# Chapter Thirty-Six — Struggles and Assassinations

![](images/00056.jpg)

## The Death of John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States during the Space Race and the Cuban Missile Crisis, was one of the most popular presidents in American history. Kennedy was handsome and well-spoken, a graduate of the famous American university Harvard. He was married to a beautiful, charming wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. He was a war hero who had served in the Navy during World War II; when his boat was attacked and sunk by the Japanese, Kennedy, although badly wounded, managed to get his men to safety. On top of all that, President Kennedy had also written two famous books. One, called *Why England Slept*, suggested that England should have gone to war against Germany much sooner. The other book, *Profiles in Courage*, described the lives of eight American heroes, and won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize.

Surely such a popular president would be reelected? Kennedy thought he would be. As he got close to the end of his first four-year term as president, he started to campaign for a second term.

A president who wants to be reelected has to travel all around the country, making speeches, meeting Americans face to face, and convincing them to vote for him. In November of 1963, President and Mrs. Kennedy took a short trip to Texas, to campaign for votes there.

On November 22, 1963, they travelled to Dallas. The sun shone, but the weatherman had predicted it would be cool, so Jackie Kennedy wore a pink wool suit. She and the president were due to have lunch in downtown Dallas with local business leaders. The governor of Texas, John Connally, had offered to arrange for the presidential car to take a winding drive through the city streets, so that the president could see Dallas (and so that Dallas could see Kennedy). Connally, his wife, the president, and Mrs. Kennedy all got into an open car together, with Secret Service agents (official bodyguards) all around them. Huge crowds lined the streets, waving and smiling. The president waved back. Nellie Connally, the governor’s wife, said “Mr. Kennedy, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you!”

![](images/00077.jpg)

At 12:30 p.m., the president’s car passed a tall building called the Texas School Book Depository. Shots rang out. President Kennedy was hit twice, once in the neck and once in the head. Governor Connally was shot in the back.

The driver sped away, towards a nearby hospital. But it was too late. When the car arrived at Parkland Hospital, Governor Connally was still alive, but the president of the United States was dead.

At the hospital, two priests came to pray over the president’s dead body. A nurse asked Mrs. Kennedy, whose suit was spattered with blood, if she wanted to change her clothes. Mrs. Kennedy refused. “No,” she said, “I want them to see what they’ve done.” Every picture taken of Jackie Kennedy that afternoon shows her in her pink suit with blood staining the skirt and jacket.

Since the president was dead, his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was now the acting president of the United States. Secret Service officials were afraid that the mysterious assassin would try to kill Johnson next. They begged him to go back to Washington as soon as possible, but he refused to leave Dallas without President Kennedy’s body.

Around 2:30 in the afternoon, only two hours after the assassination, President Kennedy’s body was put in a casket and taken onboard Air Force One, the presidential airplane. The president’s aides had already sent for a judge named Sarah Hughes. She boarded the airplane as well. On the airplane, she administered the oath of office to Lyndon Johnson, while Jackie Kennedy stood beside him. The new First Lady of the United States, Mrs. Johnson, later wrote in her diary that Jackie Kennedy’s dress somehow made the horror of the whole day even worse: “I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it. … Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights—that immaculate woman exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.”

Then the plane took off and carried the new president and the body of John Fitzgerald Kennedy back to Washington DC.

Kennedy was not the first president in American history to be assassinated. You might remember that John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln while the president watched a play in Ford’s Theatre. In 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau had shot and killed President Garfield as the president walked through a railroad waiting room in Washington DC. Guiteau was angry because Garfield hadn’t given him a job. And in 1901, President McKinley was shot while he was shaking hands with a crowd in Buffalo, New York. He died eight days later.

But somehow, this assassination was different.

After President Kennedy died, people began to compare his presidency to Camelot, the mythical kingdom ruled by King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. (One of President Kennedy’s favorite plays was a musical called *Camelot*. In an interview a few days after President Kennedy’s death, Mrs. Kennedy quoted some of the lyrics: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”)

Looking back, it seems that America really did change after Kennedy died. From the end of World War II until 1963, America was prosperous, excited about the future, and filled with energy. In the 1950s, Americans built more houses than ever before. Magazines and TV shows painted a picture of an America where those houses were filled with happy families eating dinner together, playing with hula hoops, and going to drive-in movies. In this America, every man had a good job, and every woman had a beautiful and immaculate house.

But in the 1950s, there were plenty of worries under the surface. The Cold War had grown more frightening. Immigrants who came to America from other countries often lived in poverty, surrounded by dirt and disease. Especially in the South, African-Americans were denied the right to live peacefully, to vote, and to do all of the things that white Americans took for granted.

These problems had been there all along—but after Kennedy’s assassination, they seemed to rise to the surface. They became easier to see. Life in America seemed a little less glittering and a little less wonderful. Americans were forced to face up to the troubles in their own country. You’ll read more about some of those troubles in the next few chapters.

People still debate who killed President Kennedy, and why. But most people believe a man named Lee Harvey Oswald shot the president. Oswald was an ex-Marine who knew how to handle a rifle. He had lived for a while in Russia and had come to believe in the glories of communism. And Oswald worked at the Texas School Book Depository, the building from which the shots had been fired.

On the afternoon of the assassination, police began looking for Oswald. A police officer named John D. Tippitt spotted Oswald walking around the streets of Dallas. Tippitt rolled down the window of his car and spoke to Oswald for a few minutes. Then he got out of his car. Oswald drew a gun and shot him; Tippitt died immediately.

After this, Oswald ran. But police caught up with him, handcuffed him, and took him off to the police station. He insisted that he had nothing to do with Kennedy’s death, but the police didn’t believe him. They were sure that they had arrested the assassin.

Two days later, the police got ready to take Oswald to the county jail, where he would wait until his trial could be arranged. They walked him through the basement of the police offices, towards an outside door that led to the street where a car that was waiting for him. TV cameras were recording Oswald’s journey, while people all across the United States watched, live. As Oswald walked towards the door, a Texas night club owner who had sneaked into the basement ran at him, shouting, “You killed the president, you rat!” The night club owner, Jack Ruby, pulled out a gun and shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Millions of people saw the shooting on live television.

Oswald died two days later in Parkland Hospital. He was buried with no funeral service and no mourners; reporters who came to cover the funeral carried his coffin. Jack Ruby died from a blood clot before he could be finally convicted of shooting Oswald.

President Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington DC, on November 25, 1963. His tombstone says, in part:

AND SO MY FELLOW AMERICANS\
ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU\
ASK WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR COUNTRY\
MY FELLOW CITIZENS OF THE WORLD\
ASK NOT WHAT AMERICA WILL DO FOR YOU\
BUT WHAT TOGETHER WE CAN DO FOR THE FREEDOM OF MAN

![](images/00056.jpg)

## Civil Rights

In the United States during the 1960s, not all men were free.

Slavery had ended a hundred years earlier. But the lives of African-Americans who lived in the South were still hard and unfair. After slavery was abolished, white Southerners passed new laws, designed to keep the black people poor. Black Southerners couldn’t vote or marry whites. Like blacks in South Africa, American blacks couldn’t eat in the same restaurants as white people. They had to go to separate black schools, different beauty parlors, and all-black barber shops. They drank from black-only water fountains, sat in the black-only sections of public buses (the back seats), and were even buried in black-only graveyards. In the American South, this separation was called *segregation*.

The segregation laws of the American South were nicknamed “Jim Crow laws.” They took this name from an old, nineteenth-century song called “Jump Jim Crow.” The song had forty-four verses, but the first goes like this:

> > Come listen all you galls and boys\
> > I’s jist from Tucky-hoe.\
> > I’m goin to sing a little song,\
> > My name’s Jim Crow.\
> > Weel about and turn about and do jis so,\
> > Eb’ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.

The spelling in “Jump Jim Crow” is a white person’s idea of how a black Southerner might talk.

Most of the Jim Crow laws had been passed by 1900. From the very beginning, black Southerners protested these laws as unfair. By the 1950s, these protests were becoming louder. Blacks became more outspoken about the injustice of the Jim Crow laws. All over the world, other people were gaining their freedom—and here at home, in the country that was supposed to stand for freedom and democracy, people with dark skin were not allowed to be free.

African-Americans wanted the same civil rights as other Americans. They wanted to be able to vote, and to live and work where they pleased. Their protests against the Jim Crow laws became known as the “Civil Rights Movement.”

The Civil Rights movement began in Clarendon County, South Carolina. About thirty-two thousand people lived in this county. Most of them were black. But white people owned most of the land, and black people had to work for the whites for very little pay. Many black families earned less than a thousand dollars for an entire year’s work. And the schools for blacks were shabby old buildings, with no electricity or water. The white students, on the other hand, went to school in a lovely brick building that was almost a mansion.

On May 28, 1951, three lawyers brought a case before federal judges in Charleston, South Carolina. (“Federal” means that the judges were appointed by the U.S. government, not by the state of South Carolina. All three judges were white, of course.) The lawyers argued that racially segregated schools—separate schools for whites and blacks—violated the United States Constitution, which said that all U.S. citizens should be treated equally. One of the judges was persuaded by the lawyers’ arguments. Two of them were not, and the lawyers lost the case.

But that case was just the beginning. The next case about school segregation would be more successful.

It was filed in Topeka, Kansas. Once more, lawyers protested that black-only schools were against the Constitution. This time, the case, called *Brown v*. *Board of Education*, was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court (the highest court in the land—meaning that no other judges could disagree with its decisions). In 1954, the Supreme Court agreed: Racially segregated schools violated the Constitution.

In 1955, December 1 became another landmark day for the civil rights movement. On that day, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, boarded a bus in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama. She sat down in a seat reserved for blacks only, with three other black bus riders. But as the bus filled up, all of the white-only seats were taken. One white man was left standing in the aisle.

The bus driver asked all four black riders in Rosa’s row of seats to move. The white man couldn’t sit with them, because it was against the law for whites and blacks to sit in the same row of seats. The other three moved, but Rosa Parks refused to budge. Police arrived and arrested her for breaking the law.

Rosa’s arrest gave the blacks of Montgomery a chance to protest segregation. They gathered together and agreed to boycott the buses. They wouldn’t ride buses again until the buses were “desegregated,” so that blacks could sit wherever they wanted.

The Montgomery boycotters asked a minister who lived in Montgomery to head up the boycott. He was new to town, but he had already become known as a powerful, moving public speaker. His name was Martin Luther King, Jr.

The bus boycott lasted longer than anyone expected it to. It dragged on for weeks, and then for months. Whites in Montgomery tried to frighten blacks into giving up the boycott. Someone even set off a bomb at King’s home.

The boycott wasn’t the only tactic the Montgomery blacks used. They also took the bus company to court and accused it of violating the Constitution. After all, the Supreme Court had declared that separate schools were unconstitutional. Weren’t separate bus seats just as unequal?

![](images/00023.jpg)

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed once more. It issued an order, forcing the bus company and the bus drivers to allow blacks to sit wherever they wanted.

After the boycott, Rosa Parks went on to work in the government. She joined the staff that worked for John Conyers, a U.S. congressman from Michigan. Martin Luther King, Jr., went on to speak for civil rights all over the South, and then all over the United States. Like Gandhi, whom he admired, he wanted change without violence. Like Gandhi, he led marches and peaceful protests all over the South. He spoke at public gatherings all over the country, trying to convince his listeners that segregation was wrong.

All over the South, black people followed Parks, King, and the other civil rights activists. They demanded equality, not segregation. Some white people agreed that segregation was wrong and supported the Civil Rights Movement. But others tried to fight back. After the Supreme Court ordered the Montgomery buses desegregated, some whites actually shot at the buses. Others set off more bombs at the homes of black leaders.

And others tried to keep the schools from changing. Even though the Supreme Court had ruled, in 1954, that segregation in the schools was illegal, many public schools were still segregated well into the 1960s. The Supreme Court had ordered that all schools be open to blacks and whites equally. But this order simply said that the schools should be integrated “with all deliberate speed.” No particular deadline was given.

Imagine that you’ve checked your favorite book out of the library. If the library gives you a due date, and threatens to charge you a big fine if you don’t return the book by then, you’ll probably get the book back on time. But if the library says, “Return it as soon as you can, if that’s convenient” (which is not so different than “with all deliberate speed”), you might not return the book for months. In fact, you might never actually bring the book back to the library, because you want to read it just one more time.

The public schools of the South were in this same position. Many white school principals, and many white parents, did not want the schools to integrate. Since the Supreme Court hadn’t given them a date on which segregation *had* to end, many schools never got around to admitting black students.

In some towns in Virginia, local communities simply closed all of their public schools when they were told to integrate. This was called “massive resistance.” Parents in these towns so hated the idea of sending their children to school with black children that they preferred for their children to go to expensive, all-white private schools—or, in some cases, not to go to school at all.

In 1957, in Little Rock, Arkansas, the desegregation of a public school was finally carried out by force. On September 4, 1957, a black teenager named Elizabeth Eckford and eight of her friends got ready to go to the local school—a school that had never admitted a black student. The law of the United States of America said that Elizabeth and her friends could attend Little Rock Central High School, but the governor of the state of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, didn’t intend to obey the Supreme Court order. He sent National Guard troops—Arkansas soldiers who are supposed to protect the state in case of invasion or disaster—to keep the nine teenagers from walking up the school steps. Later, Elizabeth told a newspaper reporter, “I walked up to the guard who had let the white students in. When I tried to squeeze past him, he raised his bayonet and then the other guards closed in and they raised their bayonets. They glared at me with a mean look and I was very frightened and didn’t know what to do. I turned around and the crowd came toward me. Someone started yelling, ‘Lynch her!’ ”

When the president of the United States learned about the governor’s actions, he ordered Governor Faubus to allow Elizabeth into the school. The governor refused. So the president ordered federal troops—United States soldiers—to travel down to Arkansas and walk beside Elizabeth, so that she could enter the school.

Imagine how much courage it took for Elizabeth to walk up the steps of the school a second time. But she and the other eight students went back to school—even though some of the white students and parents shouted filthy names at them and threatened to hurt them.

It took years for the schools of America to become fully integrated. The courage of boys and girls like Elizabeth Eckford, and of men and women like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., helped to bring about full civil rights for American blacks. The civil rights movement was also helped by the power of the United States government, which often told the states that they had no choice but to follow the orders of the Supreme Court—or else.

In 1964, the United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. This law said that restaurants and other establishments would no longer be allowed to discriminate on the basis of skin color. They would have to serve both whites and blacks. There would be no more separation. In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed black people the right to vote.

Three years afterwards, on April 4, 1968, the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was staying in a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was preparing to lead a march that aimed to help local black workers get better pay. As he stood on the balcony of his hotel room, an assassin shot at him—and killed him at once. Even after Congress had passed laws guaranteeing equal rights for blacks, hostility between blacks and whites remained very much alive in America.

![](images/00106.jpg)