Bobby Kennedy and the Civil Rights Movement

By Nicholas Stix with David in TN

Boy, am I ever glad to have David in TN as my friend and partner-in-crime!

The other night, we had a long conversation over the phone about the topic above. David told me about a meeting between then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and civil right activists that Kennedy organized on May 24, 1963, in his father’s luxurious, Manhattan apartment.

But before I talk about what I learned from David, let me tell you the official story that I got from a blog link he sent me, as well as a couple of other places, which all sounded like they were regurgitating the same source.

Kennedy had called for the meeting on 24 hours call, and asked Nation of Islam-sympathizing propagandist James Baldwin to invite not civil rights top dogs like , but activists. Baldwin came with Communist singer-actor Harry Belafonte; pseudo-scientist and Supreme Court perjurer, Kenneth Clark; and mulattoes singer Lena Horne; playwright Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), et al, 16 in all (11 blacks and five whites).

After serving food, Kennedy opened the session by listing the civil rights accomplishments and projects of his brother’s administration. He hoped for signs of gratitude, but the assembled activists instead read him the riot act, and left in a huff.

Bobby meditated upon what he had heard that day, had an epiphany, and become America’s greatest white civil rights activist.

Well, that’s the official story.

Before I get into the real story, consider this: We’re talking about Bobby Kennedy, the most openly vicious and vindictive of the brothers—Joe Sr’s. sons—at the time, who was the Attorney General of the United States of America. The most powerful whites, Kennedys or no, were not used to being insulted by blacks of any rank, and the civil rights movement was led by the scum of the earth.

Few whites know this today, because the media have covered for the movement for over 50 years. However, it was obvious to whites at the time, cover-up or no, because they had not undergone over 50 years of indoctrination, intimidation, violence and terror. They knew that blacks and their socialist and communist white allies sought to take over the country, and install a totalitarian dictatorship.

Nowadays, when pro-white commenters at sites like American Renaissance say they see signs of an awakening of white consciousness, they are writing from a myopic, contemporary perspective. Very few whites are today as “woke” as the typical 1963 white.

Imdb.com proved a most unlikely source for some straight talk, though it is mixed in with a great deal of nonsense. On the “Personal Quotes” section of Lena Horne’s thumbnail biography, it has her telling the attorney general of the United States,

“[to Robert F. Kennedy, on his administration's civil rights record] ‘Mr. Attorney General, you can take all those pious statements and stuff them up your ass.’”

Why don’t the official story blogs say that?

The “Trivia” section of the same IMDB.com page asserts,

“She was branded a ‘Communist sympathizer’ by many right-wing conservatives because of her association with Paul Robeson and her progressive political beliefs (which led her to be blacklisted in the 1950s).”

Horne was identified as a Communist sympathizer because she was a Communist sympathizer, i.e., she was a Communist in all but name. Of course, the anonymous writer fails to mention that Paul Robeson was a card-carrying Communist. Robeson used to travel to the USSR, where as a walking Communist propaganda machine, he’d praise the Reds for their supposedly enlightened treatment of blacks. (What blacks?)

The IMDB.com phrasing smears Horne’s critics, by calling them “right-wing conservatives,” which is a leftwing dog whistle for “fascists,” which was institutionalized by Communists as a synonym for Nazis, which they applied to any and all anti-Communists. (Today, they say, “white supremacists.”)

The IMDB.com page also engages in political myth-making, asserting in the “Mini Bio” section that Horne failed to become a movie star due to “racism,” while in the “Trivia” section, inventing or perpetuating a blacklisting myth (of which there are many), while spreading yet more nonsense in the “Personal Quotes” section.

From the Mini Bio:

“Lena's musical career flourished, but her movie career stagnated. Minor roles in films such as Boogie-Woogie Dream (1944), Words and Music (1948) and Mantan Messes Up (1946) did little to advance her film career, due mainly to the ingrained racist attitudes of the time (even at the height of Lena's musical career, she was often denied rooms at the very hotels in which she performed, because they would not let blacks stay there). After Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956), Lena left films to concentrate on music and the stage.”

Racially segregated hotels were irrelevant to Horne’s movie career, or lack thereof. And the last sentence has the chronology backwards: Prior to Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956), Lena had left films to concentrate on music and the stage. And which was it that thwarted her career as a movie star, “racism” or the “blacklist”?

If “racism” were really to blame for Horne’s lack of success in pictures, then there would have been no black movie stars at the time. But that’s nonsense. Back in the 1930s, Stepin Fetchit was one of the biggest stars in the business. As Woody Strode (1914-1994) constantly pointed out to his militant colleagues, it was Stepin Fetchit who had made a way for them.

After the war, during the same period that Horne supposedly suffered from “racism,” many black performers had success as movie stars and featured performers: James Edwards, Ethel Waters, Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Strode, Brock Peters, Juano Hernandez, Pearl Bailey, and the biggest of them all, Sidney Poitier.


As if her Bio page weren’t ridiculous enough, whoever put together her “Personal Quotes” insinuates that she was indeed, a movie star:

“I never considered myself a movie star. Mostly, I just sang songs in other people's movies.”

Why is that even there? Horne was never anywhere near being a movie star. She must have been replying to an exceedingly stupid question from a media operative, likely from a black outlet.

The MSM was blindly supportive of the so-called civil rights movement, and heavily censored all reports on it and its leading personalities. At the time, the media and related institutions had not yet browbeaten whites out of having any moral sense, and so if whites had learned of how vile the CRM’s leaders were, and if the reality of black behavior had been broadcast as counterpoint to its idealized depiction by the press and movies (e.g., St. Sidney Poitier), whites would have rebelled against it much more than they did (and they rebelled aplenty).

Instead, the media and civil rights activists brought about:

• The destruction of academic and behavioral standards in schools and higher education;
• Pervasive promiscuity;
• Support of racist violence and the rape of white girls and women;
• Constant plagiarism; and
• Vulgar racism

David in TN followed up on our conversation with the following note:

Re our telephone conversion a few nights ago, I told you about a meeting AG Robert Kennedy had with a group of black entertainers/intellectuals organized by James Baldwin in 1963.

They attacked RFK as a group, though some came up afterward and made nice. I found the account I remembered in David Halberstam's 1968 book, The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy.

Halberstam, [Jules] Witcover, etc., never got over RFK's 1968 campaign and assassination, which WAS a wholly evil act. The relevant passage by David Halberstam (1934-2007) is on page 143:

"In 1963 Robert Kennedy decided to meet with a group of Negro intellectuals and artists. Just why was never clear, but the impression was strong that he wanted to hear what was on their minds..."

"...The meeting was a disaster. Kennedy totally misjudged the temper of the Negroes who, meeting in a large group with a white man, all went to the more militant position. (Six years [sic] later I asked him what he learned from the meeting. He said, 'Never meet with more than two or three Negroes at a time. Never with eighteen. With eighteen it's hopeless. Everyone has to be more militant. Now I realize what they are saying, and why, and why they were so angry, but what was hard to take at the time were the ones who let me take the roasting and then came over afterward to sympathize.')”

Halberstam continued in an apologetic way. Would you like to have explained it to David Halberstam?

While Halberstam, in spite of being a socialist, wrote things that no one would write today, he still needs a corrective, regarding Bobby and Jack.

At the time of the meeting at Joe Kennedy Sr’s. apartment, the March on Washington was being organized. That’s the one which met in our nation’s capitol on August 28, 1963, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his most famous speech, “I Have a Dream.”

King was not the lead organizer of the march; A. Philip Randolph was, in name, but King’s man, Bayard Rustin, was the true organizer.

All speakers had to hand in the texts of their speeches in advance to Rustin and his people (and the press), who then passed them along to Bobby Kennedy’s people at Justice. Why the DOJ? That’s a good question that I’ve never seen answered.

The answer is that AG Bobby Kennedy, and his brother, the President, were ultimately in charge of the march.

One speech was particularly radical. It was by future race hoaxer and congressman, John Lewis, then the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating Committee (SNCC), which ultimately went from opposing violence to supporting ultra-violence.

Lewis’ speech used violent images which contradicted his professed, official position of non-violence.

[N.S.: The following endless, 436-word paragraph is the work of David Garrow—don’t blame me. I’d have broken it up into ten paragraphs.]

“There was much in Lewis’s remarks, which had been drafted with substantial assistance from Tom Kahn, one of [Bayard] Rustin’s top assistants, that was not acceptable to the Kennedys. First, the speech said that SNCC could not support the administration’s civil rights bill because it was ‘too little, too late.’ Second, it seemed like a leftist ideological tract, with passages such as “We are now involved in a serious revolution. This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation.’ Lewis went on to attack the federal indictments in Albany, and to contrast them with the lack of action against attacks on movement workers, and Kennedy’s appointment of ‘racist judges.’ SNCC asked, ‘Which side is the federal government on?’ Third, the advance text contained rhetorical statements certain to outrage many civil rights supporters. ‘The revolution is at hand,’ it declared. ‘we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure that could and would assure us a victory…. If any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about.’ And, Lewis vowed, in the southland SNCC would bring them about. ‘We will march through the South, through the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own “scorched earth” policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently. We shall crack the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy.’ Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall agreed that Lewis’s comments should not be allowed a place at this march. They made certain that a number of sponsors and program participants were aware of the text. Both men spoke with Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle, the Catholic prelate of Washington who was scheduled to deliver the invocation. O’Boyle’s reaction was exactly what the Justice Department expected. “When I read it, I said I could not give the invocation or sit on the platform because it would be the equivalent to approving a speech of this kind,” the cardinal recalled. O’Boyle was especially upset about the reference to Sherman’s march, inappropriate rhetoric for a nonviolent movement. [UAW President] Walter Reuther also was greatly displeased when he learned of Lewis’s language. Word of the controversy and O’Boyle’s threatened withdrawal was passed to [Bayard] Rustin, who called a meeting and went to Lewis’s hotel room to ask that he change the offending passages. Lewis refused, despite please voiced at the hastily called late-night strategy session.”

Bobby Kennedy, working through Cardinal O’Boyle, got the meeting to have six blacks and four whites.

Ultimately, Lewis complied, but Bobby Kennedy had a couple of assistants standing by at the Lincoln Memorial, ready to pull the plug, just in case. [David Garrow. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1988).]

The example of the Kennedys secretly running the March on Washington shows the real face of the brothers, with Bobby playing bad cop to John’s good cop, in contrast to the civil rights propaganda that has since cast Bobby as having had some sort of epiphany shortly after the May 24, 1963 meeting, such that he became the servant (slave?) of the movement.

The flip side to that real story is that white leaders, including what passed at the time for “liberals” were not the pathetic manginas they have since degenerated into.

Such a narrative—the official story we have heard for 30-odd years—is completely at odds with human history, politics, the civil rights movement and, above all, the Kennedys. That official story is even at odds with the histories written by the most famous, socialist/communist/whatever chroniclers of the movement. But who reads them?