become the subject of fierce debate. In death, Kennedy s memory has
become the site of a relentless cycle of adulation and condemnation, of
mythmaking and idol smashing, and occasionally of some balanced jour-
nalism and perceptive scholarship. Indeed, one of the most fascinating
aspects of Kennedy s Blues is the way in which the musical responses to
Kennedy s death can be seen as early contributions to this process of con-
structing the President s posthumous image. As van Rijn demonstrates,
the outpouring of genuine black grief, committed to vinyl by blues and
gospel artists from John Lee Hooker to Mahalia Jackson and from Otis
Spann to the Dixie Nightingales, indicates the extent to which Kennedy
had become closely associated with black aspirations for freedom, justice,
and equality. The irony is that these sincere musical eulogies for the slain
president helped fix into popular memory an image of Kennedy as a tire-
less and resolutely committed advocate of black civil rights that is at best
simplistic, at worst plain wrong.
Some historical context here is useful. In 1960, Kennedy s election
victory secured in no small measure thanks to the votes of African
Americans in the North had been greeted with considerable enthusi-
asm in the black community. As a candidate, Kennedy had promised to
end racial discrimination in housing by executive order and made sev-
eral important expressions of sympathy toward the travails of the black
community, notably when he called Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. s wife
Coretta to express his concern about her husband s latest incarceration in
Georgia. Such gestures inspired hope that Kennedy would pursue racial
justice in the United States more actively than had his predecessors.
By the spring of 1963, however, some of that early optimism had
evaporated. When Kennedy consistently failed to use executive power to
end housing discrimination  with the stroke of a pen as he had prom-
ised, an exasperated Congress of Racial Equality sent hundreds of pens to
the White House in protest. In an article in the Nation magazine, tellingly
entitled  Fumbling on the New Frontier, Dr. King captured the growing
frustration that many blacks felt toward Kennedy, accusing his adminis-
tration of  aggressively driving toward the limited goal of token integra-
tion. Others were equally disappointed with Kennedy s civil rights record,
citing the administration s reluctance to take the lead in promoting
comprehensive civil rights legislation as evidence of a lack of genuine
Foreword [ xi ]