There was Jesus, who represented unconditional hope, strength
and love. There was Martin Luther King Jr., who personified the
moral crusade that ended legal segregation. And then there was
President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy's inclusion may seem
puzzling, considering that his civil rights legacy has undergone
substantial reassessment since his Nov. 22, 1963, assassination.
But a look at why so many black people revered him then—and why
younger generations have largely forgotten his civil rights
work—shows that even 50 years later, Kennedy holds "We're still
trying to figure it out," says John Mack, a longtime civil
rights activist who was fighting segregation in Atlanta when
Kennedy was elected president in 1960. Mack says that we can
only speculate on what Kennedy might have done for civil rights
had he not been killed. "It's a question we're wrestling with
and cannot answer," Mack says. For many older African-Americans,
Kennedy was a president who sympathized with black struggle like
no other before him. The