Dr. Chester Pach
Dr. Katherine Jellison, Professor and Chair of History at Ohio University, and Dr. Chester Pach, Associate Professor of History, were quoted in a Daily Jeffersonian story headlined “Bobby Kennedy’s legacy lives on in civic leaders today.”
It was while he was attorney general in his brother’s administration, however, that Bobby Kennedy began to awaken to the civil rights movement. In the spring of 1963, he met in New York with black activists and got an earful.
“Bobby hears withering criticism of JFK’s position on civil rights,” said Ohio University history professor Chester Pach, who teaches a course on the 1960s. “It takes Bobby aback, but it causes him to think about the perspective that he’s hearing. JFK had been tepid on civil rights. It’s Bobby who develops a civil rights consciousness.”
…
Robert Kennedy confronted segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace and carried out President Kennedy’s order federalizing the Alabama National Guard to enforce the desegregation of the University of Alabama in June 1963. His brother’s assassination in November 1963 was an immense loss that deepened his empathy for other people and their struggles, said Katherine Jellison, chairwoman of the Ohio University history department.
“I think we were all reminded at the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. of the kind of person Bobby Kennedy had become by 1968, when they showed the footage of him in Indianapolis — and this is before Twitter — and he announces to the crowd that King had been assassinated,” Jellison said.
Comments