Races: The Long March

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With his legislative effort sputtering, and with the Negro revolution increasing in its impetus, President Kennedy last week decided, at long last, to appear on national television with a declaration of his own views about the moral issues involved. The decision to deliver the speech came suddenly, during the interval between Wallace's two stands in the doorway at Tuscaloosa. By broadcast time, all was quiet in Tuscaloosa. But that did not matter. As President Kennedy well knew, the civil rights issue would be around for a long while. And by now the President was beginning to feel the necessity to put before the nation a civil rights manifesto.

Fires of Discord. A hundred years after President Lincoln freed the slaves, said Kennedy, the Negroes of the U.S. are still not "fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice; they are not yet freed from social and economic oppression." As a result, "fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South."

New laws against discrimination "are needed at every level," the President said, "but law alone cannot make men see right. We are confronted primarily with a moral issue ... a moral crisis as a country and a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act in the Congress, in your state and local legislative body, and, above all, in all of our daily lives."

In its substance, the speech was possibly the most important that Kennedy has delivered as President of the U.S. Never before had a U.S. President appealed to the nation for an end to all discrimination against Negroes. And never had a President so forcefully pointed out that the Negroes' right to equality with whites rests not upon law alone, but also upon morality.

Despite the power of his appeal, Kennedy's speech did not and could not solve the civil rights crisis. A few hours after the speech, an assassin shot a Negro leader in the back in Jackson, Miss, (see following story). By the nature of the crisis, no single-front effort—whether by moral persuasion, court decision, legislative enactment, political action or street demonstration—can settle the U.S.'s civil rights dilemma.

The Shadowy Realm. For years after the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation decision, the Negroes' drive for equality remained essentially a struggle of law. It was directed mostly against governmental authorities maintaining official segregation in the South and the border states. Gradually, however, the Negroes have come to demand the abolition of subtle, nonlegal discrimination as well as official segregation.