Martin Luther King’s Reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis (original) (raw)
Abstract
This research article deals for the first time with the reaction of Martin Luther King Jr. to the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. In doing so, it also presents a document of special relevance: the draft of a previously-unknown private letter from dr. King to President Kennedy, in which the civil rights leader praised Kennedy’s management of that crucial nuclear confrontation between US and USSR and saw in it the potential for détente. The paper reflects on the elements currently available for the interpretation of this piece of evidence and, with regard to the relationship between the two leaders, it argues that the way Kennedy handled the Cuban crisis may well have played a role in Dr. King’s reassessment of Kennedy’s evolving qualities of leadership - a view that King will further develop over the course of 1963 (in the most fruitful months of their cooperation) and will express after Dallas.
Index terms
Keywords:
Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Cuban missile crisis, Cuba, nuclear, Cold war, non-violence, peace, letter, African Americans, US, Clarence B Jones, Khrushchev, reaction, 1962, Sixties
Notes
1 The Cuban missile crisis represented a turning point in the Cold war and in the nuclear age. Literature on that superpower confrontation is vast and growing. Among the many works, see Ernst R. May, Philip D. Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997); Sheldon M. Stern, Averting the Final Failure: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Aleksandr Fursenko, Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997); Tomas Diez Acosta, October 1962. The ‘Missile’ Crisis as seen from Cuba, (New York: Pathfinder, 2002); Michael Dobbs, One minute to Midnight. Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the brink of nuclear war (New York: Knopf, 2008); Alice George, Awaiting Armageddon. How Americans faced the Cuban Missile Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); The Global Cuban Missile crisis at 50, CWIHP Bulletin, No.17/18, Fall 2012; Leonardo Campus, I sei giorni che sconvolsero il mondo. La crisi dei missili di Cuba e le sue percezioni internazionali (Firenze: Le Monnier, 2014); Len Scott, Gerald Hughes (eds.), The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Critical Reappraisal (New York: Routledge, 2015).
2 The full text of the address is in Laurence Chang, Peter Kornbluh, eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis - A National Security Archive Documents Reader (New York: The New Press, 1998), 163.
3 More specifically, diplomatic historian James Hershberg recently argued that while “probably the peril of intentional escalation was less acute than once formerly believed (…) the risk of inadvertent escalation appears to have been even greater”. James G. Hershberg, The Cuban missile crisis, in Melvyn P. Leffler, Odd Arne Westad (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Vol.2, 65-87
4 Arthur Schlesinger, Foreword, in Robert Kennedy, Thirteen days. A memoir of the Cuban missile crisis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999 edition), 7.
5 Leonardo Campus, “Missiles have no colour: African Americans’ reactions to the Cuban missile crisis”, Cold War History, 15, 1 (February 2015): 49-72
6 On the crisis perceptions in the US and the reactions of the press and among the intellectuals, see Campus, Giorni, 147-231. A special survey carried out nationally by Gallup just hours after the President’s TV speech recorded that, among those who listened to it, 84% approved of his decision, 12% refused to express an opinion, while only 4% disapproved. Tom V. Smith, “The Cuban Missile Crisis and U.S. Public”, Public Opinion Quarterly, 67 (Summer 2003): 271. Also, among the several thousands messages that citizens sent to the White House, the ratio was 22 in favour to 1 against. George, Awaiting, xviii
7 “Harlemites Backing President’s Stand”, New York Amsterdam News, 27 October 1962, 1
8 “Struggle for integration must continue, King says”, Crimson, 25 October 1962.
9 This detail comes from the organizer of the Tocsin rally, the activist Todd Gitlin, future President of the Students for a Democratic Society. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties – Years of hope, days of rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), 99
10 Jet, 8 November 1962, 17. Incidentally, this comment was quoted later by the militant activist in exile Robert Williams in his newsletter from Cuba, with the word ‘military’ put in capital letters, in criticism of King’s supposed non-violent attitude. The Crusader, 4, 5 (January 1963): 3. Robert F. Williams papers. M4389, Reel 11, Group 1, Series 7, John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Berlin.
11 In May 1961, answering a letter he received from Barbara Lindsay, King had said: “I think our country has done not only a disservice to its own citizens but to the whole of humanity in dealing with the Cuban situation. ... Unless we as a nation join the revolution, and go back to the revolutionary spirit that characterized the birth of our nation, I am afraid that we will be relegated to a second-class power in the world with no real moral voice to speak to the conscience of humanity.” King also added his name to a petition condemning the attempted invasion. Brenda Gayle Plummer, Castro in Harlem: A Cold War Watershed, in Allen Hunter, ed., Rethinking the Cold War: Essays on Its Dynamics, Meaning, and Morality (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 147; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind. Black Americans and US Foreign Affairs, 1953–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 305. (The latter also documents a similar criticism of that invasion coming from the black press too).
12 Adam Fairclough, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the War in Vietnam, in Michael Krenn, ed., The African American Voice in U.S. Foreign Policy Since the World War II (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 255-277. Clayborne Carson, Tenisha H. Armstrong, Susan A. Carson, Erin K. Cook, Susan Englander, The Martin Luther King, Jr., Encyclopedia (Wesport: Greenwood, 2008). In 1968, five days before his death, King added that the US war in Vietnam was “one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world”.
13 The quotation marks here suggested some doubts on the suitability of a term that was recurrent in the international public debate of those weeks.
14 Martin Luther King, “New Year Hopes”, The New York Amsterdam News, 5 January, 1963
15 On this post-crisis triumphalism George, Awaiting, xxii, 104; Campus, Giorni, 149-152. Said triumphalism was particularly visible in the press of those days (one example being Joseph Alsop’s editorial on the New York Hearld Tribune, titled “Victory!”),See also Dobbs, Midnight, 337 and Richard Reeves, President Kennedy. Profile of power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 426. Reeves mentions “The United States’ sense of triumph in Cuba” and reports the poll documenting Kennedy’s rise in approval rates, jumping from 66 to 77% after the Cuban crisis.
16 The Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed in Moscow on August 5, 1963. Before the Cuban crisis, it had been unfruitfully negotiated for years in Geneva. It was the first international agreement over nuclear arms control. On US-USSR relations in 1963, see Michael Beschloss, The crisis years, 1960-1963 (New York: E. Burlingame Books - Harpercollins, 1991), 546-641. Consensus among scholars on the impact of the Cuban crisis on 1963 détente and negotiations of the LTBT is wide. See also, for instance, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1978) 530. David Holloway, Nuclear Weapons and the escalation of the Cold War, 1945-1962, in Cambridge, Vol. 1, 397; Campbell Craig, Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War, The politics of insecurity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009),212-213. For a partially different opinion, see Dario Fazzi, “The Blame and the Shame: Kennedy's Choice to Resume Nuclear Tests in 1962”, Peace Change, 39: 1–22,16).
17 In the annual report on civil rights that he published on ‘The Nation’, King lamented that 1962 was “the year that civil rights was displaced as the dominant issue in domestic politics”, though acknowledging that “1962 was the year of the Cuban crisis, which understandably tended to dwarf all other issues.” Martin Luther King, “A Bold design for a new south”, The Nation, March 30, 1963, 259-262. The article is also available here: www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/bold-design-new-south
18 Letter from Stanley Levison to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., + Attached, 7 December, 1978, in Box 403, Folder RFK, A. Schlesinger Papers, Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library. The previous quote also comes from this Levison letter.
19 In his letter to King, Jones noted that two positions existed: “On the one hand, there are those who feel someone of ‘Dr. King’s stature’ should say something ‘forcefully’ on the Cuban crisis, while, on the other hand, there are those who think that you have only a narrow concern for civil rights and, therefore, have no definitive thoughts or position on the matter.”’ He believed both groups missed the point. So he proposed King a text to be sent as a private letter to Kennedy. He argued that “ (…) at least if no statement is issued by you to the public at large on the Cuban crisis, it would be significant, in our judgment, that your reaction to the present Cuban crisis be made knew to the President of the United States. (…) your status as a leader requires that you not be silent about an event and issues so decisive to the word”. Jones also strongly regretted “that virtually every other Negro leader of stature has been silent on this question, to their discredit”. Finally he suggested to have the letter delivered to the President through Burke Marshall (Assistant to the Attorney General Robert Kennedy and in charge of civil rights matters), or alternatively through Andrew Hatcher (Assistant to the White House Press Secretary, the first African American to hold such position). Letter from Clarence B. Jones to Martin Luther King, Jr., Nov. 1, 1962, in Box 32, Folder 5, The Martin Luther King, Jr., Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.
20 Clayborne Carson, Tenisha H. Armstrong, eds., The papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Vol. VII (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014), xix-xxi, 172, 175, 349, 606; The King Center online database: www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/telegram-mlk-president-john-f-kennedy
21 With the partial exception of the letter dated March 17, 1961, in which King also congratulated Kennedy for his election before asking to meet with him to discuss civil rights (“within the next three or four weeks”. The meeting did not happen until October 16). Carson, Armstrong, eds., Papers, VII, 175
22 See for instance: Beschloss, Crisis, 506; Robert Kennedy, Thirteen days (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968), 98; Sheldon Stern, The week the world stood still (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 112.
23 Beschloss, Crisis, 542; Dobbs, Minute, 337.
24 In December, the editorial of the African American newspaper “Chicago Defender” would also give credit to the President for having “shown the country a good example by refusing to gloat over the Soviet Union’s backdown in Cuba”. It also advised its readers to indulge in “neither bluster nor braggadocio”. “The Voice of Wisdom”, Chicago Defender, 11 December, 1962, 12.
25 Stanley Levison to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., attached, in Box 403, Folder RFK, A. Schlesinger Papers, Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
26 He promised to send us “a simple statement confirming the authenticity of the document” (Email to the author, 13 October, 2011). Ultimately, however, he was unable to provide details, despite repeated invitations and questions on our part to help clarify the matter for historical accuracy.
27 The Martin Luther King, Jr., Encyclopedia (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2008), 164. On May 29, 1962, King had also written a letter of recommendation for Jones, affirming: “Ever since I have known Mr. Jones, I have always seen him as a man of sound judgment, deep insights, and great dedication. I am also convinced that he is a man of great integrity”. http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_jones_clarence_benjamin_1931/.
28 Clarence B Jones was born in 1931. In 1960 he joined the team of lawyers defending Martin Luther King. In 1963, as the Georgian pastor was jailed in Birmingham for demonstrating during that civil rights campaign, Jones secretly took King’s manuscript, that was then to be published and become famous as ‘Letter from Birmingham jail’. He also contributed to the first drafting of the noted speech King delivered during the March of Washington and later to King’s speech against Vietnam war of April 4, 1967 (together with Vincent Harding and Andrew Young). http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_jones_clarence_benjamin_1931/; http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/theme/2646 Incidentally, a scholarly debate has developed around King’s authorship issues, mostly due his (posthumously discovered) plagiarism of portions of his PhD thesis. However this is not of direct relevance here, as King’s frequent use of speechwriters and ghostwriters (such as Jones and Levison) as a civil rights activist simply followed a common practice among public orators and prominent leaders in general. On these issues, see David J. Garrow, “King’s Plagiarism. Imitation, Insecurity and transformation”, The Journal of American History,78, 1 (June 1991): 86-92.
29 This however is just a speculative hypothesis, and while the choice by Schlesinger of not pursuing the letter’s publication may in theory be linked also to doubts over its ‘delivered’ status, there are no elements to support this case and it seems more plausible that his choice was based simply on different research priorities. In particular, having already written two big books on the Kennedy brothers and their times, each containing chapters on civil rights and on their relations with King, Schlesinger may well have decided not to return on such topics. (The second of said books in particular – Robert Kennedy and his times - had just been published as he received the document from Levison in 1978).
30 Our italics.
31 It must be born in mind, though, that said footnote is meant to be only a generic reference, made in passing, as also shown by the fact that the text in question is clearly that of a letter, not of a “statement”. Carson, Armstrong, eds., Papers, VII, 215. The volumes of this broad project are published in chronological order, along several years, and the one covering the period of the Cuban crisis has not been released yet.
32 Letter from Clarence B. Jones to Martin Luther King, Jr., 1 Nov., 1962, in Box 32, Folder 5, The Martin Luther King, Jr., Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.
33 The Executive Committee of the National Security Council (Ex-Comm) was the group of government officials and experts that President Kennedy gathered upon the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba to advise him on the handling of the situation. It met regularly during the course of the crisis.
34 Consider for instance sharply contrasting comments on the same policy, such as this telegram sent to the President by the Nobel prize chemist and activist Linus Pauling (cosigned by his wife): “Your horrifying threat of military action on shipping on the high seas and possible massive retaliation by nuclear attack to any resistance places all the American people as well as many people in other countries in grave danger of death through nuclear war. (…) we strongly urge that you immediately withdraw your belligerent orders and threats (…)”. Linus Pauling and Ava Helen Pauling to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 22 October, 1962, in Box 1962a3, Folder 3.2, Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers, Oregon State University Libraries, Manuscripts of Articles. On Pauling’s reaction, see Campus, Giorni, 376-378
35 For instance on his article of March 3, 1962 for “The Nation”, significantly titled “Fumbling on the New Frontier”, Martin Luther King had described Kennedy’s policy on civil rights “cautious and defensive”, “characterized by inadequacy and incompleteness”, and added: “It is a melancholic fact that the Administration is aggressively driving only toward the limited goal of token integration”. Carson, Armstrong, eds., Papers. VII, 412
36 Particularly the letter’s description of how Kennedy planned a not dishonorable doorway for Khrushchev, then avoided overstating the good results and generously characterized his opponent as a statesman in order to bring out positive quality in him and laying basis for future negotiations does closely echo the second of the six principles of nonviolence that King had set forth in his own book, namely that “nonviolence (…) does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding.” Martin Luther King, jr., Stride toward freedom. The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 102.
37 This aim is also explicit in Jones’ letter: “It is probable that, to some extent, by expressing your views you may be able to support and influence the President to a positive and constructive action”. Letter from Clarence B. Jones to Martin Luther King, Jr., 1 Nov., 1962, in Box 32, Folder 5, The Martin Luther King, Jr., Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.
38 Letter from King to Barbara Lindsay, May 4, 1961, reproduced in Carson, Armstrong, eds., Papers, VII, 215-216.
39 Clayborne Carson (ed.), The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., (New York: Warner Books, 1998), 17, 23-24, 121-134. See also http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc\_nonviolent\_resistance/.
40 Vincent J Intondi, African Americans against the Bomb. Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism and Black Freedom Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 63-66. Already in 1958 he had written: “the choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence’’. Quoted in Clayborne Carson, Tenisha H. Armstrong, Adrienne Clay, Susan Carson, Kieran Taylor, eds., The papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Vol. V (Oakland: University of California Press, 2005), 343.
41 On the War Resisters League, see Scott H. Bennett, Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915-1963 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003).
42 V. Intondi, African Americans. Two clear examples of this will suffice. One is Coretta King, who in addition to the struggle for race equality she shared with her husband, had long been a committed campaigner for groups such as the WILPF (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom), WSP (Women Strike for Peace) and SANE (National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy). Intondi, African Americans, 67-70. The other is Bayard Rustin, both a leading civil rights activist and a member of the War Resisters League (WRL). During the Cuban crisis, Rustin organized the largest peace rally of the week in the US, gathering between 8.000 and 10.000 people in front of the UN building, on October 28, 1962. L. Campus , Giorni, 179, 182, 183; Lawrence Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, The struggle against the bomb – A history of the world nuclear disarmament movement, Vol. II (1954-1970) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007) 259.
43 In other words, their two-fold struggle was for desegregation, not disintegration, as in the title of one the most relevant chapters of V. Intondi’s book.
44 An example of this is in Rustin’s 1959 mission to Ghana to try to stop French nuclear testing being conducted in the Sahara desert, or in the message of support sent by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to the delegates at the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung. V. Intondi, African Americans, 4, 51-57, 46-47.
45 C. Craig, F. Logevall, America’s, 10-12, 240, 363
46 On the interconnection between civil rights and foreign affairs, segregation, and colonialism in that phase of the Cold war, see for example Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power. African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Michael L. Krenn (ed.), Race and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Colonial Period to the Present: A Collection of Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), particularly Vol.4 and 5; Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
47 Martin Luther King, “My talk with Ben Bella”, The New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 27, 1962. The article is quoted in Lewis V. Baldwin, To make the wounded whole. The cultural legacy of Martin Luther King, jr (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 176. A typed draft of the article is also available here: www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/ben-bella-conversation
48 Of course this last remark must be understood as referring to the situation of mounting tension related to the general Soviet military build-up in Cuba which was going on since the summer, not yet to the missile crisis itself, considering that Bella left the US en route to Cuba on the morning of October 16, precisely when the photo-evidence of the presence of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba was being secretly communicated to Kennedy himself. So Bella and King could not have been already aware of this new development when they met.
49 Among them, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Billy Graham, A.J. Muste, Thomas Merton. Aldo Capitini, Donald Soper. On the reactions of religious and nonviolent exponents or groups, see Campus, Giorni, 165-166, 251-273, 345-346 .
50 In this regard, see among others Stern, Week.
51 Richard Reeves, President Kennedy. Profile of power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 251, 420; Robert Dallek, An unfinished life. John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2003), 569
52 Robert Dean, Imperial Brotherhood. Gender and the making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). In this regard, the attack on Adlai Stevenson for advising the President to advance specific negotiation proposals to Khrushchev seems to us symptomatic. (On said attack, see Mark White, “Hamlet in New York: Adlai Stevenson during first week of the Cuban Missile Crisis”, in Illinois Historical Journal, 86, 2 (Summer 1993); Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 206, 220).
53 On this reluctance, see, for instance, Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 155; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days. John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), 930; Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 240–241; King himself had publicly criticized the government for this (see above). The same assessment was voiced by the black press: “As the year 1962 came to a close, there were still wide-spread feelings among Negroes that the Kennedy Administration was moving too slowly in the area of civil rights.” “Negro Progress in 1962”, Ebony (January 1963), 85. On the final legacy of the Kennedy administration on civil rights, historians disagree. For a negative assessment, see for instance Dallek, Unfinished; for a positive one, by James Giglio, see James Giglio, Stephen Rabe, Debating the Kennedy Presidency, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
54 T. George Harris, “Eight Views of JFK: The Competent American”, Look, 17 November, 1964 (The relevant section of this article – “Martin Luther King: It’s a difficult thing to teach a President” – is reproduced in Rabe, Giglio, Debating, 190-193).
55 Four examples of this, in chronological order: King’s telegram to Kennedy to compliment him for his TV address to the nation on civil rights issues of June 11, 1963, that he later defined “the most eloquent, passionate and unequivocal plea for civil rights, for justice toward the Negro ever made by any President” (Michael O’Brien, John F. Kennedy, New York: St. Martin’s, 2005, 839); the chat in the Rose Garden that JFK had with King on June 22, 1963, during which the President privately revealed King that he was “under very close surveillance” by the FBI, asking him “to be careful” (Reeves, Kennedy, 530-532; Giglio, Rabe, Debating, 161); the conclusion JFK drew at the end of the same meeting regarding the effort that they were initiating to passing a civil rights bill at the Congress: “This is a very serious fight. (…) What is important is that we preserve confidence in the good faith of each other. (…) We will undoubtedly disagree from time to time on tactics. But the important thing is to keep in touch”. (Schlesinger, A thousand days, 745); the empathic way in which Kennedy greeted King after the march of Washington (“I have a dream”, he said in welcoming him at the White House). After Dallas, King also recalled telling the President frankly that he didn’t want “to be in the position that I couldn’t criticize him if I thought he was wrong”. To which Kennedy replied: “it often helps me to be pushed”. (Both episodes come from T.G. Harris, 'Eight Views of JFK: The Competent American’, Look, 17 November, 1964)
56 In this TV address to the nation, for the first time Kennedy posed the civil rights problem in moral, rather than only legal or local terms, and announced his intention to ask the Congress to enact a bill on civil rights. https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/LH8F_0Mzv0e6Ro1yEm74Ng.aspx (Full video and transcript of the speech). To be complete, it should also be recalled that already in late September 1962, the Kennedy brothers had acted to ensure the enrollment of the African American James Meredith into the thus-far segregated University of Mississippi in Oxford, also known as ‘Ole Miss’. In theory this may have made civil rights activists slightly friendlier to Kennedy’s Cold War initiatives of the following weeks. However, there is currently no specific evidence of said episode having had any impact on Dr. King’s personal assessment of the Presidential handling of the Cuban crisis, unlike the case of some other African Americans observers (see Campus, Missiles, 56, 71). On the ‘Ole Miss’ crisis, see Frank Lambert, The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights v. States’ Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), Charles W. Eagles, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
57 King’s close aide and friend writes the historian that regarding race relations “both [the Kennedys] brothers, scandalously ignorant at the outset, pushed their way to a new perception that was more than the time-worn reformism”. This, he concludes, “explains the de facto alliance they fashioned with Martin and his movement”. Stanley Levison to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., + attached, in Box 403, Folder RFK, A. Schlesinger Papers, Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
58 For instance C.B. Jones’ forthcoming autobiography or the next volume of The papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., that, proceeding chronologically, should also cover the period of the Cuban crisis.
59 Our search in the archives of the Kennedy Library and in the online document databases of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in Boston, of the King Center in Atlanta and of the King’s Institute at Stanford found no such reply.
References
Electronic reference
Leonardo Campus, “Martin Luther King’s Reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis”, European journal of American studies [Online], 12-2 | 2017, Online since 30 October 2017, connection on 09 May 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/12186; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.12186
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