"As time goes on, people educated in our colleges got the requisite brain-washing"
Since '60, R's have re-educated minorities about hate.
On October 19, 1960, less than a month before the election, police arrested civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., along with 53 other African American protestors at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta, for refusing to leave tables at the segregated Magnolia Room Restaurant. Five days later, authorities released the other protestors from jail, but King was sentenced to four months’ hard labor for supposedly driving with a suspended license, and was transferred to Reidsville State Prison. Members of the King family feared that the minister would be murdered while in custody.
Nixon instructed aides to tell the press that the Vice President would offer no comment on the issue. The Kennedy campaign, however, saw an immediate opportunity to gain ground with African American voters. Wofford feared for King’s safety and sent an urgent message to Kennedy, who was campaigning in Chicago and in Michigan. Kennedy placed an immediate call to Mrs. King and told her he would see if he could assist the family.
Campaign manager Bobby Kennedy phoned the judge who had sentenced King. “It just burned me up . . . to think of that bastard sentencing a citizen to four months of hard labor for a minor traffic offense and screwing up my brother’s campaign and making our country look ridiculous in front of the world,” Bobby Kennedy later said. “. . . I made it clear that if he was a decent American he would let King out of jail by sundown.” It took a little longer, but within days authorities released the minister from jail. The incident got relatively little coverage in the white press, but word spread quickly in the African American community. The civil rights leader’s father, the influential minister Martin Luther King, Sr., had said that, “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion. But now he can be my president, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I’ve got all my votes and I’ve got a suitcase and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”
A blue-bound election pamphlet distributed to African American church congregations quoted the elder King’s endorsement and spread among black congregations in the days leading to the presidential election. Kennedy himself later laughed at the mixed message contained in the African American minister’s words. “He was going to vote against me because I was a Catholic, but since I called his daughter-in-law, he voted for me. That’s a helluva bigoted statement, wasn’t it? Imagine Martin Luther King, Jr., having a bigot for a father.” Then, acknowledging the controversies surrounding Joseph P. Kennedy, Kennedy grinned as he observed, “Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?” Kennedy had won over black voters worried about his Catholic background.
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