Politics
1960: JFK, RFK, and VOTER SUPPRESSION
DISCOVERING MY ACADEMIC FUTURE, AND THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT
KEN SHERRILL
When I was an undergrad, I decided to organize a Brooklyn College chapter of Students for Kennedy at the start of the fall 1960 semester. We were warmly welcomed by the Kennedy campaign but the Dean of Students’ office was very wary of any sort of political organizing on campus in the wake of the Red Scare that had recently enveloped the campus. Anyway, I became President of our small but hardy group.
I spent a lot of my time at Kennedy headquarters, a single floor in a Park Avenue building that was part of the Kennedy family real estate domain. It was a large open space with a string of offices around the perimeter of the floor, and I did a lot of the scutwork assigned to student volunteers.
This was about to change.
Someone came out of one of the offices and asked me if I knew any students studying Spanish. The campaign needed them. My mother’s family came from Spain and she insisted that I study Spanish, both in high school and in college. The campaign operative asked me if I could round up as many students as I could to help the Puerto Rican community to register to vote. I jumped at the opportunity.
New York State required a literacy test for voter registration and it was used to prevent immigrants from voting, thus enabling Republican domination of state politics. Nelson Rockefeller was Governor and our two senators, Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating, were both Republicans. Republicans controlled both houses of the state legislature. Voter suppression and outrageous gerrymandering were at the core of this Republican dominance.
Bobby Kennedy, who served as JFK’s campaign manager, realized that carrying New York was central to JFK’s path to victory in November and he felt that the only way to carry New York was to expand the electorate by registering immigrants and people of color. (Sixty years later, this sounds remarkably familiar, doesn’t it?)
In 1960, New York had a vibrant immigrant press and the Democrats perennially failed to pass bills saying that the literacy test could be given in any language in which a newspaper was published in the state. Local Irish, Italian, and Jewish political machines carefully tried to limit the electorate to people they thought would be loyal to machine. They, too, could not be counted on to expand the electorate so Bobby Kennedy made this one of the campaign’s highest priorities.
My job was to get students to go door to door in Spanish Harlem with sample literacy tests and to persuade Puerto Rican immigrants that they could pass the literacy test. Back then, in the days of door-to-door polling, pollsters knew that teams of one man and one woman were more likely to get people to open their doors so we tried to come up with boy-girl pairs to do the canvassing. Before CUNY moved to Open Admissions in 1969, the senior colleges were virtually all white. Try to imagine well-intention all white teen aged boys and girls knocking on doors in Spanish Harlem to persuade Latinx immigrants about politics. In 1960, that was the best that the Kennedy campaign could do.
The literacy test itself was remarkably simple. It consisted of a single paragraph.
The sample I carried was “Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, He was born in a log cabin in Springfield, Illinois……” Applicants had to answer five of seven questions in order to pass the test, including “What is your name?” and “What is your address?” Among the five remaining questions were “Who was Abraham Lincoln?” and “Where was Abraham Lincoln born?”
Sixty years later, I can’t remember the rest of the paragraph or the other questions. In any case, the people taking the test were allowed to look back at the paragraph as often as they wanted. It was an open-book test. If you were a graduate of a New York high school, you were exempt from taking the test. We invariably found the local Puerto Rican residents to be warm, welcoming, anxious to vote, and able to pass the test.
We did the door-to-door work for a couple of weeks. At the same time, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) ran a door-to-door campaign in Central Harlem. On a set date, CORE and the Kennedy campaign arranged for buses to be parked on local street corners to drive local residents to the Board of Elections to take the test and register to vote.
No one showed up. Not one person. All that work and not a single voter.
The Kennedy campaign rapidly found out what had happened. East Harlem was controlled by a local Italian Democratic club that came to power when East Harlem was an Italian neighborhood. It was aligned with Carmine DeSapio, the County Leader (Boss) of the Democratic Party. The old-line club was terrified that the new residents would register to vote and would in short order take control of the local party organization. The club had gotten word of what the Kennedy campaign was doing and they sent their people to go through the same buildings shortly after we had. They told the Puerto Rican residents not to trust us. They said the real test was much harder than the one we had shown them. Not only that, the club lied and said if they were to fail the test they could be deprived of public assistance and perhaps be deported.
A few days later, I was sitting in Kennedy headquarters and saw Bobby Kennedy and Carmine DeSapio go into one of the offices. The door slammed but the argument that followed was so loud that everyone in the office could hear it. Bobby was shouting, “We’re going to get you! We’re going to win this election and we’re going to get you! You’re through!”
In 1961, DeSapio was defeated by the then-neophyte James Lanigan in a primary for Democratic District Leader in his Greenwich Village district, thus becoming ineligible to continue serving as County Leader. I’ve always wondered whether the unseen hand of the Kennedy White House had a part in this obscure hyper-local race. Whether RFK did it or not, DeSapio was through.
In 1963, I headed off to the University of North Carolina, home of the only political science department studying Black political participation in the South. The directors of the study became my dissertation advisors. That experience structured my entire academic life, most notably my work on the LGBTQ movement. A few months later, JFK was assassinated.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000271626837700170
In 1964, Bobby Kennedy defeated Kenneth Keating to become the new Senator from the state of New York. One year later, in 1965, Senator Bobby Kennedy became deeply involved in the Voting Rights Act. He insisted on including a ban on literacy tests in that landmark legislation.
Professor Don Matthews, my dissertation advisor
Professor Jim Prothro, my dissertation reader
Prof. Lou Lipsitz, also on my dissertation committee
