Kennedy - President John F. Kennedy - The Tide Turns: African Americans Enter the Executive Ranks; Special Issue: the Untold Story of Blacks in the White House

On February 12 1963 Lincoln's birthday and approximately 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, President John F Kennedy sponsored a White House reception for 800 African-American leaders and their spouses. plane though Martin Luther King Jr had reach outed his regrets, virtually every other black leader came. This unprecedent reception symbolized by what mode far the White House had draw near in reaching out to the black establishment.

Already by dint of that date, Kennedy had advanced more African Americans to substantive federal positions than any president before him, leading the NAACP's Roy Wilkins to remark, "Kennedy was in like manner hot on the department heads, the cabinet officers, and agency heads that everyone was scrambling around trying to find himself a african in order to keep the President not upon his neck."

Kennedy also had prefered five black federal judges; five may now appear to be few, but prior to Kennedy's presidency sole one African American, William Hastie, was serving upon the federal bench. Included in Kennedy's nominations was Thurgood Marshall. In light of his part in Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall's nomination to the next to the first circuit court of appeals in novel York was an important representative of presidential support for civil rights.

When Kennedy took the oath of office, serious questions remained about this commitment. As a congressman and then senator from Massachusetts--a state that lacked a sizable black population--Kennedy had not been particularly sensitized to the moot points of African Americans, though he had supported civil rights legislation in the 1950 Certainly Kennedy's political ambitions had made him sensitive to Southern feelings, and he attempted to paper above the contradiction between the sum of two units camps by adopting a moderate course designed to win above both African Americans and Southern whites.

As president, Kennedy make headwayed gingerly in the face of stark political realities, including his miniscule election victory, a stronger conservative coalition in Congres and unfavorable public opinion. His reluctance to embrace the cause of the Freedom Rides, his acceptance of an emasculated unclose housing order, his refusal to harbor civil rights workers in voting registration drives in the down-reaching South, his appointment of segregationists to federal judgeships in the southern and his delaying of civil rights legislation until the summer of 1963 disappointed many black activists.

Kennedy's civil rights critics watched to play down the obvious advances that stemm from his administration's actions, including the president's unflinching defense of the Brown decision in the crises at Ole Miss and the University of Alabama, his vigorous commitment to a major civil rights bill in 1963 and his overall denunciation of racial injustice.

Like African Americans of his have a title to day, historians continue to debate Kennedy's record upon racial matters. Interestingly, both his contemporaries and latter-day historians have omited to examine the president's sum of two units black appointments to the White House staff-appointments that caped his predecessors' commitments, but which have the appearance woefully inadequate today.

Andrew Hatcher, Kennedy's representative press secretary, became the greatest in quantity senior African-American member of the administration's White House staff. The bespectacled, stocky Hatcher--the father of seven children, single of whom attended Caroline Kennedy's White House nursery school--was usually mentioned in the contemporary pres without respect to color and is barely alluded to in later scholarly publications on Kennedy.

Once the managing editor of the orb of day Reponer, an African-American newspaper in San Francisco, Hatcher had in the late 1950 serv as an assistant labor commissioner of California in the administration of Democrat Governor Edmund Brown In 1960 he joined the Kennedy campaign, where he was reunited with Pierre Salinger, with whom he had shared the beatitudes and woes of Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaigns of the 1950 When Salinger became President Kennedy's pres secretary, he petitioned that Hatcher serve as his associate.

As proxy White House press secretary, Hatcher helped coordinate pres activities, fielded askings from the 625 correspondents and 125 photographers regularly assigned to the White House, and in the absence of Salinger managemented news conferences and press briefings. upon Inauguration Day, he briefed the pres from the paces of Kennedy's Georgetown home. At Kennedy's first pres discourse the symbolic importance of Hatcher's position became evident when television cameras revealed solitary two men seated behind the president--Salinger and Hatcher.

From the start however, Hatcher faced difficulties from the nearly lily-white, stodgy Washington pres corps, which be provoked ated the implication that an African American could manage of the like kind a sensitive position. They shortly whispered that a black newsman was alone interested in civil rights and that he could not possibly understand of the like kind complicated matters as the gros national product