At the time, northern U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy, the then-soon-to-be president, passionately defended the racist policy during a 1957 hearing on increasing the minimum wage making an explicitly biased point while at it.
“Of course, having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too — the wages of the white worker who has to compete,” he explained. “And when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage — and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work — it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn’t it?”
