Baldwin–Kennedy meeting

Ultimately the meeting demonstrated the urgency of the racial situation and was a positive turning point in Kennedy's attitude towards the Civil Rights Movement.

After formally abolishing slavery, the United States maintained a racist society through Jim Crow laws and other forms of systemic inequality.

[3] Baldwin, already a popular novelist, had recently gained additional fame by virtue of The Fire Next Time, a book of two essays urging action against racism in America.

[5] According to Clarence Benjamin Jones, an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. and participant in the eventual meeting, in May 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy asked novelist James Baldwin to organize a "quiet, off-the-record, unpublicized get-together of prominent Negroes" to discuss the state of race relations.

[7] To meet with Kennedy and his aide Burke Marshall, Baldwin brought:[8] Jerome Smith was a young black civil rights worker who had been beaten and jailed in Mississippi.

[14] In Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart,[15] a documentary about Lorraine Hansbury which aired on the PBS series American Masters in 2018, Harry Belafonte recalled that at this point Smith "bared his soul and all his pain and then said very aggressively 'Let me tell you something, in the midst of our oppression you expect to find us giddily going off to fight a war (i.e., Vietnam) that's your war, that's unjust, unfair, and so dishonorable it should shame you.

Hansberry told Kennedy: "Look, if you can't understand what this young man is saying, then we are without any hope at all because you and your brother are representatives of the best that a White America can offer; and if you are insensitive to this, then there's no alternative except our going in the streets ... and chaos".

[16] According to historian Arthur Schlesinger, "she talked wildly about giving guns to Negroes in the street so they could start killing white people.

"[17][18][19] Kennedy said that his family, immigrants from Ireland, had suffered discrimination upon arriving in America but were able to overcome their hardships to achieve political success, and that the U.S. might have a black president in 40 years.

[21] Though billed as off-the-record, details of the meeting were recounted a few weeks later in The New York Times in an article by James Reston about the Kennedy administration's approach to race relations.

Specifically, Jones notes that he had requested that the President personally accompany University of Alabama students as a way to help assure successful integration.

"[27] After the meeting, Robert Kennedy ordered FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to increase surveillance of Baldwin and tap the home phone of Jones.

It was all emotion, hysteria—they stood up and orated—they cursed—some of them wept and left the room.Schlesinger and others nevertheless describe the moment as a long-term turning point in RFK's attitude towards the Black liberation struggle.

Robert Kennedy was the only White House adviser to actively encourage his brother to give the speech, in which the president publicly proposed legislation that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.