Not sure of my qualification as the Forum authority on American history, but here goes!
My memory is that John Kennedy was probably disposed intellectually to support the civil rights movment (remember, he was the first Roman Catholic to become president, so he knew what it was like to be from a disadvantaged minority - albeit in his case there was plenty of family money to soften the blow!) However, he was above all else a politician, and in 1957 he voted against Eisenhower's setting up of the Civil Rights Commission because doing so enhanced his chances of becoming the Democratic candidate for president in 1960.
Once he was the Democratic candidate he campaigned in favour of the civil rights movement, probably calculating that he needed the black vote, which was correct - he only beat Nixon by a whisker.
But when he became president he was immediately faced with international crises (Berlin, Cuba) and because the advancement of civil rights wasn't seen as a vote-winner he didn't do much about it for a while - in fact he opposed the Freedom Rides! Also, his brother Robert Kennedy (as Attorney General) advised that it was a state matter, not a federal one, which got the Kennedys off the hook.
I think it was really the media attention to the problems in Mississippi and Alabama that produced the groundswell of public opinion against white supremacy and gave the Kennedys the backbone to begin to force change through towards the end of what JFK reckoned would be his first term in office, and at the time of his death he was pushing a Civil Rights Bill through Congress - it was eventually passed under Lyndon Johnson's presidency.
Did he believe in integration and equal rights? Probably.
Was he prepared to sacrifice his political aspirations to deliver them? Almost certainly not!
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