Skrentny, author of The Ironies of Affirmative Action, called “an almost obsessive concern” for maintaining fidelity to a color-blind concept of equal individual rights. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the majority (Democratic) whip behind the bill, explained simply: “Race, religion and national origin are not to be used as the basis for hiring and firing.” Title VII required employers to treat citizens differing in race, sex, national origin, or religion equally, as abstract citizens differing only in merit. Section 703(j) of the Civil Rights Act states: “Nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any employer… to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which my exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex, or national origin employed by an employer.” The syntax was classic legalese, but the meaning was unambiguous. The Senate’s floor managers for Title VII, Joseph S. Clark (D-Pa.) and Clifford P. Case (R-N.J.), told their colleagues, “The concept of discrimination… is clear and simple and has no hidden meanings. …To discriminate means to make a distinction, to make a difference in treatment or favor, which is based on any five of the forbidden criteria: race, color, religion, sex, or nation origin.” They continued: There is no requirement in Title VII that an employer maintain a balance in his work force. On the contrary, any deliberate attempt to maintain a racial balance, whatever such a balance may be, would involve a violation of Title VII because maintaining such a balance would require an employer to hire or refuse to hire on the basis of race. It must be emphasized that discrimination is prohibited to any individual. Humphrey, trying to lay to rest what he called the “bugaboo” of racial quotas raised by filibustering southerners in his own party and by some conservative Republicans as well, reaffirmed the bill’s color-blind legislative intent: “That bugaboo has been brought up a dozen times; but it is nonexistent. In fact the very opposite is true. Title VII prohibits discrimination. In effect, it sways that race, religion, and national origin are not to be used as the basis for hiring and firing.” Humphrey even famously pledged on the Senate floor that if any wording could be found in Title VII “which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, … I will start eating the pages [of the bill] one after another.

Jensen, R. (2002). "No Irish Need Apply": A Myth of Victimization. Journal of Social History,36(2), 405-429. Retrieved August 26, 2021 The Irish American community harbors a deeply held belief that it was the victim of systematic job discrimination in America, and that the discrimination was done publicly in highly humiliating fashion through signs that announced “Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply.” This “NINA” slogan could have been a metaphor for their troubles—akin to tales that America was a “golden mountain” or had “streets paved with gold.” But the Irish insist that the signs really existed and prove the existence of widespread discrimination and prejudice. The fact that Irish vividly remember “NINA” signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists. No other ethnic groups complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one. This is especially strange since signs were primarily directed toward these others: the signs that said employment was available here and invited Yankees, French-Canadians, Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through a window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend? The NINA slogan seems to have originated in England, probably after the 1798 Irish rebellion. By the 1820s it was a cliché in upper and upper middle-class London that some fussy housewives refused to hire Irish and had even posted NINA signs in their windows. … Irish Americans have all heard about them—and remember elderly relatives insisting they existed. The myth had “legs”: people still believe it, even scholars. The late Tip O’Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw them when growing up.

Near our old apartment in Auburn, there is a trail of trees called the George Bengtson Historic Tree Trail, named after a white research forester and plant physiologist at the University of Auburn, Alabama. A great man, I’m sure. These trees are grafted from scions of heritage trees. Among the trees planted: Lewis & Clark Osage Orange. Trail of Tears Water Oak. General Jackson Black Walnut. General Robert E. Lee Sweetgum. Southern Baldcypress. Johnny Appleseed Apple Tree. Mark Twain Bur Oak. Lewis & Clark Cottonwood. Helen Keller Southern Magnolia. Amelia Earhart Sugar Maple. Chief Logan American Elm. Lincoln’s Tomb White Oak. John F. Kennedy Crabapple. John James Audubon Japanese Magnolia. No trees are named for Muskogee, the First People who died in the millions during epidemics, displacement, and land raids. Under the buildings and homes and replanted forests are remnants of Muskogee earthwork mounds, temples, and trenches, a complex network of pre-American cities. There is a single scion named for a northern Indian Iroquois, Chief Logan, another for the Trail of Tears, the only nod to the suffering of Indigenous people. There is no mention of Sacajawea, never mind that Lewis and Clark would’ve been lost in the American wilderness without her. George Washington Carver Green Ash is the only scion named after the Black inventor and scientist. No Black or Native women or femmes are named. No mention of a single civil rights leader, which Alabama birthed aplenty: Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, Angela Y. Davis. Imagine a Zora Neale Hurston Sweetgum or a Margaret Walker Poplar.

Civil rights demonstration in Washington, DC, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy speaking to crowd, June 14, 1963 (Warren

The Black Power movement's provocative militancy, while often derided and attacked by government officials, the mainstream media, and some civil rights organization, was celebrated by those who advocated assertive self-defense as the most effective means of securing respect and liberation.

John F. Kennedy encapsulated this philosophy when he said, “If by a ‘Liberal’ they mean…someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties—someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a ‘Liberal,’ then I’m proud to say I’m a ‘Liberal.

February 2: Marilyn writes to Isidore Miller. She wants to see him in Florida and hopes he is doing well. She writes about meeting Robert Kennedy: “He seems rather mature and brilliant for his thirty-six years, but what I liked best about him, besides his Civil Rights program, is he’s got such a wonderful sense of humor.

February 1: Marilyn attends a dinner party at Peter Lawford’s for Robert and Ethel Kennedy. Marilyn comes prepared to ask Kennedy questions about civil rights.

He walked over to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and said, “You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.” He looked up at the president who had weathered the burdens of the Civil War and said, “I sure hope I have better generals than he did.

The intermediate objectives for achieving U.S. defeat may be enumerated as follows: Make the Americans stupid – Disorient the people of the United States and other Western countries. Establish a set of myths useful from the standpoint of the long-range strategy. Examples of such myths: Josef Stalin is our “Uncle Joe,” a man we can trust; the Cold War was triggered by paranoid anti-Communists; Senator McCarthy blacklisted innocent people; President Kennedy was killed by Big Business and the CIA; the Vietnam War was fought on account of corporate greed; Russia and China are irreconcilable enemies who will not be able to combine their forces against the United States; the Soviet Union collapsed for economic reasons; Russia is America’s ally in the War on Terror. Infiltrate the U.S. financial system – Financial control through organized crime and drug trafficking. To this end the Eastern Bloc began infiltrating organized crime in the 1950s and, in 1960, began a narcotics offensive against the West which would generate billions of dollars in illicit money which banks could not resist laundering. In this way, a portal was opened into the heart of the capitalist financial structures in order to facilitate future economic and financial sabotage. Promote bankruptcy and economic breakdown – The promotion of a cradle-to-grave welfare state as a means to bankrupt the United States Treasury (i.e., the Cloward-Piven Strategy). Welfare simultaneously demoralizes the workforce as it bankrupts the government. Elect a stealth Communist president – As an organizer for the Communist Party explained during a meeting I attended more than thirty years ago, the stealth Communist president will one day exploit a future financial collapse to effect a transition from “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Exploit the counter-revolution – Some strategists believe that a counter-revolutionary or right wing reaction is unavoidable. It is therefore necessary, from the standpoint of sound strategy, to send infiltrators into the right wing. Having a finger in every pie and an agent network in every organization, the Communists are not afraid of encouraging counter-revolution, secession, or civil war in the wake of financial collapse. After all, the reactionaries and right wing elements must be drawn out so that they can be purged or, if necessary, turned into puppet allies. Already Putin is posturing as a Christian who opposes feminism and homosexuality. This has fooled many “conservatives” in the West, and is an intentional ploy which further serves to disorient the West. Take away the nuclear button – The strategists in Moscow do not forget that the neutralization of the U.S. nuclear deterrent is the most important of all intermediate objectives. This can be achieved in one of four ways: (1) cutting off nuclear forces funding by Congress; (2) administratively unplugging the weapons through executive orders issued by Obama, (3) it may be accomplished through a general financial collapse, or (4) a first strike.

The immigration laws that were in force until 1965 were a continuation of earlier laws written to maintain a white majority. However, after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment and accommodation, a racially restrictive immigration policy was an embarrassment. The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965—also known as the Hart-Celler Act—abolished national origins quotas and opened immigration to all parts of the world. Its backers, however, emphasized that they did not expect it to have much impact. “Under the proposed bill,” explained Senator Edward Kennedy, “the present level of immigration remains substantially the same. Secondly, the ethnic mix will not be upset. Contrary to charges in some quarters, it will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area.” The senator suggested that at most 62,000 people a year might immigrate. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law, he also downplayed its impact: “This bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives . . . .” The backers were wrong. In 1996, for example, there were a record 1,300,000 naturalizations 70 and perhaps 90 percent of the new citizens were non-white. Large parts of the country are being transformed by immigration. But the larger point is that “diversity” of the kind that immigration is now said to provide was never proposed as one of the law’s benefits. No one dreamed that in just 20 years ten percent of the entire population of El Salvador would have moved to the United States or that millions of mostly Hispanic and Asian immigrants would reduce whites to a racial minority in California in little more than 20 years. In 1965—before diversity had been decreed a strength—Americans would have been shocked by the prospect of demographic shifts of this kind. Whites were close to 90 percent of the American population, and immigration reform would have failed if its backers had accurately predicted its demographic consequences.

All I have I would have given, gladly, not to be standing here today.” The chamber became hushed. He had struck exactly the right note of sorrowful humility. It was a good start, George thought. Johnson continued in the same vein, speaking with slow dignity. If he felt the impulse to rush, he was controlling it firmly. He wore a dark-blue suit and tie, and a shirt with a tab-fastened collar, a style considered formal in the South. He looked occasionally from one side to the other, speaking to the whole of the chamber and at the same time seeming to command it. Echoing Martin Luther King, he talked of dreams: Kennedy’s dreams of conquering space, of education for all children, of the Peace Corps. “This is our challenge,” he said. “Not to hesitate, not to pause, not to turn about and linger over this evil moment, but to continue on our course so that we may fulfill the destiny that history has set for us.” He had to stop, then, because of the applause. Then he said: “Our most immediate tasks are here on this hill.” This was the crunch. Capitol Hill, where Congress sat, had been at war with the president for most of 1963. Congress had the power to delay legislation, and used it often, even when the president had campaigned and won public support for his plans. But since John Kennedy announced his civil rights bill they had gone on strike, like a factory full of militant workers, delaying everything, mulishly refusing to pass even routine bills, scorning public opinion and the democratic process. “First,” said Johnson, and George held his breath while he waited to hear what the new president would put first. “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” George leaped to his feet, clapping for joy. He was not the only one: the applause burst out again, and this time went on longer than previously. Johnson waited for it to die down, then said: “We have talked long enough in this country about civil rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time, now, to write the next chapter—and to write it in the books of law.” They applauded again. Euphoric, George looked at the few black faces in the chamber: five Negro congressmen, including Gus Hawkins of California, who actually looked white; Mr. and Mrs. Wright in the presidential box, clapping; a scatter of dark faces among the spectators in the gallery. Their expressions showed relief, hope, and gladness. Then his eye fell on the rows of seats behind the cabinet, where the senior senators sat, most of them Southerners, sullen and resentful. Not a single one was joining in the applause. •

eloquently honour President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.

From growing up in poverty to developing drugs that fight diabetes, seizures, and cancer, Dr. Frank L. Douglas has lived a life based on values, hard work, and self-control. Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream is a reflection on the events and people that made him into the man he is. In 1963, the year of the murder of Medgar Evers, Civil Rights marches, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, twenty-year-old Douglas arrived in the United States. A Fulbright scholar from British Guiana, Douglas studied engineering at Lehigh University, received his Ph.D. and M.D. from Cornell University, and did his Residency in Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins.

Economic and social deprivation, if accepted by its victims as their lot in life, breeds passivity, even docility. The miserable yield to their fate as divinely ordained or as their own fault. And, indeed, many Negroes in earlier generations felt that way. Today young Negroes aren't having any of this. They don't share the feeling that something must be wrong with them, that they are responsible for their own exclusion from this affluent society. The civil rights movement--in fact, the whole liberal trend beginning with John Kennedy's election--has told them otherwise. These young Negroes are right. The promises made to them were good and necessary and long, long overdue. The youth were right to believe in them. The only trouble is that the promises were not fulfilled.

It’s 1968, and Aiken Day’s life is in chaos. Living in Windsor, Ontario, he suffers bleak visions and nightmares—flashbacks to the killing, the slaughter of the Essex Scottish Regiment on the shale beaches of Dieppe. His wife, the elegant former professor Paris Day, has run off with a civil rights group whose members have traded peaceful protests for violent bank heists, and their son Adam, a young black man in a white, white world, seems ready to follow in her footsteps. While Aiken sets off to discover the truth behind an FBI story about his wife, Bobby Kennedy and his team criss-cross the US on his run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, campaigning to end racial discrimination and the Vietnam war. A sprawling, Pynchonesque novel that spans Canada and the US, Pushing Bobby’s Cadillac explores the hope and anguish spawned by the year 1968.

King called Kennedy’s speech “the most eloquent, passionate, and unequivocal plea for civil rights, for justice toward the Negro ever made by any president.” Hours after the president’s address, Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s Mississippi field secretary, was gunned down as he walked from his car to his house in Jackson.

My classmates stood and cheered when President Kennedy’s assassination was announced over the school’s intercom. I was in the eleventh grade in Helena, Arkansas in 1963. Even then, the cheers seemed rehearsed. How could teenagers express such rank emotion from something so vile and tragic? Was this something they had heard at home —“someone should shoot the son-of-a-bitch”? Just the year before, we had cheered the President for standing up to the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis. The crisis was the threatening prospect of Soviet nuclear missiles ninety miles from the US shoreline. Kennedy had backed down the Russian premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Who knows what really happened? Now, we welcomed his brain being splintered by a rifle bullet next to his wife. A lone gunman did it. The Kennedys were for “civil rights.” This is the reason we cheered. Anyone“for civil rights” should have his head blown off. No one expressly said it, but I knew it. There were only two things for which we cheered so raucously back then: either a victory by the Arkansas Razorbacks (or, in my case, the Ole Miss Rebels) in a football game, or the defeat — in this case the murder — of a suspected civil rights leader. No international intrigue like missiles in a communist Cuba would have done it. Civil Rights. That was the reason. Later, we would say the same when John Kennedy’s brother, Robert, was killed. The Kennedys were for civil rights. That’s what got them killed.

was inspired by the naturopath Alvenia M. Fulton to believe in diet as part of civil rights activism, “believing that bad diets bolstered the forces of white