What Mayor Pete could learn from Bobby Kennedy

[tulipsandroses]

I mentioned that I was thinking about Bobby Kennedy as I watch Mayor Pete navigate this tragedy. This is a bit of a read. But relevant for these times.


The Most Trusted White Man in Black America

[link:https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/robert-f-kennedy-race-relations-martin-luther-king-assassination-214021|
Bobby Kennedy started out clueless on race, and yet he died a civil rights hero. His learning curve should inspire today’s leaders.



The best clue to where the participants at the historic gathering stood was where they sat. All 11 African-Americans lined up on one side of the Kennedy family drawing room overlooking Central Park, the five whites on the other. It was Harlem vs. Hickory Hill. The partition was a fitting one for the spring of 1963, when demarcation of the races was written into law across the American South and into practice in the rest of the land. But it was not an auspicious beginning to an urgent conclave that the black novelist James Baldwin had pulled together, at the request of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, to talk about why a volcano of rage was building up in Northern ghettos and why mainstream civil rights leaders couldn’t or wouldn’t quell it as summer approached.

A second sign that the meeting was ill-fated was not who had been invited but who had not. Baldwin assembled a motley collection of fellow artists, academics, and second-tier civil rights leaders, along with his lawyer, secretary, literary agent, brother, and brother’s girlfriend. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t welcome, nor were the top people from the NAACP and the Urban League, because Bobby Kennedy wanted a no-holds-barred critique of their leadership. He also hoped for a sober discussion of what the Kennedy administration should do, with African-Americans who knew After feeding his guests a light buffet and settling them in chairs or on footstools, Bobby opened the discussion on tame and self-serving notes. He listed all that he and his brother John F. Kennedy had accomplished in advancing African-American rights, explaining why their efforts were groundbreaking. He warned that the politics of race could get dicey with voters going to the polls in just 18 months and conservative white Democrats threatening to bolt. “We have a party in revolt and we have to be somewhat considerate about how to keep them on board if the Democratic Party is going to prevail in the next elections,” said the attorney general. He had already implied that he was among friends by tossing his jacket onto the back of his chair, rolling up his shirtsleeves and welcoming everyone into his father’s elegant apartment. Now he wanted these friends to explain why so many of their African-American brethren were being drawn to dangerous radicals like Malcolm X and his Black Muslims.

Kenneth Clark, black America’s preeminent psychologist, came prepared to lay out studies and statistics to document that corrosive racial divide, but he never got the chance. Jerome Smith, a young activist who had held back as long as he could, suddenly shattered the calm, his stammer underlining his anger. “Mr. Kennedy, I want you to understand I don’t care anything about you and your brother,” he began. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, listening to all this cocktail party patter.” The real threat to white America wasn’t the Black Muslims, Smith insisted, it was when nonviolence advocates like him lost hope. The 24-year-old’s record made his words resonate. He had suffered as many savage beatings as any civil rights protester of the era, including one for which he was getting medical care in New York. But his patience and his pacifism were wearing thin, he warned his rapt audience. If the police came at him with more guns, dogs and hoses, he would answer with a weapon of his own. “When I pull a trigger,” he said, “kiss it goodbye.”

Bobby was shocked, but Smith wasn’t through. Not only would young blacks like him fight to protect their rights at home, he said, but they would refuse to fight for America in Cuba, Vietnam or any of the other places the Kennedys saw threats. “Never! Never! Never!” This was unfathomable to Bobby. “You will not fight for your country?” asked the attorney general, who had lost one brother and nearly a second at war. “How can you say that?” Rather than backing down, Smith said just being in the room with Bobby “makes me nauseous.” Others chimed in, demanding to know why the government couldn’t get tougher in taking on racist laws and ghetto blight. Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote the play A Raisin in the Sun, stood to say she was sickened as well. “You’ve got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General. But the only man who should be listened to is that man over there,” she said, pointing to Smith.

[murielm99]

1. I thought about Bobby, too.

I thought about him especially, since he was in Indiana when MLK was assassinated, and Mayor Pete is in Indiana.