The following is a letter to the editor by Clifford Jackson of Larchmont:
June 6, 2018 will be the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. He was a man that they called “ruthless” and someone that you did not want to be on the wrong side of. He was a part of the Kennedy dynasty and was stewarded in his career, like his siblings, by the patriarch of the family Joseph P. Kennedy, an ambassador to England during the Roosevelt administration.
He married Ethel Skakel in 1950, and was a graduate of Virginia University’s School of Law. He went on to contend with his contemporary Roy Cohn for a position as assistant Counsel on Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s special committee that he later won. From there he was on the McClelland Commission investigating organized crime within the Teamsters union.
There he developed an extremely acrimonious relationship with Jimmy Hoffa and Sam Giancanna as far as Cosa Nostra’s rapacious operation when it came to union money. He later became an attorney general under his brother John F. Kennedy, and was instrumental in the civil rights/human rights movement as far as getting Charlene Hunter and Hamilton Holmes admitted, two African-Americans, to the University of Georgia during the apex of legalized apartheid and white supremacy throughout the country. He also put the Hoover administration on notice as far as his blatant racism toward black people.
In particular, Hoover’s hatred of Martin Luther King and Hoover’s memorandum to the FBI New York office in the spring of 1964, “Do something about Malcolm X.” Although RFK had authorized an FBI wiretapping of Dr. King and he personally admitted as attorney general that they were looking to see if the Nation of Islam, with Malcolm X as their chief spokesman, “had been in violation of any federal law.”
My late father James Jackson said, “RFK changed after his brother was killed.” This appears to be the case because when he was running for the New York State Senate in 1964, he spoke at Columbia University and talked extensively about poverty in the black community and how it was directly connected to racism and a form of segregation in New York City that kept black people less literate, jobless and unskilled. It was a systemic process that has destroyed the black family throughout the country.
He defeated Kenneth Keating in November of that year, becoming a junior senator to Jacob javits.
This connection with the black community and the poor mushroomed for Robert Kennedy when he initiated and founded the Bedford Stuyvesant restoration corporation in Brooklyn in 1967, in order to bring economic revitalization to that economically depressed community. In 1968, before his St. Patrick’s Day announcement that he was running for president, he went on a poverty tour in Kentucky and Appalachia and was outraged at the level of poverty in the United States.
He said “in this land poverty is evil!” He was on the tonight show with Harry belafonte as guest host in February 1968, just weeks after Dr. King appeared there with belafonte, and rallied against America’s hypocrisy, saying: “We have thousands of poor people bitten by rats in our cities every year living in dilapidated conditions, yet we have this great wealth in this country. We talk about how everyone should be treated equally and the reality is that we do not treat everyone equally. Our society is sanctimonious and hypocritical as far as what really goes on in this country.”
That interview is extremely relevant to what is going on today. The day after Dr. King’s assassination, Robert F. Kennedy made a speech in Cleveland called “The Mindless Cycle of Violence.” That speech, along with Malcolm X’s speech at the Oxford union debate in 1964, and Che Guevara’s speech at the UN in December 1964, are three of the greatest speeches I have ever heard. They sum up everything that is still going on to this day and should be required reading and mandatory curriculum for all students on a secondary level of education.
RFK was such a special man that he, along with the loss of Malcolm X, Che Guevara and Dr. King, has had a profound impact on this country and the world, and why we are in such moral decay. The present occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. bring that point home.
