As much as he admired President Kennedy for his stylish command of the modern world, King knew that Kennedy and Barnett still had more in common with each other than either had with him. Their performance at Oxford, he wrote, “made Negroes feel like pawns in a white man’s political game.” He blended this lament into a bleak assessment of 1962 as the year civil rights lost ground in national politics. No longer the “dominant issue” of domestic debate, it had receded since the year of the Freedom Rides and of the Kennedy Administration’s early cry, “We will move!” King too had receded, as
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