“I wonder the extent to which Lee Harvey Oswald ... was an important figure in passage of civil rights legislation.”
Oswald, of course, was no civil rights figure at all.
He was, according to official history, the lone person who assassinated President John F. Kennedy.
But some things Young said when I talked with him in his office at Wittenberg University, made me think Oswald played that other, unintended role.
I’d been talking with Young, who teaches American national government and black politics at Wittenberg, about the connections between Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama, when he mentioned Kennedy’s trip to Dallas in November of 1963.
In the year before he was to have faced re-election, the trip was an effort to shore up support for his administration in the face of the backing it had been offering to the civil rights movement.
“The Kennedys had to be pushed and dragged” in that direction, Young said. “And (U.S. Attorney General) Bobby Kennedy was first to become more connected.”
But the administration had weighed in with greater force — force that led to political consequences worrisome enough to prompt the Dallas trip.
“If Kennedy had not been assassinated, would he have been re-elected as the movement picked up pace?” Young asked.
In short, would Kennedy’s measured support of the accelerating civil rights struggle have put him too far in front of the voters he needed to return him to office?
And had that happened, Young further said, would the civil rights movement dealing with a more conservative administration have abandoned the non-violence of Martin Luther King, Jr. for more militant leaders emerging at the time?
Young’s questions also led me to consider the extent to which the Kennedys lent their support to King in order to give more credence to the more moderate contender for mantle of the movement’s leadership.
Because of Oswald, Kennedy never stood for re-election in 1964. Instead, voters swayed in part by a massive outpouring of sympathy for their slain leader swept his successor, Lyndon Johnson, into the Oval Office.
And riding that mandate, Johnson, whose legislative skill was legendary as a U.S. senator, helped to push through landmark civil rights legislation.
The “what ifs” of history have their limitations. But I do think they remind us that history doesn’t unfold as the kind of fixed, inevitable march to the future envisioned by Frederick Engles, who, with Karl Marx, was a seminal thinker in communism.
And that brings to mind one other thing I learned last week from a thoughtful person.
In his radio program “The Writer’s Almanac,” Garrison Keillor talked about psychologist and philosopher William James.
Explaining that James sometimes took narcotics to experiment and observe their effects on the workings of the mind, Keillor reported that James said the only time Engles made sense to him was when he was using laughing gas.
That’s the kind of history that’s too good to make up.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.