Civil Rights Leaders Discuss Movement

A star-studded panel shared personal interpretations of the civil rights movement of the 1960s at a program honoring the life of President John F. Kennedy held Monday.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said the discussion, titled "Perspectives of a Generation Affected by the Civil Rights Movement," was a "living memorial" to his brother, President Kennedy. The President's son, John F. Kennedy Jr., moderated the discussion held at the Kennedy School of Government's ARCO Forum.

The panelists were W.E.B. Dubois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is chair of the Afro-American Studies Department; Women's Legal Defense Fund President Judith Lichtman; Deval Patrick, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights; and John Seigenthaler, chair of The Freedom Forum.

Seigenthaler, who served as administrative assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, said the civil rights movement overcame great obstacles.

At that time, Blacks were treated "in every aspect of life" as second class citizens, Seigenthaler said. Local authorities were often themselves involved with the Ku Klux Klan, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation hesitated to get involved," he said.

"It was a very difficult and dangerous time for those who were involved with the civil rights movement," Seigenthaler said. "And it was a very frustrating time for those of us who were trying to provide our support to the civil rights movement."

Yet there was a great transition during this period, the panelists said.

"President Kennedy became the very first American President to articulate the place of the Negro as central to the very fabric of the republic rather than peripheral to it," said Gates.

But although the period was a major turning point in the pursuit of racial equality, gender issues did not enter the limelight until later, said Lichtman.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had only one provision that protected women against gender bias, Lichtman said.

The provision, which is in the employment section, "was added partly as a joke and party as a way of showing those wide eye lierals just how ridiculous and how out of hand the civil rights act had really become," Lichtman said.

Patrick, the youngest panelist, said he was a product of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s rather than a participant. But he cautioned against looking at the search for civil rights with nostalgia. "The civil rights movement is as vivid and as prescient and as essential today as it ever was," he said.