'Hedging Our Bets and Buying Time': John Kennedy and Racial Revolution in the American South and Southern Africa

The brief presidency of John F. Kennedy spanned a period of intensifying change and conflict in race relations around the globe. The epicenters of tension lay in the American South and southern Africa, as the expanding civil rights movement encountered increasingly violent white resistance in the United States, and armed insurgencies replaced nonviolent protests against white rule in Angola and South Africa. Previous presidents had largely been able to avoid these escalating racial conflicts. Much as he might have wished to, Kennedy would not have this option. Both Africans and African Americans were determined to make the U.S. government take sides in struggles that seemed to them utterly clear in their moral justice and world historical in their political significance. This was their “Cold War,” replete with the same full measure of righteousness and clarity that Kennedy and other Cold Warriors saw in their own conflict with communism. Just as anti-Communists disdained or mistrusted neutralism regarding the Soviet Union, antiracists, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reported to the White House, saw “no room for nonalignment in this dispute.”1