I was living in Virginia Beach at the time and do not recall anyone celebrating. I worked with a couple of Black guys who seemed a bit happy but they did not wish him to die.
I do remember in 1963, I was a sophomore in high school. When news that Kennedy had been shot, just about everyone was happy. After maybe ten minutes or so the mood changed. Students were saying they did not want him to die tho they seemed perfectly happy for him to have been shot.
Kennedy was very unpopular at that time in the Florida Panhandle. When the principal came on the intercom to tell us he had died, the mood definitively changed. Everyone seemed sad.
I was working at a high school and one of the students approached me and said that he deserved to be shot and die because “he (Reagan) did not like the color of my skin.”
It's interesting to hear you say that. I was born after Kennedy was killed so I have no personal recollections from that era. I only have what people said after he died and that implies he was a beloved figure who was going to sail to a second term. Sure there was that bay of pigs things early on but after that it was all good. That's the sense you get by people writing about a man who was murdered. My old man used to wave that off, said "he wasn't popular and he was probably going to lose that election". His was a complicated time and the history if those days seems to be distorted a bit by a desire to speak well of a martyr rather than criticize him. But I wonder what might have happened had he lived until the 1964 election.