Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings (2 page)
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Authors: The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America
Tags: #History, #United States, #Juvenile Nonfiction, #20th Century, #Historical, #Biography & Autobiography
More and more, the developing world became the battleground for the Cold War between democracy and Communism. The United States and the Soviet Union both tried to extend their influence over smaller, poorer countries around the world. Cuba, an island nation just south of Florida, became Communist when Fidel Castro took power in 1959. Tensions ran high between Cuba and the United States, especially after President Kennedy mounted a secret invasion of the island in 1961. The invasion at the Bay of Pigs was a total failure.
The leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, sensed from the Bay of Pigs disaster that Kennedy might be weak. He decided to challenge the young president by arming Cuba with nuclear missiles aimed at the United States. The idea of an enemy missile base so close to home terrified Americans. Still, photographs taken from American
reconnaissance planes did not show any missiles ready to launchâyet. In an attempt to keep the Soviet missiles from reaching their launch site, President Kennedy ordered a blockade of all Russian ships headed to Cuba. Then he waited to see what the Russians would do.
Sixteen navy destroyers and three cruisers blocked access to Cuba while twenty-five Soviet merchant ships stayed on course for the island. Around the countryâaround the worldâpeople watched nervously. In a California high school, a student reportedly broke down, sobbing, “I don't want to die.” Pope John XXIII pleaded with Kennedy and Khrushchev to consider their moral duty to the world. At last, after thirteen nail-biting days, Khrushchev turned his ships back in exchange for a promise that America would never invade Cuba. The Cuban missile crisis was over, but the feeling endured that the end of the world might be only a heartbeat away.
Crisis followed crisis as the country continued to struggle with the issue of civil rights. The nonviolent campaign of the fifties, led by black churches, had made progress, but for many people it was not enough. More and more African Americans felt bitter toward a white power structure that still denied them basic equality. And many now grew impatient with Martin Luther King Jr. and other moderate leaders. They also began to doubt the support of the
federal government. The Supreme Court had ruled again and again that segregation was unconstitutional. Yet so long as local authorities refused to change anything, these legal victories were hollow. Only the federal government could ensure that the local authorities obeyed the law.
In 1961 the Supreme Court ruled that segregated interstate bus terminals were unconstitutional. A group of activists calling themselves Freedom Riders rode buses into southern cities, hoping to be arrested. They wanted to force the federal government to stand up for them and uphold the Constitution. But it seemed that the Freedom Riders were on their own. In one Alabama town a mob set a bus on fire. In Birmingham, Alabama, the Ku Klux Klan attacked a bus with the full support of the police commissioner. In Montgomery, Alabama, home of Rosa Parks, a white mob went after the Freedom Riders with metal pipes and baseball bats, while the city's police chief declared that his department had “no intention of standing guard for a bunch of troublemakers coming into our city.” When Martin Luther King showed up in Montgomery the next day to lead a church rally, the church was firebombed. Finally, U.S. marshals arrived to drive the white mob back. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president's brother, asked King to observe a cooling-off period. Organizer James Farmer replied to reporters with righteous anger, “Please tell the attorney general that we have been cooling off for three hundred and fifty years.”
Diane Nash, born in 1938, was one of the student Freedom Riders who joined the struggle against segregation.
I
grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and while there was segregation there, I didn't really notice it that much. I always knew things were much worse in the South. While I ran into some discrimination growing up, it wasn't until I went to school in Nashville, Tennessee, that I experienced real segregation. When I arrived at Fisk University, I visited a few of the places near campus that were available to blacks, but everything else was segregated. I resented not being able to go downtown to the Woolworth's and have lunch with a friend. Also, when I was downtown, I saw lots of blacks sitting out on the curb or on the ground eating their lunches because they weren't allowed to sit in the restaurants and eat. It was so demeaning. The first time I had to use a women's rest room marked Colored was pretty humiliating, too. Pretty soon I started looking for an organizationâsomeone, somewhereâthat was trying to do something to change segregation. I heard about a series of workshops conducted by Reverend James Lawson, who was extremely well versed in nonviolence. So I went to these workshops, and I listened very carefully. After a few weeks I decided
this nonviolence couldn't possibly have any impact. But because they were the only group in Nashville that was trying to make a change, I kept going.
In the fall of 1959 we started going to restaurants downtown and trying to get served. When we were refused service, we would ask to see the manager, ask him why we were being refused service, and then tell him we thought it was morally wrong. We called that testing. In February of 1960 we heard on the radio that sit-ins had begun in other southern cities, and then we decided to have our sit-ins at the same chains that the students were targeting in other cities.
By 1962 I had left Fisk University to devote all my time to the civil rights movement. In May I was in Mississippi, where the bus system was still legally segregated, encouraging black young people to sit at the front of the bus and conducting workshops on nonviolence to prepare students for the things they needed to know in order to join the Freedom Riders. I was twenty-three at the time, and since I was encouraging these minors to do something illegal, a warrant was issued for my arrest, charging me with contributing to the delinquency of minors. I faced a two-and-a-half-year jail term, and I was about six months pregnant with my first
child. My husband drove me down to Jackson and I surrendered to the sheriff, and the following Monday I surrendered to the court. I sat in the first bench in the first row and refused to move to the rear when the bailiff ordered me to do so, so I was put in jail for ten days for contempt of court.
Those days were really hard. The jail had so many cockroaches that I soon learned to sleep during the day so that I could sit up at night and dodge them as they dropped off the ceiling onto my cot. One night there was an insect that was so large I could actually hear it walking across the floor. I had taken a toothbrush, comb, and my vitamin pills (since I was expecting), a change of underwear, and an extra skirt and blouse, because I knew I was going to jail. But the prison officials would not let me have anything, not a toothbrush, not toothpaste, nothing. I remember combing my hair with my fingers and working out a way to brush my teeth. I emerged from the experience even stronger because I learned that I could get along with nothing if I had toâexcept food and water, perhaps.
When you are faced with a situation of injustice or oppression, if you change yourself and become somebody who cannot be oppressed, then the world has to set up against a new you. We students became people
who could not be segregated. They could have killed us, but they could not segregate us any longer. Once that happened, the whole country was faced with a new set of decisions. I think most of the students that were participating were confident that we could change the world. I still think we can.
Martin Luther King had not given up hope of a better America. On August 28, 1963, he addressed nearly a quarter of a million demonstrators at the March on Washington, the first massive display of sixties “people power.” The people in the audienceâmany of them the great-grandchildren of slavesâhad come together in one of the crowning moments of the civil rights movement. King stood at the Lincoln Memorial, beneath the statue of Abraham Lincoln, and gave one of the most stirring speeches in American history. “I have a dream,” he said, describing his vision of America as it could be and as it should be. “When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will all be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, âFree at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!'”
King's words were electrifying. For the first time,
many white Americans understood that the civil rights workers were patriots, challenging the nation to live up to its best traditions. The March on Washington was a grand, hopeful spectacle. But only two weeks later a bomb exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young black girls as they were putting on their choir robes.
On Friday, November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was in Dallas, Texas, trying to smooth his relationship with members of the Democratic Party there. Many white southern Democrats had felt he was too supportive of the civil rights movement, and with an election coming up, JFK wanted to repair his image in the South.
The president and the First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, were in the backseat of an open convertible, waving to the crowds lining the parade route in downtown Dallas. The president smiled and waved, raising his right hand to push back his hair, when he suddenly slumped forward, clutching his throat. Almost immediately his head was thrown back by a second impact. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been shot. Secret Service agents flung themselves toward the dying president and his wife, who was unhurt but covered with her husband's blood. John Connally, the governor of Texas, had also been shot, though not fatally.
Reporter Richard Stolley, born in 1928, covered the assassination of the president for
Life
magazine.
O
n November 22, 1963, one of my colleagues, who was watching the AP [Associated Press] ticker, suddenly shouted to me that Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. I got on the phone to the New York office, and they told me to get to Dallas as fast as I could. I set up a bureau office in a downtown hotel. At about six o'clock I got a phone call from a
Life
[reporter]. She had heard from a cop that a Dallas businessman [Abraham Zapruder] had been in Dealey Plaza with a movie camera and had photographed the assassination from beginning to end. If that film actually existed, I just knew I had to get it, but I wasn't sure where to look. So I picked up the Dallas phone book and just ran my fingers down the Z's, and God, there it was: Zapruder, comma, Abraham. I called the number every fifteen minutes for about five hours, but no one picked up. Finally, late that evening, around eleven, this weary voice answered, and I said, “Is this Abraham Zapruder?” He said, “Yes.” “Is it true that you photographed the assassination?” “Yes.” “Have you seen the film?” “Yes.” And then I said, “Can I come out and see it now?” And
he said, “No. I'm too upset. I'm too tired. Come to my office at nine.”
I got there at 8:00 A.M. Saturday. Zapruder was slightly annoyed that I was an hour early, but he let me come in anyway. Inside the room were four very grim-faced Secret Service agents who had also come down to see the film. Zapruder got out this creaky old projector, with, of course, no sound, and he beamed the film up on a plain white wall. Within just a few seconds I knew that I was experiencing the most dramatic moment in my entire career. I was sitting there with these Secret Service agents as they watched a film of their failure at their number one job, which was to protect the president. We watched the motorcade snake around onto Elm Street around Dealey Plaza. It went behind a sign and Kennedy was briefly out of the scene. The next time we saw the president, his hands were up around his throat, and Connally's mouth was open and he was howling in painâthey had both already been shot. Jackie turned her head and looked quizzically at her husband. Less than two or three seconds later, without warning, the whole right side of President Kennedy's head just exploded in pink froth. Everyone watching the film in the room, including the Secret Service agents, just went, “Ugh!” It was like
we had been gut-punched. Zapruder, who had already seen the film, turned his head away just before the image of Kennedy getting shot appeared on the screen. It was an absolutely astounding moment. There was Jackie crawling up onto the trunk, and Secret Service agent Clint Hill leaping up onto the car, pushing Jackie back in, and holding on for dear life as the limo sped away to the hospital. The camera ran out of film just as the limo disappeared under the underpass.
The assassination of President Kennedy stunned the nation. A rush of events followed: On Friday Vice President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president on the plane carrying Kennedy's body back to Washington. That same afternoon the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was arrested in a Dallas movie theater. On Saturday, while it poured rain in Washington, the body of the president lay in state in the East Room of the White House. On Sunday, in front of live television news cameras, Oswald was shot dead in the police station by a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby. On Monday came the funeral itself, with the heart-wrenching image of JFK's small children mourning their dead father.
America's young were in shock. The president had formed a special bond with them, a bond that had helped them to feel that these times were
particularly theirs. With his leadership gone, young people experienced a feeling of both freedom and responsibility. The decade now appeared to pass even more completely to them. A youth-oriented subculture emerged around the arrival of more sophisticated rock groups such as the Beatles, and a growing political awareness was centered around protest over American participation in the Vietnam War.
Vietnam, once the French colony of Indochina, had won its own war for independence in 1954. It ended with the country's being split into two halves: Communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam, which America would come to support. The war had also ended with an agreement that both North Vietnam and South Vietnam would hold elections on reunification. But when it became clear that the Communists would win the election, South Vietnam put off the referendum. Over the next few years, Vietnamese Communist guerrillas gradually infiltrated South Vietnam, eventually renewing the war.