JFK, MLK, RFK: 1960 to 1968 SESSION II 10/23/05 PAGE 1

Transcription

1 PAGE 1 JOHN SHATTUCK: We are amidst an extraordinary conference on JFK, MLK, and RFK-- the relationship among three extraordinary men who have addressed, in their own different ways, the moral crisis of our time. Our second session this afternoon will cover the years , as the Civil Rights revolution came to a head and U.S. involvement in Vietnam deepened. It was a tumultuous time, a time of great contrast between political advances for civil rights and growing fragmentation in the movement, progress toward the division of a great society, and increasing polarization in the country over issues of war and justice. On January 25, 1965, Dr. King exhorted his orders to the whole country by reminding us that, We still have a long, long way to go and that there are dark moments in this struggle, but often the darkest hour appears before the dawn of a new fulfillment, in these dark moments, searching for the dawn of a new fulfillment. We have another distinguished panel of speakers to take us through these five years: Marian Wright Edelman to my immediate left, grew up in the segregated town of Bennettsville, North Carolina, and later became the first African American woman to be admitted to the Bar in Mississippi, where she directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund office in Jackson in the mid-1960s. In 1968, she was recruited by Dr. King to be counsel to the Poor People s March that he began organizing shortly before

2 PAGE 2 his death. In 1973, she established the Children s Defense Fund, which has become the most powerful voice ever created for millions of poor children in the United States. She s been honored all over the world for her life-long commitment to civil rights and has received the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for her writings, which include five books, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation s highest civilian honor. Peter Edelman was legislative assistant to Robert Kennedy during his four years as U.S. Senator from New York. Earlier he served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and worked in the Department of Justice in the Kennedy Administration. The New York Times review of Peter s book, Searching for America s Heart: RFK and the Renewal of Hope, describes his work with Robert Kennedy this way: For four years, as a campaign and Senate staff member, Peter Edelman was at Kennedy s side on a journey of discovery into poverty and a nation in tumult. He witnessed the riveting scene when Kennedy first met Cesar Chavez, the farm worker/organizer in the Mississippi Delta, investigating the hunger and malnutrition that existed in much of the rural South at the time. And on that trip he met his future wife, Marian Wright. Quote, I was extremely impressed, he writes. [laughter] As you will see, that is my comment, She was really smart and really good looking.

3 PAGE 3 Peter Edelman is now a professor at Georgetown Law School, a prolific writer and a continuing activist for social justice. As you can see, I went a little bit out of order for a particular reason there. Elaine Jones, sitting between Marian and Peter, is one of our nation s foremost civil rights lawyers. After graduating from Howard University, she served in the Peace Corps in Turkey, and then became the first black woman to earn a law degree from the University of Virginia. After law school, she turned down an offer to join a prestigious Wall Street law firm and went to work for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, first as a trial lawyer, then as legislative counsel, legislative advocate and, finally and most recently, as Director Counsel. She s had an extraordinary career in the courts as a lawyer for death-row inmates, victims of employment discrimination and other civil rights clients, and in the legislative arena as one of the chief architects of the Voting Rights Act amendment of 1982, the Fair Housing Act, and the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988, and the Civil Rights Act of She s been a teacher and mentor to hundreds of young civil rights lawyers and has been a guest lecturer at many law schools. The moderator of this panel will be Juan Williams, one of America s leading journalists and a frequent speaker at the Kennedy Library. As senior correspondent at National Public Radio, Juan s reporting and commentary

4 PAGE 4 brings special insight to the news, and is heard by millions of listeners across the country. A former editorial writer, op-ed columnist and White House reporter for the Washington Post, and a frequent television commentator, Juan is also the author of several critically acclaimed books including the best seller Eyes on the Prize: America s Civil Rights Years, , the companion volume to the award-winning television series. So please join me in welcoming to the stage of the Kennedy Library Marian Wright Edelman, Peter Edelman, Elaine Jones and Juan Williams. [applause] JUAN WILLIAMS: Thank you very much. We re going to try and do things a little differently than the first panel in that we really want to have you get a sense from these people on the panel, about the personalities of Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. This is a period, , that really features so much in the way of turmoil. And if you think of turmoil as revealing something about the character of a person, testing that character, we have a rare opportunity here this afternoon to hear about the personalities that came to the forefront, who met the challenges of their day. I m talking about, in 1964, things like the controversy in the Atlantic City Democratic Convention with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. We re talking about the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 64; we re talking about the deaths of Chaney, Goodman and

5 PAGE 5 Schwerner. You move on to 65 and you get into the era of Selma, the Voting Rights Act, and of course riots, and of course then we go on in that way. So I wanted to start by asking the panel, beginning with Marian Wright Edelman, to tell me a little bit about Martin Luther King, Jr. Someone that you knew personally, worked with personally. How would you describe King to these young people today? MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: I knew Dr. King for eight years. The Sit-In Movement in Atlanta occurred in March after the Queensboro, North Carolina sit-ins in February. Dr. King came to speak in the Spellman College Chapel in April of that year, and he had an indelible impact on the students who heard him. One of the things he said was about the importance of moving and movement. If you can t fly, drive. If you can t drive, run. If you can t run, walk. If you can t walk, crawl, but keep moving. And the second thing I remember from that first speech, as a young person sitting in Spellman s chapel, was him talking about taking the first step in faith. You don t have to see the whole stairway, but you take the first step and you leave the results to God. And one of the things that impressed me very much about Dr. King was that most of the times I saw him, he was depressed and didn t know where he was going next. And he was one of the few adults who we admired very deeply, who could be uncertain, who could

6 PAGE 6 share his fears, who could talk about his uncertainties. And that has been an enormous help to me throughout my life. The second thing I remember about him was how accessible he was. I go back to my diaries and I see how many times he met with me, took time with me, and other young people. The first plane ride I ever had to Raleigh was when Ella Baker got us all together to go up to Raleigh and he spent the whole time listening and being there. When black students in Atlanta in 1960 decided not to give into the threat of the Ku Klux Klan about marching across town to Wheat Street Baptist Church, he showed up unexpectedly to greet us on the other side. He was a man of enormous courage and talked about courage not being the absence of fear, just don t let it paralyze you, just keep that struggle going. And so he had an enormous impact over that eight years. And Robert Kennedy I got to know personally only in the last fifteen months of his life. I had obviously known about him long before, but he came to Mississippi to the poverty subcommittee, which people probably talk about, Joe Clark s subcommittee, to investigate charges into the Poverty Program that Senator Stemis had levied, and challenges to Head Start Program in 1965, in April 1967, excuse me, April And I thought I was going to talk about Head Start, but what was on my mind was hunger. The fact that there were starving and malnourished

7 PAGE 7 babies. And so I talked about that. And then I asked him and the senators to come up to the Mississippi Delta, and he said he would, and he did. And it transformed my view of Robert Kennedy because I d not been a great, great fan during the earlier years because I had known about him during the McCarthy Era, I d known about the King wiretaps, I had known about the judges that had been appointed who were not the same kind of judges that the Eisenhower years had been. But when I saw him go into those Mississippi Delta homes, and stood outside of camera range with hungry children with bloated bellies and saw his moral outrage, and saw his determination to act, it was a very moving thing. We need Robert Kennedy today. But he went back to Washington, he pushed Orville Freeman. He sent Peter back down to Orville Freeman who didn t believe there were people in Mississippi with no income. And so we retraced the bounds of the previous trips. But he was a fearless, tireless pusher to deal with the problem of hunger in our country, which he was shocked about. I think one of the lessons of that era was how hard it was for our country to do what was right for the hungry and the poor, and with Vietnam detracting us Even with the kind of advocacy and the media that Robert Kennedy could command But he didn t go away.

8 PAGE 8 And last, I would just say that he and Dr. King came together, and I felt privileged to be the glue that I think led to the Poor People s Campaign because on one of the trips to Washington, in the aftermath of one of his earlier visits to Mississippi And I d kind of gotten to know Peter and liked Peter, and realized he wasn t an arrogant, cigarette-chomping fellow. [laughter] On a visit with him, we went out to Hickory Hill and met with Robert Kennedy sitting around the pool. And he heard me update him on the frustrations of how slow change was in Mississippi, and what we could do about it and how everybody was being distracted by the Vietnam War, and how do we make the poor visible? It was still going on and on, and he was frustrated with the pace of change on hunger. I mentioned that I was on my way back to Mississippi, but I was going to stop in Landon, as I often did, to see Dr. King. And he said, Well go tell him to bring the poor to Washington. And get in Lyndon Johnson s face. Bring them and make them visible. And so a couple of hours later, I went by and saw Dr. King and his very unprepossessing office on Auburn Avenue, and he was depressed, figuring out what to do. This was after a lot of struggles in the northern efforts. And he was frustrated, but I went and told him what Robert Kennedy had said about bringing the poor to Washington. And he lit up and said, You re like an angel whose delivered a message. And I ve always felt so grateful to have been an angel between Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but that led to Martin Luther King thinking and then begin to deal with his very strong-

9 PAGE 9 willed and rambunctious staff about why we should have a poor people s campaign. And for me the convergence of the two was a move toward substantive civil rights, to try and begin to put the economic and social and educational underpinnings beneath the earlier civil rights struggle. And so, it was a watershed effort between the partnership of the two--the Poor People s Campaign. JUAN WILLIAMS: What a wonderful start. Thank you Marian. So let me turn now to the other dominant personality in that relationship, that Marian just described, Robert Kennedy. And ask Peter Edelman, how would you describe Robert Kennedy to these young people? PETER EDELMAN: Juan, I m just so pleased to be here, especially with Ethel Kennedy, my dear friend. Robert Kennedy was somebody who was absolutely determined There s so much that we could say. We could be here for hours and days. But, particularly, talking today about Dr. King and about civil rights and, as Marian just said, about the transformation of the issues through the 1960s into the intersection between civil rights and poverty, which is the part of the question of civil rights that we have been least successful in dealing with over the decades since. If there was one thing about Robert Kennedy, he always said, one person can make a difference. If there s one phrase that we remember about him, and he so admired individuals whom he met. When it was my privilege to

10 PAGE 10 go around the country and just be there as a witness and to help a little bit. When he met Cesar Chavez, when he met Marian, when he met others who individually were making a difference, that was what meant the most to him. And that s what he modeled for everybody. That s what he did in his life and, of course, as a staff person it was a little frustrating because you d have a terrific day and you d get something done, you know, whether it was getting an amendment to a bill in congress, or whatever, because he was in his role as Senator basically the whole time I knew him, and the next day, it was like you hadn t done it! You had to start all over again because you had to make a difference the next day. And you didn t stop and say, Well wasn t that great, and pat yourself on the back and all of that. So that was a very forceful part, a very characteristic part of RFK and working with him. He was funny and everybody that worked for him was part of the family. And so, it was a very informal office. And another characteristic is that he was a listener. He was a person who learned. He certainly was a reader, he always had a book with him when he was on a plane or wherever he was going, and he loved the Greeks. He read philosophy and literature and history and so on. But every one of his senses worked equally. And so it wasn t enough to read a book about something; he had to go and see for himself. He had to go and touch and listen. And so it was of course, the objective fact was that he went to places where no United States Senator had ever been, no presidential candidate had ever been. But that was about him, that wasn t about politics. That was the way he learned and connected.

11 PAGE 11 So walking into the home of one of those families, all of those families, in Mississippi where the children were hungry, and to the people who had been coal miners and lost their jobs in eastern Kentucky and on Indian reservations, and farm workers, all of that. It was about listening, and not about telling them what he was going to do. It was about listening. The relationship between Robert Kennedy and Dr. King, of course, goes back to the beginning and to the subject matter of the previous panel, and I just want to say this. I think maybe it s obvious. But it was a relationship of discomfort. And it should have been because Dr. King and everybody associated with the Civil Rights Movement wanted things to move faster and sometimes they did and said and asked for and pushed for things that were inconvenient for the politicians. You know I m busy! I ve got to deal with Khrushchev. Well, yes, you do have to deal with Khrushchev, that s pretty important. But so is justice, so is ending segregation in the United States. And so a lot of the time Robert Kennedy was the one who was saying to the Movement and to Dr. King and the others, You ve got to slow down, don t send those freedom riders. Don t sit there in jail down there in Birmingham, you re making things inconvenient. But then story after story where, after he had tried to get them to kind of slow down, he was there, associates were there, the President was there, to be responsive, to get King and others out of jail, to help do that. So, discomfort.

12 PAGE 12 Now the last thing I want to say, and I know you ll have a lot of other questions, is that the relationship between Senator Kennedy and Dr. King during the period that I knew Robert Kennedy was not very extensive. They knew each other. There had been the past discomfort, which may have contributed to this. But the real point was that RFK was now a senator from the state of New York and he was doing that business, and he was a national Senator, and he was an international Senator. But he was doing what he was doing as a Senator and they were working on parallel lines. And the most important fact about their relationship is that without being in some sort of joint plan, they both saw how wrong the Vietnam War was and worked on it, and Dr. King gave his famous speech at the Riverside Church. And Robert Kennedy said many things and did many things that were important about that. And in terms of the question of civil rights and poverty, they both saw what not enough people in our country saw, and what not enough people in our country see now, which is you can t have a meal at that lunch counter if you don t have the money to pay for it. And that is a continuing challenge in our country. Why are African Americans and Latinos poor at a rate of twentythree percent and whites poor at a rate of nine percent in our country? And so that was something that was going on where they were both headed in the same direction, and it wasn t as though they had to do it in a way that involved conversation all the time. There were letters back and forth. Dr. King came and testified at the Ribicoff Hearings on Urban Poverty, but the

13 PAGE 13 real point was that they both understood that working for racial justice means working for economic and social justice. JUAN WILLIAMS: By the way, why did he hire you Peter? PETER EDELMAN: Beats me! [laughter] JUAN WILLIAMS: What did you say to him? PETER EDELMAN: The first thing is I was lucky enough to be working for a wonderful man who Ethel and I, many of us loved. John Douglas was in the Justice Department and was the head of the Civil Division. And I d gotten there because I had clerked for Justice Goldberg who had said, Go to work in the Kennedy administration; it s the best administration you re going to see in your lifetime. I was like, wait a minute, Franklin Roosevelt, I remember him! Anyway, as a consequence of being in the Justice Department right place at the right time the accidents of life, and with a little interest in politics, I got involved in his campaign for Senate. And then afterwards he offered me a job on his staff. I could tell you that story but that JUAN WILLIAMS: We ll come to it. But now I want to come to Elaine Jones. And Elaine, you were a student activist during this period. The way I

14 PAGE 14 think of it is this is a crucible period when really you re seeing so much going on. There are so many pressures, so much happening, and it forms the Elaine Jones that becomes a super-hero to this generation. But I wanted to ask you, from your perspective and as a leader in the student movement, someone who s closer to the streets, who understands the kind of turmoil in terms of riots, dissatisfaction, discontent on the streets. What did you think of these two men? How would you describe your view, as a young person, of these two men to these young people? ELAINE JONES: The messages of the three of them, of JFK, RFK and Dr. King, resonated with my generation. I was born in the segregated South. And so I knew what they were talking about when they would talk about the daily indignities. I lived through it, you know, the back of the bus, the separate water fountains and the colored signs. So I always said, even as a child, you know I m in America, this is wrong. I need to play some role in this. And the point that they would make, generally, to anybody who would listen is the point Peter just made. Any one of us can make a difference where we are. And so I m a high school student when President Kennedy told us, Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country, and that resonated. When I went off to Howard University, Martin Luther King came to the campus. He came to Howard, spoke at Charter Day in 1962 to all of the students. Stokely Carmichael and I were in the same class. That class at

15 PAGE 15 Howard in the early sixties, you know, was really a cauldron of activity. Kids going back and forth, going to different missions and I was from Norfolk, Virginia, and so we had our sweet little city and you know it was nothing. You still didn t feel as if you were really a part of it all, but you were absorbing it. So when Lyndon Johnson gave the Great Society speech, it was to my graduation class. And there again I heard that. And so the idea was how could I take what I wanted to do, this thing of law, and make it work to bring about some social justice. So then the campaign, the whole idea of the Peace Corps came up through the Kennedy administration so I went off to Turkey. After three or four years I just packed my bags and said well maybe it s better over there. And so from 65 to 67, that s where I was; I was in the Peace Corps teaching at the University, the medical college in Istanbul. And then over there, Robert F. Kennedy had a 1966 speech in South Africa in Cape Town that was a riveter. And somehow through the Peace Corps mechanism we heard about that speech. We were getting an exhortation to become involved. And so that s why when I came back and I enrolled in the University of Virginia Law School, they had not had African American women, they had only three African Americans, period. I said, look, I m from Virginia, I m going to apply. If I do not get admitted, then Thurgood Marshall will have a test case. But I m going. I said, if they don t admit me,

16 PAGE 16 then they will pay my tuition at some other university which was the practice in the South, even then. And so that s when I went there and I decided I was not going to be run out of UVA. I was not going to be a statistic. I was going to graduate. And so when I got the job on Wall Street, Mr. Nixon s law firm, Wall Street, I said I can t do it because I can t look myself in the mirror. And it was paying $18,000 a year then, that was big money, big money. But I said I can t do it and so I called up Jack Greenberg at the Legal Defense Fund and I started litigating death penalty cases throughout the South. And so my thirty, thirtyfive years as a lawyer has been informed by the lives of these three men. And I met Martin Luther King once, only once when he came to Howard in JUAN WILLIAMS: What did you think? ELAINE JONES: You know I often wonder why it is when you take on these issues of social justice and equal rights and civil rights, why is it so allconsuming? We use you up. We don t leave anything left for you. You know, he was tired then. He was always tired, you know I understood, but he was tired and rest deprived. And that s what we do, we ask people to lead and then we say we want you to give every last measure while you lead us, and you may be consumed because of that leadership. And then, after they ve given their last measure, we forget to follow through. [applause]

17 PAGE 17 MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: This period of 63 to 68 and I would just say from 1960 to 68 or from the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement when we were all conscious of Dr. King, for me was a period of great hopefulness and great transforming change. I did listen very carefully. I realize I met President Kennedy in 1961 in my first year of law school because I had heard the call, Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. I went on Crossroads Africa, and our group went to the White House and John F. Kennedy spoke to us the day before we were going off to Africa. But this period, when as a young person And I ve always felt so grateful to be born who I was, where I was, when I was with the convergence of great leaders and great transforming events. It was really a period, in my view, like Seamus Heaney says, Where hope and history rhymed, because we had an outlet for youthful frustrations. Always hated segregation, always hated being contained. And so Dr. King, in a sense, opened up new outlets. You had President Kennedy giving new senses of hope that change was possible. New energy and new vigor. And then you had Robert Kennedy coming on the scene. And it was a period of great hopefulness. You had new legislation. I think the lessons that began from the speech at the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act of 64, student sit-ins, and public accommodations were opened all over the place, and the Kennedy Justice Department was on the right side of moving that along.

18 PAGE 18 So I guess I think that the lesson from this period was how possible transforming change is. And for a young person who had grown up in a totally segregated state, to see the walls of apartheid begin to crumble, both through the courts starting with Brown and then the Montgomery Bus Boycott, I think it taught us how hard change is. And what I love, and I try to distinguish between the first part of the sixties and the second part of the sixties, was the sacrificial witness that was provided by all. I mean John Kennedy obviously was killed. So were the next two. But we had examples of adults and young people and children being willing to sacrifice everything to bring about change. And then, third, I think we learned about the importance of multiple roles. Peter says that it was an uncomfortable relationship, but Robert Kennedy had a different role as Attorney General in his brother s administration, and he was trying to control the agenda. But Dr. King had another agenda, of trying to push the administration and transcend the law. And I think the fourth thing to come from this was to watch how people can change. Because I think to watch and to get to know Robert Kennedy in those last years was very, very moving. And while Peter s comments emphasized how much of a listener he was, Dr. King was also a listener. He was unbelievably patient in listening to young people. And Stokely, I remember Meredith March, and every night after the march, we would all

19 PAGE 19 gather and Stokely would gripe and everybody would gripe. And Dr. King would sit there, and that s when Black Power began to come forward, and he would say, Is it so bad Stokely, is it that bad, Stokely? But night after night, and his stricken face, when one got to Greenwood and Willie Ricks got up and started yelling, black power, and using that. And then in Jackson, the same thing. But he constantly listened. In addition to listening, Robert Kennedy was somebody who was insatiably curious. And boy would he ask all kinds of questions all the time. What are you reading? Every time. I don t think I ever saw him in those last fifteen months where he would not ask, What are you reading? He even had the nerve to ask me in the car, Who are you dating? I said, It was none of your business. [laughter] But I also associated with Robert Kennedy, and it was very moving in those last months JUAN WILLIAMS: Let me say that we want to look at an intersection that comes between these two characters. We have some tape of Robert Kennedy speaking, as news comes to his campaign while he is in Indianapolis, of Martin Luther King Jr s assassination. I m going to ask that that tape be played. But you spoke about this as an optimistic period. I must say that if you look back on it, you can look back on it as a period that seems rather dark. You have the President s assassination in 63; you move forward and you have

20 PAGE 20 Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. You have riots. You have the whole rise of the Black Power Movement, almost as a result of alienation from the political process and the sense of optimism about the possibility of peaceful, social change. In addition to which there s this ongoing discontent in terms of riots in the big cities that are sweeping the country, that will lead to some political response, you know, crime and law and order and all the rest. So I wanted to ask you about the dark side of this picture. But first I was hoping that we could hear what Robert Kennedy had to say in his unusually elegant form that day. And it really picks up with something you spoke about, Peter, which is his love of the Greeks, because you hear that language as you hear him speak here. [video] JUAN WILLIAMS: You could see there some evidence of that kind of sadness, and I wish we had the opportunity to hear the entire speech because it is an amazing presentation, but I wanted to ask each one of you, beginning here with you Peter, about the impact that you felt from the dark side of this period, and what we saw of the character of Robert Kennedy and King. PETER EDELMAN: It s a complicated decade, certainly. It s certainly one of the most unusual and filled with change of all kinds of any decade in our history. We have, of course, the decade of the Civil War; and we went

21 PAGE 21 through World War II; and we went through the Great Depression so there have been other momentous times in the history of our country in which both the greatness of our country manifested itself and there was terrible tragedy. And that is the character that is a fact about the 1960s. Marian was starting to say that it kind of divides itself into two halves. So I m always troubled, to be honest with you, when I read, which tends to be people who come from a different political place than I do, who read the sixties as a time of counter culture and drugs and long hair and hippies and things being out of control, as well as what I think you were getting at, which is the changes that occurred within the Civil Rights Movement where there was a move from inclusion to exclusion within the movement which was deeply troubling to many people. So it was a time [where] there was horrible loss in so many ways, but so much achievement. And that s what Marian was talking about. Someone will ask and so I will answer badly, but I will answer the only answer that there is to the question which is what do we do without those three great leaders? What do we do in a time when we don t have leadership like that? And the answer is we have ourselves. We can hope that people will come along whom we can follow, but when we ve lost leaders of that caliber, we still have ourselves. Everybody in this room and everybody around the country, with all that s going on in our country and the world, if we don t take personal responsibility one person can make a difference if we don t

22 PAGE 22 take personal responsibility and get together and organize and make those waves that multiply on up, we have only ourselves to blame. [applause] JUAN WILLIAMS: Elaine, let me come to you with the same question. Here s a period where you do have people turning away from non-violent social change, becoming involved in violence. Did it drain the optimism from you? ELAINE JONES: If it had, Juan, I wouldn t have spent the next thirty-five years in the courts trying to make a difference. The sixties It was the first time that I can remember, really, that this country had a national conversation on race. It had never happened before. We had the Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch and the courts all talking about race. I didn t always like what they were saying about it, but we were talking about it. We have yet to be healed in America. So it was important. And when you look at the sixties The civil rights laws on which we rest today, 2005, were passed in the sixties. And it came out of that destruction and that chaos, and all of that activity. A lot of positive things went on. People realized they could have an impact on their present and their future for their families. The 64 Civil Rights Act, you know, Juan, the importance of that. It s critical public accommodations, education the whole thing. In 65, the Voting Rights Act, you know, critical. And the 68 Housing Act. And you know we d never get civil rights bills enacted into law in periods of calm.

23 PAGE 23 JUAN WILLIAMS: Well, let me follow up on that with you. But you also get then, after Robert Kennedy s death, you get Nixon s victory. ELAINE JONES: The backlash, the reaction. JUAN WILLIAMS: Well, tell me. ELAINE JONES: I mean point/counterpoint. What happens, I think, President Johnson had it right when he signed the Civil Rights Act. He said, you know, We re turning over the South. And what s happening is that the South really was Democratic, it was the code words. And eventually the South, in a backlash I think, reacted to a lot of the progress made in the sixties So, over the course of the next 20, 25 years it became finally Republican. Race has a lot to do with that. Look at the politics racial politics divisiveness wins elections. They learned that. And so that is what has happened. We ve been pitted against one another for political gain. JUAN WILLIAMS: Now Marian, let me come to you with just the same thing, but let me put it in a more personal context. If Dr. King had lived, if Robert Kennedy had lived, do you think, one, Robert Kennedy would have been elected president and defeated Nixon; and, two, do you believe that it would have changed the political agenda that we ve seen? Without a doubt

24 PAGE 24 it would have changed that political agenda, so let s just stay with the first question. MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Of course he would have beaten Nixon. [applause] And of course we would have brought about different changes because after the depression of Dr. King s death, we still had Robert Kennedy, who ended up being assassinated and dying on my birthday in fact in But we had hope. Let me just say that a lot of things happened after the chaos of their deaths. Like Elaine, who went off and pursued, continued to try to keep planting seeds to end racial discrimination through the courts, I went off and started planting the seeds, after the Poor People s Campaign, which has resulted in expansions of Medicaid, the child health insurance There are 25 laws on the books that weren t there. And I just want to tell you that during the Nixon years, because of what Robert Kennedy and MLK put into What they began Because change is hard and it takes a long time. We had the largest expansion in child and family nutrition programs during the Nixon years because of the chain of events that had been begun by Robert Kennedy. Food stamps, which today is our major safety net program, serves 25 million people and another 20 million are eligible. That all happened because of what Robert Kennedy and Dr. King did. And they triggered the McGovern

25 PAGE 25 committee and the doctors from the Field Foundation. During those Nixon years, significant progress began to be made, despite all the bad things that happened. But I think we need to look now at the last 30 years, where the seeds were planted in the Civil Rights Act and look at the millions of children who have health care, who have child care, who have a head start. Dr. King dropped in when Head Start was being threatened in Mississippi and was called an outside agitator by Sarge Shriver as we were struggling for refunding. But the fact is Head Start has moved from 355 million to a 6.5 billion dollar program, and so change didn t stop, and in many ways it was spurred on by our looking at the sacrifices that were made, our seeing what was possible, and our determination to move to the next stage of movement building, which is the intersection of race and poverty. JUAN WILLIAMS: Let me ask people in the audience to line up to ask some questions about this period. We have about ten minutes to go. But as we do this, I just wanted to follow up on something you said, Marian, which is you look at all the policy and programmatic efforts that have borne fruit, but you didn t mention President Johnson. And I know that historically there was a great deal of tension between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Why didn t you mention Lyndon Johnson? MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: I didn t mention Lyndon Johnson because in many ways it was, he was We wouldn t have a lot of the civil

26 PAGE 26 rights laws and the War on Poverty but that was the OEO and the Poverty Program and the Head Start which made the next step from where we were in Mississippi in the summer project. It became the salvation or the lifeline in many ways in Mississippi and it was out of Head Start that we ended up having the kinds of hearings that led to the awareness of hunger, which led to the awareness of the need to try to talk about proactive, social and economic underpinnings for children and for old people. Lyndon Johnson was obviously a very crucial actor. But by the time we got to 1965 the war in Vietnam was distracting him. And so it was because of these extra voices of King and Kennedy that we were able to push ahead on the poor, even as they were also raising their voices against the war in Vietnam. I guess the last thing I want to say that I just remember so vividly, not only RFK S speech but the day after Dr. King was shot, going out into public schools in D.C. and having an year old boy, whom I was telling not to loot, and not to go out and riot and telling them they would ruin their future. And I remember this little boy looking me straight in the eye and saying, Lady, what future? I ain t got no future, I ain t got nothing to lose. But secondly, the presence. I mean Robert Kennedy and Ethel, I don t know if you remember this, walking into the inner city right after the riots, going to Walter Fauntroy s Church, being present, walking down the streets that were still simmering, that presence of leadership. Somehow one never lost hope because, I guess, what one had come out of You know Brown didn t

27 PAGE 27 start in 1954, Charlie Houston and all of them began a long time ago. I ve always had this forty-year view of transforming change and I ve seen it. We ve got to move on to the next period of transforming change. But it takes lots of seeds and lots of sacrifice, but you honor that sacrifice by keeping going. And we ve learned that struggle can pay if you just don t give up. JUAN WILLIAMS: Peter, did you want to jump in on that, about the relationship with LBJ? PETER EDELMAN: I think Marian said it. I think we should give LBJ the credit that he absolutely deserves, if you read all of Caro s books. To some extent you have to wonder why we never completely understood why he cared so much about civil rights, but he really did. And the groundwork had been laid by the movement, and by President Kennedy making the proposal which was in June of But Lyndon Johnson went to Howard University and he had said, We shall overcome. Lyndon Johnson said that. And it was on his watch that largely, and partly in memory of President Kennedy, that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the finishing up of the creation of legal rights and efforts, you know, that were flawed But, between the Great Society and the War on Poverty, all those laws and programs are still on the books. Medicare and Medicaid, Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, now messed up with No Child Left Behind, and efforts across a number of

28 PAGE 28 different areas. And so he did a terrible thing by expanding the war in Vietnam. But let s give appropriate credit as well. JUAN WILLIAMS: Elaine, you look like you ve tired out that microphone. [laughter] ELAINE JONES: I just want to say on Lyndon Johnson also, he really worked on trying to desegregate the courts. And he understood the importance of symbolism, although Thurgood Marshall was much more than a symbol. Lyndon Johnson had to spend a whole lot of political capital on getting him up to the Supreme Court. Before that President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy in getting him on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. It took a lot of energy to get that done. And Constance Megan Martley who we just lost, I mean she went up to the court during that period. So they realized that civil rights lawyers could also be judges. That hadn t been understood before, and so we thanked them for that personally. JUAN WILLIAMS: So let s go to the audience. Let s start over here on my left. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Mr. Edelman, Mrs. Edelman, Mrs. Jones, you all have unique perspectives into the roles of law, politics, civil rights in the United States, you too Mr. Williams. But how would you say the position or

29 PAGE 29 the attitude of politicians have changed since you guys started and now in their attitudes toward race and equality? JUAN WILLIAMS: All right, so this is a question about the politics of race and how it s changed from that period that we re discussing today, and we ll go back to the election of President Kennedy, the sixties. If you were to go from that period to now, and I think this is really an appropriate question, given Peter, in your response, you mentioned how there was tension between the civil rights activists and the politicians in terms of the rate of change, and we know that from Elaine s comment that I m sorry it was Marian s comment that oftentimes people were disappointed even in Robert Kennedy in terms of the judges who had been appointed or the decisions that had been made. So what s the difference between, let s say, Robert Kennedy the politician of that period and the kind of politics we see now with regard to race? PETER EDELMAN: I think you have to talk about the underlying views in the country, so that it s interactive. The people who hold office are the people who got elected to office. And so I think that we have a lot of work to do. One thing that I think is tremendously, has enormous potential This is a very different country in terms of who s in this audience, compared to an audience 30 or 40 years ago. We ve had huge immigration into this country that I think has wonderfully enriched the United States. And so when we talk about race as an issue, as much as we still have a serious

30 PAGE 30 agenda for full equality for African Americans, we re talking about Latinos, and people from all parts of the world who make up the diversity of this country. And I think that has tremendous political implications that we haven t realized as yet. So I would view this as a transitional time. This is a bad time politically. And so what happened about race specifically is that it became a no-no to say the N word. And, you know, you couldn t stand in the school house door anymore, and you couldn t make comments about all the niggers I know being fat and happy, which is something that Governor Ross Barnett actually said publicly in Mississippi. So you re not allowed to do that anymore. And the consequence has been politics where it s a euphemism, it s been the politics of crime and welfare, where we end up after all that legislation, after we shall overcome with over two million people under lock and key, disproportionately African American and Latino in this country. If you don t think that s a racial issue, you re on some other planet. So what s happened is we ve had a change in all of that. And we just need to get back to what I said before, which is to get to work in using the assets we have, which is ourselves. JUAN WILLIAMS: Well let me have Elaine chime in here because if you look at the numbers, Elaine, you see, for example, in terms of voting for President Bush, if it was just a matter of not only overwhelming support of

31 PAGE 31 white men for President Bush, it s also a majority of white women voted for President Bush. ELAINE JONES: I m sure a lot of them want their vote back. [laughter] What has happened though to us in the past 30 years is that it has been racial politics. We have been bombarded with racial quotas to divide us. You know, this group against that group, throwing out buzz words like quotas. And it has won elections. It s been practiced and it s developed as a fine art. What we, the people, have to do, we have to do it, we have to turn this thing around. And we can do it. Looking at Bob s issues Bob Moses raised the question about the quality of public education. It is not in the Constitution. You won t find the word education in the Constitution. It s not there. Now it s almost beyond race in our divisiveness, in our narrowness, it s about us as Americans. Can we compete? Can we be a united society to hold onto and develop our greatness? We can t do it if we do not educate all of our children! All of our children! [applause] And so what we have to do is we have to educate our neighbors and our friends and say, You can do all you can for your child and your grandchild, but that s not going to save us. That s not going to save us. You have got to be concerned with these kids who do not have access, who do not have resources, but who have brains that can be developed. And we ve got the money, we ve got the money but we don t have the will. And we have to

32 PAGE 32 start holding these politicians accountable when they come to us using buzz words and talking about the death penalty and gay rights, which is peripheral stuff that belongs in the state s inner house. They re not federal issues, they re not issues that the Executive Branch deals with, but they use them to get votes! And so we need to hold them with our questions, and we need to stay on it. And it s not just the level of the president and the congress, it starts with our folk at home. Local folk. It s what the students did in the sixties, and we ve got to take that back now, and take those lessons and apply them to the first part of the 21st century. [applause] JUAN WILLIAMS: So Marian, let me ask you not to answer this question so we can get another question from the audience. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, hi, let me start by explaining some things. My stepson was killed in Iraq. He was a lance corporal for the United States Marine Corps. And we re Hispanic, a poor family, I guess you could say. Two of the things that we found out very much after the fact We re also a blended family, or a divorced family. We found out, after the fact, that he was targeted by the recruiter, first of all for being Hispanic, and second of all for being poor. That s information that is given unless you can opt out. So it s been more than a year since that has occurred.

33 PAGE 33 My husband and I have been working with peace activists, but there s something missing. I grew up in New York, and if part of the rainbow s missing, it s not a rainbow, and it doesn t give me hope. And it s been mainly black, sorry, the black community and people of color of other languages have been missing. And I was wondering if each of the speakers could give a tip, a simple tip Because the thing back then in the sixties was that there was less technology available but a lot of grassroots, simple things that were done It s missing today. JUAN WILLIAMS: So let me get this straight. You think that in terms of the anti-war movement, the anti-iraq war movement, am I right? That what s missing is a sense of interracial support? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Definitely. For instance, the March on Washington, that Cindy Sheehan [organized] was pretty much all white. And then the Millions More March was pretty much all black. Why? JUAN WILLIAMS: Okay so who wants to Marian? MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Can I just say One: the seeds of what has to be a cross-racial, cross-class movement were again planted in the Poor People s Campaign where Dr. King brought white, black, brown, red folk together for the first time to put a face on poverty that was not just

34 PAGE 34 black and not just inner-city and not just Southern. And the next movement has to be cross racial. May I just say I am so sorry about your son. And it is always poor minorities who are recruited, children, both for war and also we have this phenomenon called the cradle to prison pipeline, and our children are being rooted into a pipeline to prison. Prison is the new slavery. A black boy has a one in three chance, who is four years old today, has a one in three chance of ending up in prison. And the disparate application of laws in our juvenile justice and criminal justice system result in a black young person on a drug offense being 48 times more likely to go off to prison, and a Latino young person being 9 times more likely to go off to prison for the same offense as a white young person. So we ve got to deal with the growing criminalization of our children across race and class. But I want to give a little hope because there is a lot of cross-racial stuff going on. There were a lot of young leaders meeting around the country this time last Sunday for six hours. Young Latinos and young blacks and young Asians were meeting in my office with Harry there. We have down at Haley Farm young Asians, all kinds of young people are coming together because we have been quietly trying to convene young people to try to be the kind of role model and provide mentoring. Every summer, freedom schools are being run by a thousand young people Latino, black, brown. So there s a lot going on in communities and a great recognition by many that one has to

35 PAGE 35 talk about a movement and new leadership across race and class. So it s happening. JUAN WILLIAMS: Marian, your comment raised three questions. The first one was Harry who? MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Harry Belefonte. JUAN WILLIAMS: And you didn t mention whites. MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Whites are engaged in everything. Again, I want to tell you there s an awful lot of work going on in many networks all over this country. With whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians, at the adult level and with young people. But also trying to get structures for advocacy and service, and for change, because change is much more complex now. JUAN WILLIAMS: All right now let me ask Elaine. Elaine I want you just to get right to the nub of this question. If you look at the anti-war marches, the Sheehan type of event, you don t see people of color. Why? ELAINE JONES: Let me show you the glass half-full answer to that question, which is there were marches. There was the march on the war in Iraq. I mean it was well attended and it was there, and the activism, and