Andrew Torget: We're going to talk about
the civil rights movement in
Texas after the Brown decision of
1954 up through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts
of 1964 and '65.
We're going to start talking about the desegregation of
Texas public schools in
the aftermath of the Brown decision,
and how that came to a crucible moments
at Mansfield High School in 1956.
We'll talk about how all of this helps push
further apart the two halves of the Democratic Party,
and the process opened
up a window of
opportunity for the Republican Party to return to Texas,
which it really will starting in
1960 with the election of a man named John Tower.
Texas also, because it becomes
a competitive two-party state
with the return of the Republican Party,
will become much more important to national politics,
and that will lead to the rise of
Lyndon Baines Johnson with John F. Kennedy to,
first the vice presidency and then with
the assassination of JFK to the presidency,
our first Texas president in 1963.
It really is because Lyndon Baines Johnson
became president at that particular moment that he is
able to help martial through
United States Congress the passage of some of
the most landmark legislation
that has ever been passed in the United States Congress,
the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.
I want to pick up with the Brown decision.
In 1954, the United States Supreme Court decided
that separate but equal has
no place in public education in the United States,
and they base this decision in part on
the Sweat versus Painter decision of 1950,
there is a Texas case,
so Texas had helped lay some of
the foundation for making that possible.
This was a landmark decision.
It was a unanimous decision
by the United States Supreme Court,
it rocked the world and
particularly of Southerners in places like Texas.
The question is, what does that really mean?
We have this beautiful picture here of High Court
banned segregation in public schools,
woman looking at her very young daughter
knowing that this has enormous implications for her.
But the question is, what does that mean in practice?
The court had not said in
the Brown decision of 1954 how to desegregate.
That meant they needed to issue a second
ruling the following year in 1955,
which is often called Brown II.
Brown II decision of 1955 what the court
said was that states
needed to integrate their schools with,
and this is the crucial phrase,
"with all deliberate speed".
Now the question is, what does
all deliberate speed mean in practice?
If you are a white Southerner,
you would have probably looked at the word
deliberate as the most important one and
said that means carefully and therefore slowly.
If you are African-American
and wish that your schools would be
integrated for the improved education
that would make possible,
you probably saw the word speed as in like,
let's get this thing done and move on with everything.
There's a distinction between these two sides.
But what ends up happening in part is that
Southern states will institute what's
called massive resistance and
basically try to do everything that they
can to prevent the Brown decision from
being implemented and schools being integrated.
Just to give you an example of that,
white Virginians decided that
they would rather just not educate
white children if it meant that they would also have
to educate black children alongside them,
and so certain counties in Virginia
just shut down their schools entirely.
Now, in Texas,
the Brown decision split Texans along racial lines,
which really should be no surprise.
For a lot of black Texans,
so you see this young girl on the left here,
there's a lot of African-American parents
who were excited in
one sense because the integration of schools could
promise their children
new and better educational opportunities.
But at the same time,
we have to remember that there
was a lot of African-American families,
parents in particular who were
terrified of what this would
mean in terms of backlash against their kids,
it's really scary thought to
send your daughter or your son to
a school where they're going to be not
just ostracized and treated
differently because they're black,
but maybe the subject of
violence and true anger amongst white parents.
I want to point out that it wasn't just,
hi, we won this is fantastic.
There's a lot of fear and uncertainty
facing African-Americans in
the aftermath of the decision
and the vulnerability that they're feeling.
The same time, white parents are getting terrified.
We know that almost all white Texans
opposed integration because there was a poll done
at this time where 80 percent
of all white Texans said they opposed integration.
For them, this was also a terrifying thing.
Now, obviously, racism is playing a very large role here.
But when people's kids are involved,
people tend to get very amplified in
their fears about all things.
There's a lot of white parents who
were scared about what this is going to mean.
What's it going to mean for
their kids and their education,
and what that's going to look like.
The emotional tenor of all of this goes up
a hundredfold when you involve
people's children in these decisions.
My point simply saying all this is that there's
a big emotional aspects
to this history that we need to remember,
and the tensions and the scale of
those tensions are incredibly high.
Politicians tried to capitalize on that,
including the governor at the time man
named Allan Shivers.
When the decision is made in 1954 by Supreme Court,
Allan Shivers uses this to
basically drum up more political support for himself,
and you can see his
quote right here where Shivers comes out,
and he tells the Texas voters.
By that I mean, he's speaking
mostly to white Texan voters.
"All my instincts,
my political philosophy, my experience,
and my common sense revolt against this
Supreme Court decision," what
Allan Shivers said talking about the Brown decision.
What he's basically saying is, I'll help make sure this
is not going to happen anytime soon,
and that helped Shivers win
an unprecedented third term as Governor of Texas.
Shivers is capitalizing on this,
but also the Texas State Legislature gets in on the Act.
In response to both the Brown decision
and the Brown II decision of 1955,
the Texas State Legislature decides to go ahead and pass
three laws to oppose all of this basically.
I like to call these the three ridiculous laws that
they passed in response to Brown because they
are all pretty ridiculous.
But it gives us a sense of the fear
that white Texans were feeling and
the state legislature is playing into.
The first of the three ridiculous laws was
a law that made interracial marriage illegal,
and this is ridiculous for lots of reasons.
One of which is that it was already
illegal to have interracial marriage in Texas.
That was already on the books and illegal.
This law just makes it super, duper, illegal somehow.
The point is it's playing on fears that this will lead to
interracial sex and interracial marriage,
and as the legislature is imagining,
that's just terrible and will be horrible and they
need to oppose it in all ways, is their thinking.
Then ridiculous law number 2,
they passed a law that exempted white students
from attending any integrated schools.
Basically, if your kid
is going to be sent to a school with African-Americans,
you can just not send your kid.
The state legislature is basically saying,
it's better to just not let Johnny read if he's
going to learn to read next
to an African-American person,
which is insanity, but that's what they passed.
Then the third ridiculous law,
and this one's actually going to matter
here in just a few minutes.
Let's pay attention to it.
The third law, they passed was a law
authorizing the state to
block the federal government
from integrating Texas schools.
Which is to say, the law
basically said that the state of Texas could
use maybe the Texas Rangers or
some police force to prevent
the integration of public schools.
Basically, what they're saying is that the state of
Texas can defy federal authority.
Can we do that actually?
The answer is no. No, we cannot.
The Civil War basically settled that one when
Texas tried to secede and be a part
of the Confederacy and lost that war.
All of these three measures get passed
, and Henry Gonzalez,
Mexican-American in the Texas Senate at the time,
he is the lone Mexican-American in the state legislature,
and he filibustered against
these measures and tried
to prevent them from being passed.
But in the end, he was
unable to prevent them or do anything about it.
What's happening in the state is
that after the Brown decision of '54,
the Brown II decision of '55,
this scene right here is likely to be happening.
You have African-American young lady on the left
and Anglo-American girl on the right,
and they might be in the same school together.
This is a terrifying prospect for a lot of white Texans.
This came to a head because in 1956,
Mansfield High School,
which Mansfield is not terribly
far from Fort Worth, if you don't know where that is,
Mansfield High School was ordered by
the federal courts to desegregate.
This is a picture on the screen right now of
Mansfield High School at the time.
This was the first school in Texas
ordered to desegregate by federal authorities.
It was the very first time
that all of this was going to be
tried out in any meaningful way.
Mansfield as a town was
like most Texas towns in that it had
segregation basically woven throughout
all aspects of town life and society.
These are pictures actually from Mansfield itself.
You can see here's a water fountain
with white and colored sides.
Restaurants that openly
said we are going to
serve African-Americans like this one right here.
What happened in 1956 is that there was
a couple of African-American families in
Mansfield and these are the kids right here.
Young adults, I really shouldn't call them kids,
but these young people were
being sent into Fort Worth
where there was an African-American school
that they attended and it was
a really long bus ride that they
had to take to go over there and Mansfield
had a perfectly good high school right down the street.
The federal government said that they
needed to integrate the school and that these kids,
these young people right here,
needed to be allowed to register for classes for 1956.
When that court order was sent out,
it got printed up in the Mansfield newspapers you can
imagine and the white people of Mansfield
began organizing themselves into what were
called white citizen councils to
oppose all of this and try to figure out what they could
possibly do to prevent
the integration of Mansfield high-school.
While they're doing this,
there's a couple of effigies that go up around Mansfield.
You can see this picture right here.
This is the front doors to
Mansfield high-school and you can see above that there,
there was an effigy of an
African-American that was hung over the school
as overt threat to African-Americans for
anyone who might be considering
registering and being a part of this school.
This is saying, violence will come to you.
Now, the principal should have pulled
this thing down obviously.
But the principal said, well,
I didn't put it up there,
so I'm not going to take it down.
It just stayed up there.
Again, it's not only that the effigy went up there,
but the authorities of
Mansfield high-school and of the town of
Mansfield just openly endorsed
this by letting them stay there.
There were other effigies that went up across the campus.
Another one went up on the flagpole.
You can see over here on the left.
Then there's another one that actually was
hung in town over
a bridge in the middle of Mansfield.
These things stayed up there.
But what really came to a head was on registration day.
If you're going to go to a new school today,
you need to go register at
that school and you can go do it in person.
A lot of times people can do it online.
But back in 1956,
the way you registered is that there would be
a day for registration and you
this new student or your parents would go
down to the school and there'll be a table
there with a form
you fill out when you write your name and
your address and saying I will be attending
this school and the upcoming school year.
Well, everybody knew when
registration day was going to happen,
which is on August of 1956.
Normally when registration day happened,
no one went to the school except
anyone who was new to Mansfield.
But in this particular case,
everybody showed up that day
for registration because everyone wanted to see
these young students going to show up
and dare to sign up for the new school year.
When the morning came,
people drove from all over and came in.
There's these cars that show up that have
all incredibly threatening, nasty.
I'm not going to read any of the messages that are on
these cars because they're too awful to read.
But they're very powerful because you can see
the overt threats here of violence,
of danger in all forms for any
African-American who dared to be a part
of registering for class and integrating the school.
A mob literally showed up
and surrounds Mansfield high-school.
This image you see right here
is of the people who've shown up and
they're all standing out there
waiting for any African-American to show up.
By the way, you can see in
the background here on the right,
the flagpole where you have an effigy of
an African-American hanging still over
the playground and then over the front
of the school you can't see it in this picture,
but that other effigy still stands there.
It's a massive mob and it got bigger
and angrier as the day went on.
Here's another picture in front of the school.
They're forming a human shield
of the school and if you were
to show up as
an African-American student to walk in here,
you'd have to go through all of this. What would happen?
Nothing good. It's incredibly
dangerous, incredibly threatening.
None of the African-American students showed
up this day because they
would have probably been lynched.
The only folks who did show up were
the lawyers for the NAACP.
This man in the middle right
here is a lawyer for the NAACP.
He's coming here to scope out
the situation and look at what's going on.
He gets assaulted by the crowd and he
actually has to get escorted out by
that police officer there
on the right because the crowd is
just riled up and looking for someone to attack.
The NAACP, seeing the situation tells
the black students don't
come register today, you're just going to get hurt.
They sent a telegram to Austin,
Texas to ask the governor of the state,
Allan Shivers, if he can do something
about this because he's the Executive of the state.
It is his job to enforce the law,
federal law, or state law.
The NAACP telegram shivers and they say,
so what are you going to do about this?
Allan Shivers thinks about it.
He decides he is going to invoke ridiculous law number
three, and use the state police to basically stop integration.
Allan Shivers sends the Texas Rangers to Mansfield,
Texas, but he sends them specifically to
prevent the integration of Mansfield high school.
This image right here is again
the front doors of Mansfield high school.
You can see the effigy there at the top.
They just left it up there.
There at the bottom are a couple of
Texas Rangers who are there to
prevent any African-Americans from
trying to register for the school.
He sends the rangers to stop the integration.
Here's another image of
a Texas Ranger out in front of the school with
a whole fawning gallery
of young students from Mansfield High School,
none of whom are African-American.
The rangers stay there and don't
do anything useful whatsoever.
The result is Mansfield high-school
does not integrate in 1956.
They won't integrate in 1956.
They won't integrate in 1957,
58, 59,
60, 61,
62, 63, 64.
They won't integrate until 1965
when they were going to lose federal funding
if they didn't do something about it.
Now, this is very meaningful for a lot of reasons.
One, for anyone who lived in Mansfield,
segregation stood because the white people
stood up and tried to prevent it.
Then the government of the
state-backed them up with the Texas Rangers.
But it matters too because
someone should have done something about all of this.
Who should have done something?
Well, first, it should have been
Allan Shivers here on the left,
but in a bigger sense,
on the right, it should have been
the president of the United States,
Dwight D. Eisenhower, who should have
seen that when the state of
Texas defied federal authority,
that the federal authority should have come in and say,
you can't do that.
Eisenhower knew what was going on in Texas.
How do we know this? Because Shivers was
sending him letters and keeping
them up to date with everything.
Eisenhower knew what was going on,
and Eisenhower chose to do nothing about it.
That's powerful.
Because what had happened in
Texas is that the governor of the state had
defied federal authority and
had not been challenged by the president,
which set a powerful precedent for
all other southern states in the United States,
Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana.
All these other Southern governors saw this and
realized that sounds like you got a blank check.
If you don't want integration,
just stand up against it,
and what's going to make you more popular
with white southern voters than
standing up against integration?
Nothing. It's a win-win situation.
This matters because it helps lead
to what happens the next year in 1957.
This is something more
people are familiar with,
the central high integration in Little Rock, Arkansas.
It's a much more famous case,
and it gets taught in public schools.
It's in the textbooks we always read and talk about.
It's got these really powerful images of this young lady
who was separated from the main group
as they tried to integrate that day,
and the woman behind her was tormenting her and screaming
at her and saying all kinds of terrible things.
The reason we get Central High in Little Rock,
Arkansas in 1957, is because of Mansfield in 1956,
that Texas had set a precedent
saying you can defy federal authority,
and Arkansas tried to and were unsuccessful in doing so,
but that helps lead to that particular case.
But all of this also ends up leading to the NWACP getting
banned from Texas because conservatives in
Texas didn't like the NWACP,
didn't like the brown and decisions that
had been made and everything had preceded that in Texas,
and so they managed to get a state court
to ban the NWACP from Texas in 1957,
and they did it by arguing that
the NWACP made a profit one year,
which violated its status as a non-profit,
and they banned it from operating in
the state which was just a forest.
The whole point was simply to throw out the NWACP.
But I want to point this out.
Integration did come to Texas
because a guy named
Governor Price Daniel got elected in 1956.
Leadership matters,
and the fact that Allan Shivers was no longer governor
mattered because Governor Price Daniel just
decided to let integration happen in Texas,
and he made no effort to resist
federal efforts at integration,
and so Texas schools,
not immediately as we just saw with Mansfield until 1956,
but public schools in Texas started
integrating across the state.
But things are moving fast and furious at this point,
and they're moving, again,
at the federal level with,
again, Texas's leadership.
One of the best examples of this that
happens the year after Mansfield
in 1957 is the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
Pretty much no one's heard of this,
but there's just some really important Civil Rights Act
because it was aimed at providing equal voting rights.
But it was the first civil rights bill
passed by Congress since reconstruction,
and who helped get it through the United States Congress?
None other than Lyndon Baines Johnson.
In the United States Senate.
By this point one of the main leaders of the Senate.
He's been called the master of the Senate because
he could wheel and deal
like pretty much nobody else's business.
Now, why did Johnson try
to get a civil rights bill passed in 1957?
First off, it was pretty watered down as
a bill and it didn't really accomplish a whole lot.
It was more symbolic than anything else.
But Johnson was pushing civil rights and he will
continue to push civil rights for a very basic reason.
He thought it was the right thing to do,
and I know that sounds really weird thinking that
a politician might actually do
something because they thought it
was the right thing to do.
But Johnson really did believe in civil rights in part
because he felt that
the real problem in American society was poverty,
which affected Americans of all backgrounds,
ethnicities, and colors.
That all this fighting
over race and such was just distracting from the bigger,
deeper, real problems within American society.
If we could solve some of these segregation issues,
Johnson hoped he had more room to
work on poverty and things like
that he felt really, really mattered.
He's helping push this through the Congress,
and I want to point out it is a Texan
who is helping push through
this civil rights bill and
get that thing done at a federal level.
But who is Johnson opposing,
who is fighting against him?
It's not the other party,
it's not the Republicans per se.
It is members of
Johnson's own Democratic Party who are opposing him,
and this gets back to that split
that had emerged in the Democratic Party of
the United States between
the conservative side and
this new progressive side of the party.
So if Johnson's the new progressive side
that wants to push toward civil rights,
the conservative side is embodied in part by people
like the gentleman on the screen
right now, Strom Thurmond,
who was the senator from South Carolina,
and Strom Thurmond, he's
really that conservative side of the Democratic Party.
He doesn't like civil rights at all,
and he doesn't like
the government being involved in such things,
especially in southern states trying to enforce things
like the Brown decision and such and so forth.
As Johnson is pushing this bill through the Congress,
he's being opposed by his own party or members
of his own party with Strom Thurmond.
Which is like Coke Stevenson,
the conservative side of the Texas Democratic Party.
Again, this is a split that's in Texas,
but it's also in the broader nation,
and Strom Thurmond tried to
kill the 1870s civil rights bill.
Here's a picture of him yammering.
He tried to do it with a filibuster,
and he actually set the record for
the longest filibuster in Senate history by one man,
and he talked for 24 hours and 18 minutes
straight in what became
basically a symbolic failed attempt to defeat the bill.
But he got up there and he just
talked and talked and talked.
Imagine what it would take to talk for
24 hours and 18 minutes straight.
He read from the Declaration of Independence,
he read the Bill of Rights,
he read George Washington's farewell address,
and then after we ran out of patriotic things,
he just read random stuff like the phone book.
At one point he even began to
recite his grandmother's biscuit recipe.
But that wasn't enough and he failed and
Johnson won and the bill passed.
This is important because
when things like the civil rights bill get
past it alienated conservative members
of the Democratic Party in Texas,
and that deepens the split between the two sides,
between the progressive side
and this older conservative side,
and that means that there's a lot of
conservative Democrats in Texas who
are fed up with
the Democratic Party and its push for civil rights.
They're fed up with people
like Johnson and they don't like this,
and so there's a lot of
white conservative voters in Texas
who are beginning to look for a new home for themselves.
Candidates to vote for
because what they're looking for is
someone who will vote in
the ways that they want to be supportive,
and that opens the door to
the Republican Party to come back to
Texas where you have
all these conservative Democrats in Texas
who are looking for somebody
to represent them in some way.
This comes to fruition
for the Republican Party.
In 1960 when John Tower,
whose picture is on the screen right now,
was elected United States senator from Texas,
and the reason he was elected was because in 1960,
and we'll talk about this a little more in a second.
Lyndon Baines Johnson gave up his Senate seat
because he had just been elected
Vice President of the United States.
Since Johnson had given up his Senate seat,
there was a special election
held to fill that open seat,
and John Tower here runs for that seat.
What's remarkable is that he won that seat
as a Republican and he wanted over another conservative,
the Democrat, William Blakely.
Now, you got to understand,
Texas had not voted for a Republican
in a statewide election since reconstruction.
John Tower, by winning this election,
he's away as a conservative,
but as a Republican conservative,
and this would have been inconceivable
before the 1940s or '50s.
It just wouldn't have been possible before because
the Republicans were just dead in the water in Texas.
But when John Tower comes in and says,
you want a real conservatives,
not Lyndon Baines, Johnson.
None of these guys who are voting
for civil rights and stuff like that.
Vote for me. John Tower,
the fact that he was a Republican was
almost a sideline issue.
The fact was that he was a conservative and
the label was just an add-on the side.
John Tower is elected senator in 1960,
and that is
one of the seminal moments in Texas and really US history
because it means that Texas is now a two party state,
which means there are
two political parties in the state of Texas now.
You have the Democrats and you have the Republicans,
and here's the kicker and all this.
The Republicans can actually win.
How do we know this? Because John Tower had
just been elected in statewide office.
That means the Republicans are competitive,
and that means Texas is
now up for grabs in national elections.
You're going to have a lighter note,
presidential election.
The Democrats could win or the Republicans could win,
and Texas now is going to matter in
national elections because we
have a lot of electoral votes.
Today, in modern day
Texas has the second most number of electoral votes.
Back in 1960, we had the third most.
We were behind California and New York.
But having the third most in
the entire country means it's a big prize,
and if either party wins Texas,
they'll have a very good shot at
winning the United States Presidency.
Texas, as a result of all of this,
is now pulled to the front lines of
national politics and national elections
in a way we hadn't been before.
We'd just been taken for granted,
essentially by the Democratic Party and also
by the Republicans saying we
can't win there so why even bother?
Now suddenly we're an open ticket
and that's going to matter.
It's going to matter particularly in 1960
when John F. Kennedy
is going to be running for the White House.
Here's a great picture of Kennedy on the campaign trail.
It's a long amazing story about Kennedy,
and I wish I had time to go into it.
But for our purposes here,
Kennedy is a easy young senator,
and he had been in
the Senate terribly long when he runs for president
in 1960. Who he's running against
in 1960 is he's running against a lot of people.
But one of his main opponents is none
other than Lyndon Baines Johnson,
who Johnson has been in the Senate since 1948.
He's been there a bit longer than Kennedy,
and Johnson was aiming for the presidency,
desperately wanted to be president.
These two guys go at each
other for the nomination in 1960s.
Here's a great image from
the convention of Johnson's supporters.
I love the guys with the trombones
there on the bottom front,
and you can see that's story just always cracks me up.
They both go head to head.
As a cut to the chase.
Kennedy wins and gets the nomination.
There's some backroom wheeling and dealing that goes on,
but Kennedy wins,
and when Kennedy gets the nomination,
he has a really tough choice ahead and he needs to figure
out who is going to be his vice presidential candidate.
Who's going to be also on his ticket,
and like most politicians,
he's trying to figure out
who will make a good vice president,
but his main concern is I got to get elected.
When he looks around the room,
he finally decides to make
Johnson his vice presidential nominee.
Here's one of those iconic
Kennedy and Johnson campaign posters
where you see both there. Their mugs on there.
What I was planning to my students is
these two guys did not like each other.
Kennedy is not picking
Johnson because he thinks he's a great candidate.
Kennedy did not think a whole lot of Johnson in 1960.
Why is he picking Johnson?
Why would he put this guy on the ticket?
Well, the reason is very clear.
Kennedy needed to win Texas.
He needed to win Texas.
It was no longer a guarantee for the Democratic Party.
If you don't win Texas,
the Republicans have a really good
shot at winning everything.
Johnson is from Texas,
that would make a really big difference, hopefully.
Kennedy puts Johnson on the ticket,
and that does make a difference.
People look at 1960 election
for all kinds of historical reasons.
It was Kennedy for the Democrats and it
was Richard Nixon for the Republicans.
We see this is an image from one of their debates.
This is the first televised debates.
I love this one right here. This images of them,
Kennedy is in New York and Nixon is in Los Angeles here.
They got the split-screen kind of thing going on here.
People often talk about this election
because of these televise debates,
that they made a really big difference,
which I think has been a little more
disputed in recent years.
But I like to point out this election
because Texas becomes,
I would argue these swing in this election.
You see on this map here,
this is the 1960 election by county,
and you can see Texas,
there's a lot of blue,
which historically been true of most Southern states.
Like if you look at Georgia over there,
it's pure blue in part because voters segregation laws.
But Texas has a lot of red too,
the Republican Party had made very big inroads in Texas,
and it comes down to
50,000 votes is Kennedy's margin of victory in Texas.
Kennedy wins Texas by only 50,000
votes out of two and a quarter million votes cast,
which is to say he wins
Texas by the slimmest of margins,
and if you didn't have
Lyndon Baines Johnson as the vice presidential nominee,
he probably wouldn't have won Texas.
If you don't have the votes that are coming
out of South Texas of
the Viva Kennedy Clubs
and all the efforts that Johnson had
made to campaign and secure support,
you're not going to get Kennedy elected.
My point is, without Texas and
without Johnson on the ticket,
you don't have a president Kennedy,
because Kennedy barely wins
this election by the various skin of his teeth.
But the fact that he does has
enormous consequences
for the history of the United States.
Here's Kennedy in the Oval Office looking a
little tired
from all the difficulties of being president.
I just want to say, I think
being president would be really hard.
I don't know quite what the appeal would be
of putting yourself through the agony that,
that would take besides obviously
doing good for people in United States.
As a historian I will say it looks
like a very difficult job,
and Kennedy did have a very difficult road ahead of
himself as he became president in 1961.
He's facing a couple of
different challenges that are
intertwined with each other.
The first one is the Cold War
that comes out of World War II,
and the fear and the threat of the spread
of communism all over the world,
and so this is a great pamphlet
that I think gives a good sense of
the fear that communism
exists in places like Russia and by this point in China,
but that it expands aggressively and then it's
trying to pull its tentacles around all of the world.
This is scary on its own merits to a lot of Americans,
but the fact that the Russians have nuclear weapons
makes it scary on an image bigger, broader level.
Actually, Kennedy had
campaigned basically on that issue.
His argument during the 1960 election was that,
we the United States were falling behind the Soviets
in our military capacity
and the number of nuclear weapons that we had,
and our ability to face off with them,
Kennedy was wrong about all of that.
We were never actually behind the Soviets in terms of
military capacity or in terms of
nuclear weapons or any of that stuff,
but that was a giant fear that was out there,
and Kennedy is dealing with that on a broader scale.
This had real consequences because in 1962,
we came very close to nuclear war with the Russians
and the Cuban Missile Crisis that happened
in mid-October of 1962.
There's an enormous amount of stress and
pressure that's coming from all of that,
and these are very terrifying things.
I think most Americans in
the early 1960s are living under
the very real fear that
nuclear war could break out at any particular moment,
and Kennedy is the one on
the very front lines of all of that.
I can't imagine what that stress must have felt like.
At the same time, the civil rights movement had taken
a much more aggressive and confrontational turn.
After the Brown decisions 54 and 55,
the NWCP efforts get broader,
you have many more groups that become
leaders in the African-American civil rights movement.
There's a movement much more toward the
sit-ins and demonstrations that
become violent in various ways as people not
only claim their legal rights but try
to have those enforced in actual action.
One of the best examples of that is,
you can see this image right here, this bus.
In 1961, so
that's the year that Kennedy is inaugurated,
the Freedom Riders, as they were known,
was a group of black and white civil rights activists,
and they rode on these buses down through the South,
and their point was to
basically forcibly integrate bus stations
all along the way.
They left Washington DC in May of '61,
and on this map, I hope you can
see they leave Washington,
they go down to Richmond and FarmVille and Virginia,
then down into North Carolina,
Greensboro,
and when they make their way into South Carolina,
they start encountering some real resistance because what
happened was these buses pulled into these bus stations,
the Freedom Riders would get out and they had
black and white riders because they would get into
these bus stations and there'll be
a white waiting area and
then a colored waiting area as it was called,
and they would basically just switch sides.
The white Freedom Riders
would go sit in the colored area,
the black ones would sit in the white area,
and the point was to try to
forcibly integrate these places.
Well, they start running into
violence in South Carolina and Georgia,
but it is when they hit Alabama,
that everything basically falls
apart and enormous amounts of violence come on there.
The buses get firebombed,
the police come in and the police assault them,
and mobs storm these buses,
and beat these riders,
and there's an enormous amount of violence
that ensues in all different ways.
Not just with the Freedom Riders,
but the efforts to integrate and
demonstrate and March are often
met in the deep South with enormous amounts of violence.
That was a problem,
and human rights level, it's a very big problem,
but for the Kennedy administration,
it's a political problem
that they need to figure out a solution too.
Because if you're fighting the Cold War,
so much of the Cold War was about
us being the United States,
being a better bastion of freedom and liberty,
then obviously the Soviets or the
Chinese or any other communist state,
we had to hold ourselves up as a beacon of light
and hope for other nations and peoples around the world,
so they join our side and not the communist side.
Well, it's hard to do that,
when there are scenes on the daily news at night
of African-American Americans being
beaten by their own people,
this was embarrassing and the Soviets held this up as
a contradiction in American society
that we couldn't claim to be land of freedom,
and all that came with that if we were obviously
systematically segregating and discriminating
against the section of American society.
Kennedy had to deal with that,
and that is what led him in part
to put before the United States Congress
a Civil Rights Act and
a voting rights bill
that was put in front of the United States Congress.
I will say Kennedy
supported civil rights as a president,
but usually when it was forced on him,
he was an integrationist at heart,
but he knew that pushing civil rights
could lose him crucial support in the white South,
and he didn't want to sacrifice that,
so it was really the civil rights movement,
its movement and activists themselves who really forced
Kennedy's hand by putting themselves in danger
and then having white Southerners beat them so much,
and have that covered in the news that
Kennedy really had to move forward.
That's again how we get the civil and voting rights acts
for United States Congress. I want to emphasize.
It doesn't look clearly like that's going to pass,
but he gets in front of United States Congress.
Meanwhile, by the time you get to 1963,
Kennedy is looking forward
to the 1964 election and he's saying himself,
this is going to be a hard one to win.
Kennedy hadn't accomplished a ton during his first term,
certainly not anywhere near as much as
he would have liked to have settled,
and so Kennedy is looking forward in 1964 and saying,
I got to get re-elected,
and I need to
think carefully about how I'm going to do that.
Therefore, Texas figured very prominently into what
Kennedy's plan was for getting reelected in 1964,
because Kennedy had barely won Texas in 1960.
Again, by the skin of his teeth by 50,000 votes,
so if he's going to win in 1964,
he needs to keep Texas,
there's no losing that.
The problem for him is that Texas
is increasingly being split with
the Democratic Party and
the Republican Party in
the state is gaining increasing ground,
and so there's this real big controversial split
in politics and the state.
What Kennedy needs to do, Kennedy decides,
is that Kennedy needs to come to Texas
and try to heal these splits
in the Texas Democratic Party to help bring
the progressive and conservative sides
of the Democratic Party together,
which is what brings him to Texas in November of 1963.
Many ways all the history we've been
talking about up until this point,
that is splitting the Texas Democratic Party
and all the ramifications that it's having
is what brings President Kennedy to Texas in 1963.
He comes on a goodwill mission
to bring together these two sides of
the Texas Democratic Party because he's looking forward
to the presidential election in 1964.
Here's an image of him in Texas.
Before he got to Dallas,
he'd actually been to Houston and San Antonio and
they've been doing these little caravans
around the state as a part of
raising goodwill and all that.
They were accompanied by the Governor of the State,
John Connally, who is
the second person from the right on the podium here.
The person on the far right, of course,
is Lyndon Baines Johnson. He's here as well.
You have these Texas leaders
alongside Kennedy as a part of this goodwill mission.
On November 22nd, 1963,
Kennedy woke up in Fort Worth,
Texas and he gave a speech that morning.
That's where this picture is taken, right here.
He's in Fort Worth in the morning,
and later that day, later that morning,
he and Mrs. Kennedy,
you can see right here, they board
Air Force One and they fly to Dallas.
You and I would probably drive from Fort Worth to Dallas.
But when you're the president,
you get to fly in Air Force One. He flew over there.
He landed at Love Field,
which is the only airport at the time in Dallas,
and they did what they were
already done in several cities in Houston,
San Antonio, in Fort Worth.
This was just one more leg on a journey.
They're going to get this limo here.
Tom Connally's, the guy is standing up there,
I guess saluting. It looks like.
They're going to be driving to the Dallas Trademark.
It was the plan because Kennedy was
supposed to give a speech down there.
But all along the way you have
these fans of the President
and all these different people who are
super excited about seeing and they'd
advertise the routes they
were going to take in the newspapers.
Because again, this is about
building camaraderie and excitement
amongst Democrats in Texas to bring together the party,
and so you can see these enthusiastic crowds,
including you can see here at the front African-Americans
who are very excited
about the Kennedy administration which
put forward the civil and voting rights acts.
These pictures always really get me
because look at Kennedy there,
he's using the limo right there, at center.
Look how close all of these crowds of people are.
Obviously you'd never see that today because of what
happens on November 22nd, 1963.
But these are just astounding pictures.
Here's Kennedy making his way along
the route with open-air limousine right there,
everybody catching a glance of the president.
He came down Main Street.
He took a right-hand turn on Houston and then made
a sharp left onto
Elm Street following the red arrows
you can see here on the map,
and as he's going down,
this is one of the last pictures of Kennedy ever taken,
and John Connally is right
there in front of him, in the limousine.
As he's going along here, shots ring out.
I'm not going to get into a debate about
how many shots rang out or where they came from.
But Kennedy indisputably was shot multiple times.
Here's the Secret Service jumping on the back of
the limo as it's taking off as fast as it can.
The limo speeds away.
It's taken to Parkland Hospital,
which is still in operation today,
and Kennedy had been
shot in the head and through the throat,
and there was really no saving him.
He was essentially dead on arrival,
and a Catholic priest,
because Kennedy was Catholic,
administered the last rites and the president
was declared dead at about one in the afternoon.
Governor Connally, who was sitting in front of him,
had been shot multiple times by
those same bullets and was in very serious condition.
He was rushed into surgery and
will endure two surgeries that day,
although Connally would survive and recover.
The President had been killed.
About two o'clock in the afternoon,
they took his body in a casket from Parkland Hospital.
They put it in a hearse and drove it over to
Love Field where it boarded Air Force One.
You can see here, this is them carrying
Kennedy's casket onto Air Force One.
It's a really somber scene.
Quick aside, this is the reason today that Air Force One
is well equipped to
deal with situations as horrific as this.
In 1963, Air Force One did not have a surgery table,
didn't have room for a casket.
They had to take seats out in the back
to put Kennedy's casket in there.
Today, the Air Force One is
pretty much equipped for
absolutely everything including has
a room for surgery on board and
everything you can possibly imagine for such emergencies.
His body was flown back to Washington DC.
Before the plane left the tarmac though,
Johnson was sworn in as President of the United States.
This is that one most iconic pictures of this era,
Johnson taking the oath of office with Mrs. Kennedy,
which I can't even imagine what
that woman had been through that day.
She's standing right there
while Johnson is taking the oath of office.
The woman giving the oath.
You can see the back of her head
right there Sarah Hughes.
She was one of the first female federal judges,
and she was brought in to administer the oath of office.
Now, Johnson become
president the instant that Kennedy had died.
But this image was being taken,
and the oath was being taken in part to reassure
all Americans that someone is in
charge and the government
is still intact and moving forward from there.
Then when Johnson becomes president,
he is facing enormous challenges on all levels.
He's facing everything that Kennedy had to deal with.
The cold war raging in a massive way and the roiling of
the country over civil rights
and Johnson's facing all of this in the aftermath,
and then the shadow of the death of President Kennedy,
which was an enormous shock for virtually all Americans.
When Johnson came into office,
he is determined to push through
the civil and voting rights acts
that Kennedy had put in
front of the United States Congress.
We talked a little earlier about how Johnson
truly did believe in civil rights,
and so he believed that
these acts needed to get passed to prevent
things like the scenes on
American streets right here where dogs are being let
loose on American citizens for the fact that they're
African-American and asking for
their equality and their rights.
Right here you see, this is,
I think the Birmingham Fire Department
using fire hoses on black protesters,
and these fire hoses are no joke.
I mean, those things are enormously high pressure,
and that stream of water there could take the bark off of
a tree or rip bricks out of the wall of a building.
I mean, these things are incredibly
powerful that are being used again on
human beings in the most violent and horrific ways.
All this is being seen on
the nightly news across the United States,
being covered in the newspapers,
and Johnson, now that he's President,
wants to push through the civil and voting rights acts
that will hopefully bring an end such scenes.
Here he is with Martin Luther King Junior
conferring in the Oval Office.
Amazingly,
Johnson is probably the right man
at the right time to get these bills passed.
Kennedy, when you put them in front of the Congress,
you remember Kennedy is from Massachusetts.
He is not a Southerner.
He is basically telling
the Southern states you guys need to change.
The southern states, the white Southerners,
are not very interested in listening to
a new Englander tell them
what to think and how to behave.
Johnson's different.
Johnson is a southerner.
Johnson is a white southern Texan.
He can say to other white Southerners,
look, hi,
I'm from here, I'm a view,
but this needs to change and this needs to change now
, Johnson also was,
as before he becomes Vice President and then President,
an experienced politician in the United States Senate.
This man knew how to get stuff pass and he
was willing to make you highly,
deeply uncomfortable in order
to get your vote for something.
This is often called the
Johnson treatment and you
can see on the image right here,
he was a very tall,
very imposing figure and he would use his physicality to
get up literally into your face to try to intimidate you,
and he'd stay there until you agreed to
whatever it was he wanted you to do.
Here is a good example of that where he is up in
the craw here of a guy named Abe Fortas.
Abe Fortas was somebody
he nominated to the United States Supreme Court.
This is somebody he is on the same side with,
but you can see he is using all of
his physicality to try to intimidate and push.
The point simply being, Johnson had the political skills,
but he also had
the background and the identity that it took
to explain very clearly and pointedly
that this is a change that needed to happen
and these bills needed to get passed.
He helped, he wasn't the only person that
made the difference and I want to give that impression,
but he helped make a giant difference in getting
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed.
The Civil Rights Act of '64,
which I also want to emphasize was
passed in large measure because of Republican support
from the Midwest often descendants of
Quakers who believed in
the moral aspect of getting these laws passed.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964.
It was a landmark piece of legislation because it
outlawed racial segregation in schools,
in public places, and employment.
Basically, you could no longer have
separate but equal anything.
No separate drinking fountains,
no separate buses, no separate cars.
These were all citizens of the United States and they
had to be treated as citizens of the United States.
What the act really did was it threatened
to withhold federal funding from any state
that conducted such segregation and
discrimination and since none
of the states could afford to do that,
they basically just all had to comply.
One of the things that's most remarkable and will have
some very long-term consequences about
the '64 Civil Rights Act is that it included women.
At the last minute,
the category of sex was added to
the group of protected groups
that you could not discriminate against someone.
They added sex in there, it was actually done by
a congressman from I
think it was Virginia or West Virginia,
I don't know which one.
But he put it in there to
try to kill the bill because he thought
all of his fellow congressmen would
never vote for something that would give rights to women.
It backfired and the bill still
passed and then it protected sex.
Then that's going to matter
much enormously later with the women's rights movement,
particularly with something called Title Nine in 1972,
which will be an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of
1964 so just keep
that in the back of your head because
that is important later.
Then, the next year,
Johnson helps get passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
I would argue that this might actually
be even more consequential
because it gave political voice
to African-Americans and Mexican Americans and anybody,
and everybody who had been oppressed by all of
these shenanigans that Southern states
have been using to keep people from voting.
What the law did was
it abolished discriminatory practices
like literacy tests that kept people from voting and,
more important, I would argue,
it authorized the US federal authorities
in the United States to
basically examine registration of
voters in southern states
and voting laws in southern states.
Basically Texas couldn't pass
any laws that affected voting without
the federal government being able to
look at it and make sure that it was
not trying to do something to keep people from voting.
That opened up, the reason it matters is it opened
up huge number of people to
vote who had not been allowed to vote before.
We know this because southern African-Americans
lined up to vote in huge numbers.
The number of African-Americans voting in
Alabama increased by 278 percent.
In Mississippi, the number of black voters increased by
nearly 700 percent. What does that tell us?
That these people wanted to vote
but just couldn't before but
now that the laws have been changed so that they could,
they all line up in huge numbers
and that happens in Texas too.
Black voting in Texas,
as you can see on the screen right now, goes up from,
the number of African-Americans
registered to vote goes up from
277,000-400,000 in the immediate aftermath
of the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
That has enormous long-term shift and change.
It has immediate consequences
in the form of new people being
elected to state level offices and then national offices.
I think my favorite example of that
is the woman who is on the screen right now,
Barbara Jordan, who was elected to
the Texas legislature in 1966.
She was elected to the state senate that year,
along with two black colleagues to
the State House of Representatives and this was
made possible because of the 1965 Voting Rights Act,
that there is a lot more African-Americans who are now
voting and they voted for somebody who
looked like them and can represent them.
She represents a really big shift and a step forward for
African-Americans in terms of
political influence, power, and representation.
I want to point out that Mexican-Americans in
Texas had reached that point in 1956,
with Henry Gonzalez being
elected to the Texas State Senate.
It took African-Americans an entire decade
longer because they had to rely
on the civil and voting rights Act
of '64 and '65 but once those happened,
you have someone like Barbara Jordan.
Jordan would go on to a very
distinguished career in 1973,
she was elected to the United
States House of Representatives,
becoming the first black woman ever to
represent Texas in the United States Congress.
She heralded a really massive change
in Texas politics, again,
brought about by the Civil Rights Movement itself.
Johnson as president, you have a Texan as president
now who helps push that kind of change through.
I think a lot of that has to do
with his experiences in Texas,
his vantage points from Texas,
and many ways taking
the Texas experience up to the national level.
But Johnson will also have
major challenges ahead of him because he is
now in the broader Cold War
that Kennedy had been a part of.
It's going to embroil Johnson
in this war in a place called Vietnam that
ultimately will also have
its own long-term consequences for Texas
and the experience of this entire era.