By Kathy Wray Coleman, Cleveland Urban News.Com and The Kathy Wray Coleman Online News Blog.Com, Ohio's No 1 and No 2 online Black news venues (www.clevelandurbannews.com)Reach Cleveland Urban News.Com by email at editor@clevelandurbannews.com and by phone at 216-659-0473
CLEVELAND, Ohio- Cleveland Urban News.Com, Ohio's most read online Black newspaper, remembers the late United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy as the 50th anniversary of his unprecedented assassination approaches.
A year after his death, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Often referred to as "Jack," JFK was the 35th president of the United States of America and served from January 1961 until his untimely death. He died from a gunshot wound to the head while riding in a motorcade during a parade in Dallas, Texas, and at the hands of infamous assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who was later killed himself.
A Democrat and former Massachusetts senator, he defeated then Vice President Richard Nixon to take the presidency in 1960. He was the last Democrat to lose Ohio and go on to win the presidency.
JFK was a brother of former U.S. senators Robert Kennedy and Ted Kennedy, both deceased, with Robert Kennedy assassinated too.
His presidential successor was Lyndon B. Johnson, his vice president at his death.
Among a grieving America and international mourners across the world , JFK left to cherish his legacy, his wife Jacqueline, who later remarried, and two children, Caroline Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr.
Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, now an ambassador to Japan, is the only surviving immediate family member.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died in 1994 at the age of 64 and JFK Jr. died when the private airplane that he was piloting, his plane in fact, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 1999. They were in route to a family wedding at Martha's Vinyard. His wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and her sister, Lauren Bessette, were passengers on the airplane and died too.
A champion of Civil Rights, Black leaders at the time of his death called his assassination, "a dark day in the history of America."
