President John F. Kennedy - Civil Rights Project

Civil Rights are rights to personal liberty established by the 13th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. constitution and certain Congressional acts, especially as applied to an individual or a minority group.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to as JFK, was the 35th President of The United States, serving from 1961 until his death in 1963. There are many ways that he was successful in establishing equal rights for the blacks in the early 60's.

 President Kennedy in the early 60's helped to end Segregation. Blacks and whites weren't treated equal. Blacks didn't  hold many government positions and they had segregated facilities. For example, blacks couldn’t eat in the same restaurants, drink out of the same drinking fountains, or use the same bathrooms as whites. They couldn’t even sit in the front of buses. The whites got to sit in the front and the blacks had to sit in the back. President Kennedy helped change this unfairness by developing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

During Kennedy’s Presidential Inaugural address in 1961, he promised to end racial discrimination. During his time in office, he appointed black people to many federal positions. No other president had done that in the past. He also selected five black federal judges. 

 In 1960, a Supreme Court Decision ruled that segregation was illegal in bus stations that were open to interstate travel. Civil rights activists started taking Freedom Rides. This meant that black and white people, called Freedom Riders, would travel around the South in buses to test if the new law worked. In some places people would attack the Freedom Riders because they didn’t want to change. President Kennedy supported the Freedom Riders. 

Discrimination in housing was another civil rights issue in the 60’s. Many blacks lived in poor areas. Most banks, realtors, and homeowners would not sell  homes in white neighborhoods to blacks. Kennedy’s Executive Order #11063 tried to correct the black housing problem in 1962 by banning racial discrimination in housing.

Many black people were not allowed to vote in the 1960’s because the white people in the South used any excuse to not allow them to vote. Kennedy tried to get more blacks registered to vote by helping students to go and register blacks to vote in the South. He thought that if blacks could vote, they could change laws. 

School Segregation was another civil rights issue in the 60's. In many places whites and blacks were not allowed to go to the same schools. School desegregation is when people are trying to put whites and blacks into the same school so they don’t have to go to separate schools. They were trying to put them in the same school so that blacks would  be treated the same as the whites. President Kennedy helped support the people who wanted desegregation.He tried to make whites aware of how unfair the blacks were being treated. He said that unequal treatment was against Americans religion and The Constitution. He wanted a quicker end to discrimination and he also promised new civil rights laws.

President Kennedy told Congress that the new civil rights laws he proposed would involve every American’s right to vote, to go to school, to get a job, and to be served in a public place without discrimination. His enactment of The Civil Rights Act of 1963 was very important. The Civil Rights Act of 1963 had eight sections and included laws that would guarantee that all people would have equal access to public places. The act also helped black voting rights and school desegregation.

President Kennedy didn’t get to see his Civil Rights Act of 1963 become a law. He was assassinated in November 1963. The act became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and one year later it was passed.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a start to helping blacks and whites to be treated as equals.