JFK Holds Complex Place in Black History Not that many years ago, three portraits hung in thousands of African-American homes, a visual tribute to men who had helped black people navigate the long journey to equality. 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 an important but complicated place in black history. "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. FILE - In this Dec. 19, 1961 file photo, President John F. Kennedy leaves the White House in Washington to Andrews Air Force Base for flight to Palm Beach, Fla. en route to the bedsite of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who is hospitalized after suffering as stroke. Kennedy's civil rights legacy has undergone substantial reassessment since his 1963 assassination. Half a century later, "We're still trying to figure it out," says one longtime civil rights activist. (AP Photo/WJS) Close They recall him speaking eloquently against segregation despite resistance from Southern racists in his own Democratic party. Some even feel that his support for civil rights was one reason he was killed, even though racial motives are not prominent among the many theories about Kennedy's death. Yes, these black folks say, Kennedy may have moved reluctantly on civil rights. Yes, he may have been motivated by the need for votes more than racial justice - but they speak of the effort he made. "People say he should have moved faster, but he's dead because of the pace that he did move," says Rev. Shirley Jordan, a pastor and community activist in her native Richmond, Va. She was 13 when Kennedy was shot in Dallas. She heard the news in school, she recalls, but especially felt the impact when she got home: "My mother cried as though it was her child who had died." That was just the tone, the aura. There was a big cloud over the whole black community," Jordan says. When you look at the pictures of the funeral, you see so many black people out there. Later, Jordan's parents hung Kennedy's portrait next to King's in their housing project apartment. Such portraits also were a common sight in black homes for Rev. Charles Booth, who grew up in Baltimore. "You always saw pictures of Jesus Christ, John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King," says Booth, now a pastor in Columbus, Ohio. You could go in an average home and see a picture of JFK on the wall. In the minds of most black people at the time, he was a friend to the African-American community. One reason why, Booth says, was Kennedy's relationship with King - though that, too, was complicated. They first met in June 1960. Kennedy, then a senator from Massachusetts, would soon win the Democratic presidential nomination. King had become a national figure for leading the victorious bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., that ignited the civil rights movement. As a Democrat, running against Republican Richard Nixon (at the time, many influential blacks, including Jackie Robinson, were Republicans), Kennedy faced some difficult racial calculus.