Report to the American People on Civil Rights

John F. Kennedy spoke from the Oval Office on the evening of June 11, 1963, after the standoff over two Black students enrolling at the University of Alabama. It is a brief broadcast, and it is the moment a cautious president called civil rights "a moral issue" that was "as old as the scriptures." He told the country he would ask Congress for a sweeping civil rights bill, the one that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Just after midnight, Medgar Evers was shot in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, which makes this a heavy but essential prelude to the speeches that follow.