After Kennedy and his civil rights expert Harris Wofford pressed King to ask both men to resign from the SCLC, King agreed to ask only O'Dell to resign from the organization and allowed Levison, whom he regarded as a trusted advisor, to remain.[315]
In early 1963, Kennedy related to Martin Luther King Jr. his thoughts on the prospects for civil rights legislation: "If we get into a long fight over this in Congress, it will bottleneck everything else, and we will still get no bill."[316] Civil rights clashes were on the rise that year.[317] His brother Robert and Ted Sorensen pressed Kennedy to take more initiative on the legislative front.[318]

Kennedy's Report to the American People on Civil Rights, June 11, 1963
On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy intervened when Alabama Governor George Wallace blocked the doorway to the University of Alabama to stop two African American students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from attending. Wallace moved aside only after being confronted by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and the Alabama U.S. National Guard, which had just been federalized by order of the president. 