
Much has been written about Kennedy’s transformation after
his brother’s death. Chris Matthews, Larry
Tye, and Evan Thomas are among those who talked about how the seemingly ruthless
consigliere for JFK became a passionate advocate for the underdog and a hero in
the African-American community.
Robert Kennedy’s transformation began before his brother’s
death and was evolutionary. But one of
the most important events was his meeting with African-American leaders in May
1963. I discuss it in my book, Dinner in Camelot, about the Nobel Prize
dinner at the White House thirteen months earlier.
Kennedy met Baldwin at the dinner. The brief encounter was enough for them to
come together in the wake of the Birmingham civil rights campaign during which
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was jailed.
They agreed to meet at Kennedy’s home, Hickory Hill, in McLean,
Virginia, to discuss race relations.
They did on May 23, but a late plane truncated the discussion. Kennedy asked Baldwin to assemble some African-American
leaders for a meeting in New York the next day.
More than a dozen people were assembled at the Kennedy apartment
across from Central Park. Among those
present were Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Lorraine Hansberry, and Dr. Kenneth
Clark, a prominent psychologist. The
meeting was brutal. Kennedy clearly did
not understand their concerns and was defensive when several people, especially
young activist Jerome Smith, challenged him.
Dr. Clark later called the session “the most intense, traumatic meeting
in which I’ve ever taken part…the most unrestrained interchange among adults,
head-to-head, no holds barred…the
most dramatic experience I have ever had.”
Both sides left angry.
And yet, after a few days the arguments made about discrimination and civil
rights had an impact on Kennedy. He
started to raise the issue of black equality in meetings. Eighteen days after the New York encounter,
President Kennedy delivered his noted Civil Rights Address, covering many of
the concerns discussed at the meeting and outlining the legislation that would
become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Robert Kennedy was the only Kennedy advisor to support this televised,
fourteen-minute speech.
I’m drawing a connection between the encounter at the
Nobel dinner to the Kennedy-Baldwin meeting to the Civil Rights Address to
Robert Kennedy’s maturation on the issue of civil rights. It is the subject of my next writing project,
but it also is one of the amazing outcomes of the April 29, 1962 dinner at the
White House; you can read about it in Dinner
in Camelot: The Night America’s Greatest, Scientists, Writers, and Scholars
Partied at the Kennedy White House.
Interestingly, we later learned that the My Lai Massacre
also took place on this day fifty years ago, March 16, 1968. Kennedy’s views on Vietnam evolved during the
1960s as well.
One final comment on the RFK presidential campaign: I was eighteen years old and a fervent
supporter. Robert Kennedy’s death in
June 1968, just as I was graduating from high school, was a traumatic
event—only eclipsed by that earlier assassination in 1963.
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