driver’s license after moving to Atlanta and was sentenced to four months of
hard labor with dangerous criminals and violent deputy sheriffs.
The White House was inundated with calls for King’s release. The heat
was especially intense for the presidential candidates, Richard Nixon and
John Kennedy. With white southern voters up for grabs, the Republican
Nixon kept mum about King. With Nixon remaining sphinx-like, Kennedy
saw an opportunity to do the ‘decent thing’ that would also attract black
voters. In a brief telephone conversation after midnight, he told an over-
wrought Coretta Scott King: ‘I want to express to you my concern about
your husband. I know this must be very hard for you. I understand you are
expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about
you and Dr King.’ Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother and cam-
paign manager, was steamed up over the political predicament that King’s
arrest posed. He applied tremendous pressure on the judge who jailed King,
and the judge saw the wisdom of releasing King the next day. Although
Daddy King had favored Nixon because Kennedy was a Roman Catholic, he
announced from the pulpit that ‘because this man was willing to wipe the
tears from my daughter[-in-law]’s eyes, I’ve got a suitcase of votes, and I’m
going to take them to Mr Kennedy and dump them in his lap.’
The Kennedy campaign milked the incident fully, distributing millions of
pamphlets in black churches and neighborhoods that described the candi-
date’s telephone call and King’s release. The pamphlet read, ‘No Comment’
Nixon Versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy. Kennedy also praised
the sit-in movement as within ‘the American tradition to stand up for one’s
rights – even if the new way is to sit down.’ He told audiences that ‘if the
President does not himself wage the struggle for equal rights, if he stands
above the battle, then the battle will inevitably be lost.’ As a sign of his resolve,
Kennedy pledged to prevent job discrimination and to end segregated public
housing ‘with the stroke of a pen,’ meaning by executive order.
Impressed by Kennedy’s call for a New Frontier in civil rights, 68 per cent
of blacks voted for the Democrat, 7 per cent more than the party received
four years earlier. In the key states of Illinois and Texas, blacks abandoned
the Republican party to vote overwhelmingly for Kennedy. Black votes
nationwide were crucial to Kennedy because Nixon captured 52 per cent of
white votes. Blacks had high expectations of the new president, and they
pressed him to respond. The first challenge was a bus ride through the deep
South.62 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Kennedy, Robert(1925–
68): US attorney general
who enforced federal
court orders to desegre-
gate the universities of
Mississippi and Alabama.