The State Must Provide by Adam Harris

Author:Adam Harris [Harris, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

On March 1, 1961, there was a sign that, perhaps, Kennedy did genuinely care about civil rights. In the East Room of the White House, Kennedy informed reporters that an executive order was on the way. That past September, when Kennedy was running for office instead of occupying it, he suggested that there were a range of civil rights actions he could take without Congress. This first executive order was one of them.

Kennedy’s executive order was not supposed to change education; he had his eyes on the workforce. Within a few days, he planned to issue an order that would “strengthen the employment opportunities both in and out of government, for all Americans,” he told reporters.26 Black people were being systematically excluded from any number of federal jobs. How could they expect to be treated fairly in the private sector when the public sector, which professed to take their equality seriously, denied them?

Diversifying the federal government was the low-hanging fruit, and one reporter wanted to ask Kennedy about the nectar a little higher up. In January, the US Commission for Civil Rights had issued a report on public higher education.27 The report outlined the federal government’s role in creating separate and unequal public colleges, the continued underfunding of those institutions, and how federal policy could ameliorate those failures. The commission offered three proposals as remedies. Chief among them: federal money should go only to public institutions that did not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. What, the reporter asked, did the president think of denying aid to universities that discriminated against minority students?

Kennedy, who had not included any prohibitions on aid for segregated schools in his recent education legislation, dodged the question. It was under study as part of an overall look at “where the federal government might justly place its power and influence to expand civil rights,” he said.28

Five days later, Kennedy charged on with signing Executive Order 10925. The order required government contractors to “take affirmative action29 to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated equally during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” It would also establish the President’s Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, the forerunner to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Kennedy appointed his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, to be the chair of the new organization. Kennedy stressed that his order was “both an announcement of our determination to end job discrimination once and for all, and an effective instrument to realize that objective.”30

The secretary of labor, Arthur Goldberg, was named vice chair. Goldberg, who was white haired and wore thick-rimmed glasses, would be nominated by Kennedy the next year to serve as an associate justice on the US Supreme Court, but, at the time, Kennedy had charged the prominent labor attorney with making this new White House initiative a reality. Goldberg staffed his own department quickly, appointing three Black men to high-ranking positions, including George L. P. Weaver, who had served as the

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