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Oral history
John F. Kennedy Oral History Collection
JFKOH-RFK-07
In this interview Robert F. Kennedy [RFK] and Marshall discuss the very limited proposal for voting rights legislation before the demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama; how civil rights groups did not always understand politics or how to get things through Congress; John F. Kennedy [JFK] trying to explain political difficulties to civil rights leaders; meetings on civil rights legislation and the strategy for getting the votes for a civil rights bill in both houses of Congress; RFK’s disagreements with Lyndon B. Johnson on civil rights legislation; RFK, the Justice Department, and the reapportionment cases; RFK’s meeting with James Baldwin and the subsequent attack on RFK in the press; JFK’s role in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963; speeches at the March on Washington; George Wallace, Alabama state troopers, and the investigation into the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, September, 1963; and JFK, James J. Delaney, and the issue of aid to church schools, among other issues.
Oral history
John F. Kennedy Oral History Collection
JFKOH-RFK-06
In this interview Robert F. Kennedy [RFK] and Marshall discuss civil rights legislation, and how it was innovative and yet inevitable; meetings between RFK and businessmen on civil rights legislation; RFK’s unintentional intimidation of the businessmen based on his history with Senate hearings on labor; attempting to put leadership in the community (North and South) to deal with the problem of segregation and other racial discrimination; hostile treatment of RFK in Alabama; working with the NAACP on school desegregation; the desegregation of the University of Alabama, and the question of if and how to bring in troops to help; and using the incident at the University of Alabama as a political stepping stone, among other issues.
Oral history
John F. Kennedy Oral History Collection
JFKOH-BM-05
Marshall discusses civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, legislation that would become the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, and George C. Wallace’s attempt to stop the desegregation of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa.