The President believed that segregation, like colonialism, was an anachronistic addiction curable by the steady advance of modern attitudes. To him, this required the exercise of cool, detached reason in an atmosphere of public calm, which was incompatible with emotional demonstrations by either whites or Negroes. Like any President, Kennedy responded instinctively against “unrest” within his domain, but in the area of civil rights especially he stressed calm as a condition of progress. Such a posture necessarily placed civil rights on the periphery of his ambitions in the White House,
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