“With Black ministers leading the way, Kennedy won an estimated 68 percent of the Black vote on Election Day, 7 percent higher than Adlai Stevenson’s showing in 1956.”
What did then Senator Kennedy do to earn those votes?
After a sit in at a department store in Atlanta, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was sentenced to serve his sentence in a prison in rural Georgia,
Coretta King feared for her husband’s life.
Both the Kennedy and Nixon campaigns were asked to intervene on Dr. King’s behalf.
Senator Kenned did. Vice President Nixon did not.
That act was crucial to the Kennedy margin of victory in the Black community, as described in a review of a new book about the nine days between King’s sentence and Election Day.
Black support for Stevenson in 1956 was less than it was in 1952.
I know this because that’s how Robert Caro begins his account of Lyndon Johnson’s role in the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
If the Southern Democrats again filibustered to death a civil rights bill, the Black vote for the Republican nominee was expected to grow again.
But Majority Leader Johnson used his legislative skills to pass a bill, the first civil rights legislation enacted since Reconstruction.
It set the stage for Kennedy’s intervention on behalf of Dr. King.
In both instances, elected officials made decisions.
Their decisions had consequences.
