How The Kennedys Scammed & Played Black America

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A timely post from www.debbieschlussel.com about John F. Kennedy’s role with black Americans. This follows this previous post about the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. In the meantime, you can get more involved if you like here and read an interesting book HERE.

How The Kennedys Scammed & Played Black America


By Debbie Schlussel


Yesterday, I told you about Dave Wilson, the White candidate in Texas who turned Black racism on its head by leading Blacks to believe he was a brother, and getting elected. A number of Blacks–and White liberals–were aghast at this hilarious development. But it’s funny that no Blacks ever seem to be upset about how they were scammed by the Kennedys, particularly John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, both of whom the Black community continues to idolize to this day.

It won’t be news to most of you, just as it wasn’t news to me, about how the Kennedy Bros scammed and played American Blacks throughout the ’60s in a way that emulates “Boardwalk Empire’s” Nucky Thompson. We know the Kennedys voted against civil rights in their legislative lives (JFK voted against Republican President Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Act in 1957), and yet they get credit for being champions of civil rights. And so on. But there’s more that’s at least getting a little mainstream media coverage as we near the 50th anniversary of Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination of JFK. Kennedy couldn’t have cared less about Blacks. He only cared about one thing (well, two things, but we’re talking about the one other than sex here): getting elected. He was a phony and a power-seeker and he used and manipulated Blacks like a maestro plays a violin.

As a Democrat, running against Republican Richard Nixon (at the time, many influential blacks, including Jackie Robinson, were Republicans), Kennedy faced some difficult racial calculus. The South, where Jim Crow kept black people in a second-class status, was ruled by Democrats. To win the presidency, Kennedy needed white Southern Democrats, and many of them hated King, whom they saw as a threat to their way of life.


In a speech soon after meeting King, Kennedy spoke of the “moving examples of moral courage” shown by civil rights protesters. Their peaceful demonstrations, he said, were not “to be lamented, but a great sign of responsibility, of good citizenship, of the American spirit.” Referencing the growing “sit-in” movement, in which black customers demanded service at white-only restaurants, Kennedy said: “It is in the American tradition to stand up for one’s rights — even if the new way to stand up for one’s rights is to sit down.”



But there was another side to Kennedy’s stance. Behind the scenes, his aides were urging King to end his nonviolent protests, according to historian Taylor Branch in his authoritative civil rights chronicle “Parting the Waters.” Since the protests were being suppressed by Democrats, they made it harder for Kennedy to get black votes in the North. But if Kennedy criticized the suppression, he would lose white votes in the South.



Declining to heed Kennedy’s men and curtail protests, King was arrested with a group of students at an Atlanta sit-in on Oct. 19, 1960, scant weeks before the excruciatingly close election. King refused to post bail. He remained behind bars as the Ku Klux Klan marched through Atlanta streets and Kennedy and Nixon held their final televised debate. Authorities produced a 5-month-old traffic ticket from a neighboring county, and King was sentenced to four months’ hard labor. By the next morning King was in a maximum-security prison. Many feared he would soon be killed.



Over the objections of Kennedy’s brother and campaign manager, Robert Kennedy, who wanted to steer clear of the matter, an aide managed to convince the candidate to place a sympathetic call to King’s pregnant wife, Coretta. News of Kennedy’s call was leaked to reporters. Yet King was still in jail — until Robert Kennedy called the judge. Suddenly, bail was granted and King was freed.



That’s so typical Kennedy–privately opposing MLK and wanting to stay out of it and publicly calling a judge to get credit with the King family for bail.


The story of the Kennedys’ involvement made headlines in black newspapers nationwide. King issued a statement saying he was “deeply indebted to Senator Kennedy,” although he remained nonpartisan. The Kennedy campaign printed tens of thousands of pamphlets describing the episode, and distributed them in black churches across the country on the Sunday before the election.



Kennedy, who got 78 percent of the black vote, won the election by one of the narrowest margins in U.S. history. “In an election that close,” says Villanova University professor David Barrett, “you could make a case that Kennedy’s call to Coretta mattered enough to win.”



Once elected, Kennedy deliberately slowed down the pace of his purported civil rights agenda. Hey, he needed Southern Whites for his foreign policy pursuits and their votes for his re-election.



Kennedy needed some of those segregationists to advance his foreign policy agenda, says Barrett, the Villanova professor. He also had to think about reelection, and not alienating white Southern voters. “Civil rights simply was not a top priority,” says Barrett, who studies the Kennedy administration and teaches a course on the civil rights movement.



The Kennedys were phonies then, and their progeny are phonies now. And so are the many wannabes in the Democrat Party who try so hard–way too hard–to be the new Kennedys. And they continue to manipulate America’s Blacks today as the Kennedys did in yesteryear. Yesterday, the currency of pimping and manipulating American Blacks was civil rights. Today, that currency is ObamaPhones, ObamaCare, and the entitlement state.



And, like the Kennedys did back then, they continue to laugh at the Blacks all the way to the bank . . . and the Senate and the White House.



You know datz right!