Having a serious conversation without the serious players would have been difficult enough, but Bobby made it even harder: What he really wanted was gratitude, not candor. He also hoped for a sober discussion of what the Kennedy administration should do, with African-Americans who knew what it already was doing. wasn’t welcome, nor were the top people from the NAACP and the Urban League, because Bobby Kennedy wanted a no-holds-barred critique of their leadership. Baldwin assembled a motley collection of fellow artists, academics, and second-tier civil rights leaders, along with his lawyer, secretary, literary agent, brother, and brother’s girlfriend. Kennedy, to talk about why a volcano of rage was building up in Northern ghettos and why mainstream civil rights leaders couldn’t or wouldn’t quell it as summer approached.Ī second sign that the meeting was ill-fated was not who had been invited but who had not. But it was not an auspicious beginning to an urgent conclave that the black novelist James Baldwin had pulled together, at the request of Attorney General Robert F. The partition was a fitting one for the spring of 1963, when demarcation of the races was written into law across the American South and into practice in the rest of the land.

All 11 African-Americans lined up on one side of the Kennedy family drawing room overlooking Central Park, the five whites on the other. The best clue to where the participants at the historic gathering stood was where they sat. Larry Tye is the author of seven books, including the just-released Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, from which this article is adapted.

Bobby kennedy by larry tye