June 12th, 1963: President Kennedy sends federal troops to enforce desegregation of the University of Alabama. Later that day, in a televised address, he calls segregation a "moral crisis" and proposes what will in OTL become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
June 20th, 1963: President Kennedy travels to Charleston, West Virginia, where a crowd of ten thousand is gathered on the north lawn of the State Capitol, to hear him commemorate their state's 100th anniversary.
[POD] As President Kennedy steps up to the microphone, he is thrown backwards in a horrifying crimson spray. Cheers turn to screams, and the crowd turns to a panicked mob. Hundreds of visitors are trampled as the rest try to flee the unseen shooter. Two Secret Service agents rush the dying President into the safety of the Capitol building, where he expires a few moments later.
Within 24 hours, the local and state police, FBI, and Secret Service agents are combing a steep "brushy ridge", 500 yards away from the State Capitol. At the spot where the assassin most likely was hiding, they find nothing but bootprints and crushed vegetation; but a few yards away in the weeds they find a lost scrap of cellophane from a cigarette pack, with an intact thumb-print on it.
It takes an army of searchers three weeks, poring through millions of fingerprint cards in the dusty FBI vaults, before they find a match: an ex-Marine and current Klu Klux Klansman named Bobby Frank Cherry. Early the next morning he is killed in a shootout with federal agents, as they try to arrest him at his home in Birmingham, Alabama.
The suspect is dead, but a search of his home turns up an M1C rifle and ballistics evidence proves it is the weapon that killed Kennedy. Several members of his local Klan are arrested and interrogated, but none can be tied to the murder. All of them express the same disturbing sentiment: that Kennedy was a "goddam Yankee n**r-lover" who brought the assassination on himself.
- - -
Thoughts?
- Any opposition to the Civil Rights Act and other such legislation will be politically impossible (outside the deepest parts of the South). There will be no "Southern Strategy" for Nixon.
- No Berlin visit, and no "ich bin ein Berliner" speech. With the Vice Presidency vacant (and no way to fill it, sans the future 25th Amendment), Johnson will probably have to avoid travel outside the U.S. for the rest of 1963 and 1964.
- There won't be any belief in government conspiracy to kill JFK (although it may make the public uneasy that it took weeks to find the killer)
Others?
June 20th, 1963: President Kennedy travels to Charleston, West Virginia, where a crowd of ten thousand is gathered on the north lawn of the State Capitol, to hear him commemorate their state's 100th anniversary.
[POD] As President Kennedy steps up to the microphone, he is thrown backwards in a horrifying crimson spray. Cheers turn to screams, and the crowd turns to a panicked mob. Hundreds of visitors are trampled as the rest try to flee the unseen shooter. Two Secret Service agents rush the dying President into the safety of the Capitol building, where he expires a few moments later.
Within 24 hours, the local and state police, FBI, and Secret Service agents are combing a steep "brushy ridge", 500 yards away from the State Capitol. At the spot where the assassin most likely was hiding, they find nothing but bootprints and crushed vegetation; but a few yards away in the weeds they find a lost scrap of cellophane from a cigarette pack, with an intact thumb-print on it.
It takes an army of searchers three weeks, poring through millions of fingerprint cards in the dusty FBI vaults, before they find a match: an ex-Marine and current Klu Klux Klansman named Bobby Frank Cherry. Early the next morning he is killed in a shootout with federal agents, as they try to arrest him at his home in Birmingham, Alabama.
The suspect is dead, but a search of his home turns up an M1C rifle and ballistics evidence proves it is the weapon that killed Kennedy. Several members of his local Klan are arrested and interrogated, but none can be tied to the murder. All of them express the same disturbing sentiment: that Kennedy was a "goddam Yankee n**r-lover" who brought the assassination on himself.
- - -
Thoughts?
- Any opposition to the Civil Rights Act and other such legislation will be politically impossible (outside the deepest parts of the South). There will be no "Southern Strategy" for Nixon.
- No Berlin visit, and no "ich bin ein Berliner" speech. With the Vice Presidency vacant (and no way to fill it, sans the future 25th Amendment), Johnson will probably have to avoid travel outside the U.S. for the rest of 1963 and 1964.
- There won't be any belief in government conspiracy to kill JFK (although it may make the public uneasy that it took weeks to find the killer)
Others?
