As we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, here’s a largely forgotten story about how an almost random phone call, to King’s wife Coretta Scott King from John F. Kennedy, played a huge role in shifting national black voting habits from Republicans to Democrats.
Most people think the major shift occurred in 1964 as a result of Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater voting against the Civil Rights Act over a constitutional objection to one of its provisions. And, yes, the reaction against Goldwater accelerated the trend and made it well-nigh irreversible. But, the Kennedy incident four years earlier got the ball rolling.
Until President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, blacks had almost uniformly voted Republican. As late as 1956, most scholars now believe that about 39% of blacks voted for Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and presidential campaign historian Theodore White cited one study putting Eisenhower’s black percentage all the way up at 60%. Four years later, only 30% of blacks voted for Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon.
Entering 1960, Nixon had a longer and deeper record of supporting civil rights than Kennedy did, and he had a friendlier rapport with MLK himself. Black celebrities Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, and Zora Neale Hurston all were Republicans. And, while MLK remained neutral in the 1960 presidential race, his father had endorsed Nixon in mid-October.
Then, MLK was arrested for a peaceful demonstration in Atlanta and sent on trumped-up charges to a maximum security prison in rural Georgia. With good reason, his family feared he could be murdered there or perhaps spirited away and lynched.
Robinson pleaded with Nixon to make a public show of support for King. Nixon, who was trying to pry some of the states in the formerly “solid South” from Democratic hands, took it under advisement but refused to act in haste or to “grandstand” about the situation.
Kennedy, though, had a top aide named Harris Wofford, later a U.S. senator, who was friends with King. Wofford pushed and pushed for Kennedy to get involved, at first to no avail.
Then, Wofford got his boss, Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy brother-in-law, to take up the case with Kennedy in private. Kennedy, because he was lying down while feeling ill in a suite at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, was not surrounded by the usual bevy of aides who would argue political advantages and disadvantages in front of him. When Shriver approached him less than two weeks before Election Day with Coretta Scott King’s number and asked Kennedy just to call her to reassure her and express concern, Kennedy reportedly sat up from his bed and said, “What the hell? That’s a decent thing to do. Why not? Get her on the phone.”
That two-minute phone call from a presidential nominee to a frantic, pregnant wife electrified the King camp. There was no real substance to it. Kennedy himself did nothing to ensure King’s safety, but he did provide hope, and Coretta Scott King spread the word through the black media. Then, also almost randomly, Kennedy’s brother Robert Kennedy got involved.
RFK was initially furious at Wofford and Shriver, fearing his brother’s call might cost the campaign white votes. Then, RFK was told that King was being denied bail in a dangerous prison while being held for a mere misdemeanor. RFK was a lawyer, and he knew that wasn’t right. So, he brooded. While walking to an appointment in Manhattan, he suddenly made a decision. He stopped at a pay phone, called the rural judge in Georgia, a Democrat, and reamed him out. Whatever RFK said, it worked. The judge reversed course and released MLK.
Nixon, unsure how to react, made no comment. But MLK’s father switched sides, now saying he would vote for Kennedy. The white media paid little attention once King was released, but the Kennedy campaign distributed two million pamphlets to black churches two days before the election, quoting the King family’s words thanking the Kennedys for saving their son.
White, the campaign historian, analyzed the results after Election Day and determined that the resultant shift in black votes to Kennedy more than accounted for his victory margin in Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, South Carolina, and Delaware. Others add Pennsylvania and Missouri to that tally. No less a sage than Eisenhower said that Nixon’s loss was determined by those “couple of phone calls” of the Kennedy brothers.
Since then, Republicans have never come close to that 30% share of the black electorate. Spontaneous humanity by the Kennedy brothers, pitted against the overcautious calculations of Nixon, turned the tide.
A lesson for MLK Day, then, might be that spontaneous human decency, across cultural and tribal lines, can have lasting consequences. Here’s hoping that lesson prevails more often.
