James H. Meriwether

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James H. Meriwether | "Worth a Lot of Negro Votes": Black Voters, Africa, and the 1960 Presidential Campaign | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

"Worth a Lot of Negro Votes": Black Voters, Africa, and the 1960 Presidential Campaign

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In July 1960 some 280 African students awarded scholarships in the United States stood poised for an extraordinary opportunity. Four years of college would vault them into the educated elites of their countries and provide crucial intellectual infrastructure as their nations moved toward independence. The students had scholarships; their communities had raised money for expenses. Just one obstacle remained: passage to America. And as the start of the school year neared, their journey seemed in jeopardy. An organization dedicated to helping these students, the African-American Students Foundation (AASF), did not have the funds to bring them to the United States. Wealthier foundations said their money was committed elsewhere. When the AASF appealed to the U.S. State Department for help, officials consistently rejected their pleas. Yet when the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation pledged the funds needed to get the students to the United States, Senator Hugh Scott, a Pennsylvania Republican, strode onto the Senate floor to accuse "the long arm" of the Kennedy family of attempting to "take over the function of the Government in advance of an election."¹	1
In that summer's fiercely fought campaign for president of the United States, both candidates—John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon—sought the black vote, and both worried about alienating white southern voters. The "solid South" no longer seemed so solidly Democratic, in no small measure due to the pressures the civil rights movement put on the long-standing structure of white rule in the region. In this extraordinarily close contest, some of Kennedy's advisers feared that explicit support for civil rights could cost them the election, while Nixon's strategists hoped they might win as many as six southern states. The campaigns needed ways to appeal to black voters without alienating the increasingly unsolid South.	2
Kennedy's decision to telephone Coretta Scott King on a late October day to offer sympathy for her jailed husband, reinforced by Robert Kennedy's subsequent call to help secure Martin Luther King Jr.'s release, has become the campaign's iconic event and a storied explanation for the outcome of the election. The phone calls, the conventional recounting goes, endeared Kennedy to a skeptical black America and provided the critical boost for his ultimate victory. And Kennedy needed every vote he could get: he won New Jersey by just 22,091 votes; Missouri by 9,980; South Carolina by 9,571; and Illinois by a mere 8,858.²	3
Within days of the election, Senator Thruston B. Morton, the Republican National Committee chairman, was lamenting that Nixon had lost by polling only 10–12 percent of the black vote—an inaccurately low figure, but one that reinforced ideas about the importance of black voters. In time, the King phone calls and the candidates' physical appearance during the televised debates emerged to dominate the mythicized collective memory of the campaign. Although the story of the phone calls was at first situated in broad analyses that attributed Kennedy's win to a range of factors, over the years the phone calls received greater attention, particularly after the publication of Theodore White's The Making of the President: 1960 (1962). White, while carefully noting that one could not identify any single decision or episode as the most important, rated Kennedy's decision to call as "among the most crucial of the [campaign's] last few weeks." When Harris Wofford, one of Kennedy's civil rights aides, published his account of the era, he offered a fuller rendition, filled with details about stratagems he used to get the phone call placed. Wofford's account made him critical to persuading Kennedy to make the call and by extension to winning the election; over the years the tale has been elaborated on in other places, often by participants highlighting their own roles. The story finally became canonized in Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters, which asserted that "two little phone calls about the welfare of a Negro preacher were a necessary cause of Democratic victory."³	. . .

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