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He appointed some Southern judges who proved to be outright racists. But the civil rights movement was becoming an urgent presence in the nation; it demanded Kennedy's attention. He was not a leader on this subject, not for a long time, but was led by events and historical pressures and by figures like Martin Luther King Jr.
The South was filled with agitation and change. There were riots at the all-white University of Mississippi when a black man named James Meredith tried to enroll. Two people were killed. Kennedy was forced to call out federal troops to install Meredith in the university. In Birmingham, Public Safety Commissioner Theophilus Eugene ("Bull") Connor turned loose police dogs upon a march led by King. The news photographs of that spectacle—the fire hoses and the snapping dogs and the beefy Southern lawmen—outraged Americans and turned the public mood. In the spring of 1963 there were 2,000 civil rights demonstrations in more than 300 cities. Kennedy now faced the civil rights cause directly. "We are confronted primarily with a moral issue," he said. "It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution." Eight days later he sent Congress a civil rights bill that would assure equal access to public accommodations and fight discrimination in schools and jobs and at the polls.
But as in foreign policy, Kennedy's performance was somehow deflected, inconsistent. While pronouncing civil rights to be a moral issue, he acquiesced in an FBI investigation of King. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, for decades the lord of his own almost independent principality within the American Government, said that King was associating with Communists. Kennedy and his brother Bobby, then Attorney General, allowed the wiretaps of King 1) to clear King's name and thus disarm Hoover, 2) to see for themselves whether Hoover's suspicions were correct, or 3) both. They did not, however, authorize the bugging that amounted to a much broader invasion of King's privacy.
Kennedy died before his civil rights bill could become law.
His relations with Congress were not good, one of his failures as a leader. His program also suffered because he lacked a working majority on the Hill. Eventually President Johnson, that consummate creature of the Congress, obtained a comfortably functional Democratic majority in 1964. Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. His Great Society went well beyond what Kennedy envisioned. "He's done," wrote Walter Lippmann in April 1964, "what President Kennedy could not have done had he lived."
Kennedy all along had calculated that his first term would be a period for developing programs, for sowing seeds that a second term would allow him to bring to fruition.