If only Richard Nixon had Listened to Jackie Robinson — The GOP Might be Doing Better than Trump Today
Flashing images of two iconic figures of the civil rights movement — Jackie Robinson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — were included in recent TV campaign ads for President Donald Trump. Almost immediately there was an outraged push-back from both men’s families.
Robinson’s daughter Sharon emphasized that Trump represents the opposite of everything her father stood for. King’s daughter Bernice commented on the wide gulf between Trump and her father’s vision of the “Beloved Community.”
As it happens, it was 60 years ago this month that Jackie Robinson and Dr. King found themselves at a crossroads with the Republican Party.
On. Oct. 19, 1960, three weeks before that year’s presidential election, King was arrested as part of a student sit-in at Rich’s department store in Atlanta. This prompted a campaign crisis for both candidates for president, Sen. John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon — but especially for Nixon. The Republican vice president had befriended King four years before, and King had voted Republican in 1956. King’s father had endorsed Nixon in the 1960 election on the day before his son’s arrest.
King found himself in two courtrooms and three jail cells over nine days. Because of an earlier $25 traffic charge, King was sentenced to four months hard labor in Georgia State Prison. Nixon’s top Black surrogate, retired baseball legend Jackie Robinson, sought to change that, desperately urging Nixon to speak out for King’s release — before the Kennedy campaign did.
Robinson believed Kennedy to be untrustworthy on civil rights, and Black Republican leaders envisioned a future in which Nixon would lead the GOP back to the affiliation with Black people forged by Abraham Lincoln 100 years before. Some political analysts believed, based on the progress President Dwight D. Eisenhower had made with Black voters in 1956, that Nixon could win up to half the Black vote.
Yet as the days of King’s imprisonment ground on, an interracial trio of Kennedy staffers working on civil rights — Louis Martin, Harris Wofford and Sargent Shriver — urged Kennedy to make a bold move, and the candidate eventually called Dr. King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, to express his concern. Kennedy also had his brother Robert call a judge outside of Atlanta to help arrange King’s release.
Robinson, meanwhile, knowing that Nixon’s advisors were warning him “not to rock the racial boat,” urged those advisors to push instead for action. Nixon, Robinson told them, “has to call Martin right now, today. I have the number of the jail.’’
Robinson made his case directly to Nixon, as well, only to walk away with tears in his eyes.
Nixon “thinks calling Martin would be ‘grandstanding,’” Robinson told Nixon speechwriter William Safire. “Nixon doesn’t deserve to win.”
After being released from prison, King did not formally endorse either candidate, but he expressed such gratitude to Kennedy that many Black voters got his meaning. Kennedy’s savvy Black advisor, Chicago Defender editor Louis Martin, made sure of that by having an estimated two million pamphlets about the event distributed through Black churches.