Our Impoverished Politics

[mgc1961]

The other day I went looking for a quote from a civil rights speech that John Kennedy had given during a critical moment of American history, as the National Guard was called out to escort two black students enrolling at the University of Alabama. I found the passage I wanted and then went ahead and read the entire speech. It was fairly stunning.

Consider some of the following excerpts:

I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.

If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?

We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as 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 time to act in the Congress, in your State and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives.

It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the fact that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.

Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.

The first thing that's striking about this rhetoric - and a fact which makes the second observation all the more notable - is that it comes from a president who was just barely decent on civil rights issues. Kennedy was young, handsome, eloquent, witty, martyred and canonized by his camp after his assassination, and Americans therefore remember him as a much more successful president than he actually was. More importantly, we give him more credit than is due for his moral courage on issues like civil rights, perhaps the single most important domestic question of the era. (In this respect, it must also be said that two other less-than altruistic motivations leap off the page as you read this speech: the national elite's concern, in the context of the Cold War, about how racism was hurting American efforts to win over hearts and minds in the Third World; and white America's palpable fear of black violence boiling over in response to unyielding racism.)


Finish the article at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/24-1

[NC_Nurse]

1. Excellent. K&R.