57 years ago today, John F. Kennedy made one of his most important and enduring orations, an appeal to all Americans to accept civil rights as 'a moral issue ... as old as the scriptures and as clear as the Constitution.'
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"If an American, because his skin is dark … cannot enjoy [a] full and free life," the president said in his address that evening,"...then who among us would want 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?" Like his brother, Bobby Kennedy had seen no great urgency in the cause of racial equality. By his own admission, he"did not lie awake at night worrying about the problems" of African Americans. But in the spring of 1963 his perspective began to change.
The gathering, in the Kennedy family's spacious Central Park South apartment, began civilly enough before Jerome Smith, a young Freedom Rider who had been arrested and hospitalized for the beatings he sustained, lit into the attorney general about the plight of African Americans.
Rev. Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders meet with President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office, Aug. 28, 1963.
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