Kennedy recalled as a champion of civil rights
ATLANTA (AP) — In the early hours before President Barack Obama’s historic inauguration, U.S. Rep. John Lewis’ phone rang. It was Edward Kennedy.
“I’m thinking about you, of how proud you must be and how happy you must be,” Lewis, a lion of the civil rights movement, recalled hearing the liberal lion of the Senate say on the other end. “I wish that my brothers, Jack and Bobby, and Dr. King were here to observe what we are about to observe.”
For all the causes championed by Kennedy, who died Tuesday at 77 after nearly half a century in the Senate, he will be remembered in the South almost exclusively as the man who, in the face of resentment from many whites, delivered on the promises his brothers made to help end segregation.
“Of the white Americans who did the most to help the advancement of civil rights, Ted Kennedy would be on the short list. He may even be at the top of it,” said Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University. “He wasn’t just for civil rights in the sense of the movement, but for dignity rights for all people.”
And while John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy had a tenuous relationship with civil rights leaders — particularly the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — Ted Kennedy was embraced by the civil rights community, Brinkley said.
“He was our shepherd,” Lewis said. “He was our fighter for social justice, and not just in the traditional sense or for people of color. He was a champion for those who were left out and left behind.”
As Kennedy lay in repose Friday at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, Lewis and the Rev. Jesse Jackson were among those who came to pay their respects.
Jackson said Kennedy was relentless in his push for civil rights after he took up the cause.
“Ted, with his consistency, lived long enough to see the seeds he planted bear fruit. We are a better and a different nation today because he changed the course,” Jackson said.
Barely four months after his oldest brother was assassinated, Edward Kennedy, then a 32-year-old serving his first term, gave his first major speech on the Senate floor. Until then, Kennedy had largely been deferential to his senior colleagues. But after four weeks of listening to them debate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he could be silent no more.
“My brother was the first president of the United States to state publicly that segregation was wrong,” Kennedy said. “His heart and soul are in this bill. If his life and death had a meaning, it was that we should not hate but love one another; we should use our powers not to create conditions of oppression that lead to violence, but conditions of freedom that lead to peace. It is in that spirit that I hope the Senate will pass this bill.”
It was the opening salvo of the youngest Kennedy son’s career-long efforts on behalf of blacks, which decades later would see him deliver an endorsement that helped put the first black man in the Oval Office.
Many Southern whites recoiled at the Yankee senator, whom they saw as an ultra-leftist threat to their way of life, Brinkley said.
“Ted Kennedy found the Jim Crow system abhorrent,” he said. “He almost became an ugly parlor joke with the mere mention of his name.”
For Kennedy, the movement became personal. After King’s assassination in April 1968 and Robert Kennedy’s slaying two months later, Edward Kennedy remained close to King’s widow, Coretta Scott King.
“He’d call her whenever he passed through town,” said Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who worked alongside King and other civil rights leaders and knew Kennedy for decades.
“And she didn’t hesitate to call him when there was anything that the government or that he, personally, could do. I think he became a family friend.”
Young said Kennedy saw his mission as continuing the legacy not only of his brothers, but of King. Long after the marches and freedom rides stopped, Kennedy continued to work on issues of equality for minorities and the poor, pushing for economic opportunity and a national teachers’ corps.
Kennedy also worked with Coretta Scott King to get a federal holiday established in her husband’s honor.
Martin Luther King III called Kennedy the country’s “greatest statesman in modern times.”
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