chapter 8 Promise of the 1960s
Page 99 →The summer of 1963 was one of active civil rights protest in Orangeburg. On August 20, the Orangeburg Freedom Movement submitted 10 demands to Orangeburg Mayor Fair and the City Council. Key demands were removal of “White” and “Colored” signs from municipal buildings and businesses licensed by the city, upgrade city and county government employment opportunities for Black residents, open county-owned hospitals to all regardless of race, and county and district school board compliance with the Brown school desegregation decision. Protest marches preceded and followed the demands. Leaders of the Orangeburg movement understood the lesson of Frederick Douglass: “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. . . . Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”1
That summer was the first time I became active in the Orangeburg Freedom Movement. I had just finished my junior year at Wilkinson High School and had been accepted to attend Fisk University as an early entrant in the fall. The center of the Orangeburg movement was Trinity United Methodist Church. My father was a member of that church and my brothers and I attended most Sundays, except when we attended Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Jamison, where my mother was a member. I was captured by the charisma of Matthew McCollom, who pastored at Trinity. He Page 100 →incessantly promoted participation in the movement. He especially engaged with the youth to get them involved because parents had employment obligations and some wanted protection from being fired because of protest activities. With my parents’ permission, my older brother, Wally, and I heeded the call to participate in protest marches. It was courageous of my mother, who had been recently rehired as a public school teacher after being fired for civil right protest activities several years earlier, to permit us to get involved. She had a strong moral compass for equality and human rights.
Before protest marches, it was customary to have a rally to instruct student protesters on how to behave in a nonviolent and respectful manner. There was the singing of many civil rights songs, especially “We Shall Overcome,” to buoy our spirits. I was picked on numerous occasions to lead rallies because of my oratorical ability. My adeptness in this leadership role caught the attention of Reverend I. DeQuincey Newman, who was the South Carolina field secretary of the NAACP. He asked me to join him to speak at a rally in Columbia to get students involved there. Early in high school, I recognized that I had a talent for public speaking and demonstrated that prowess by speaking at various school assemblies, reenacting various foreign policy positions of Woodrow Wilson in my American History class, and campaigning for vice president of the student council.
The summer of protest involved many marches, and several of us were arrested for trespassing because of sit-in activities. The summer reached a crescendo with the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I can still feel the excitement of that wildly enthusiastic crowd of 250,000 as we gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. The march was organized to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. This marker was critical to dramatize the unfulfilled promises of equality and freedom provided for in the language of the proclamation.
Page 101 →I was sixteen years old at the time of the march. It had been a long night journey on the Atlantic Coastline train from Orangeburg to Washington, DC. The Atlantic Coastline train, dubbed the “Freedom Special,” originated in Florida on August 27 and travelled up the East Coast picking up marchers at various locations, including Orangeburg and Florence, where the train added several cars from the western part of the state. By the time it reached Washington, it was twenty-two cars long.2
The trip was made shorter by the energy and enthusiasm of our youthful group filled with anticipation of the dawning of a new day in America. Every student who actively participated in protest activities was invited to attend the march with the Orangeburg delegation. We sang civil rights songs throughout the night, including “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Blowin in the Wind,” “If I Had a Hammer,” and of course “We Shall Overcome.” Our group included devoted young civil rights workers who had participated in sit-in and community organizing activities. One of them, my brother, Wally, had at age seventeen spent two weeks on the chain gang in Bowman for sit-in activities at the lunch counter at Orangeburg Pharmacy two weeks before the trip to Washington. So were the other Black students who experienced the same ordeal, which included hard labor and eating food infested with bugs.3 After their incarceration, the group was required to register with the Orangeburg police department pursuant to a picket registration ordinance. The ordinance permitted the tracking of students who periodically participated in protest marches.4 It was clearly designed to discourage Black students from exercising their First Amendment free speech rights.
That summer marked a period of pronounced civil disobedience in Orangeburg. I was arrested twice: once for seeking service at the Piggy Park drive-in on Calhoun Drive in Orangeburg, and again for participating in a sit-in at the lunch counter at S. H. Kress 5 &10 store in downtown Orangeburg.5 However, I escaped incarceration Page 102 →in the Orangeburg County Jail, euphemistically called the “Pink Palace” because of its pale color, because at age sixteen I was considered a juvenile under South Carolina law and was released to the custody of my parents. All persons arrested for protest activities between August 28, 1963, and March 19, 1964, are listed in the underground newsletter The Torch. The newsletter was secretly published by Dr. Charles E. Cottingham, professor of biology at South Carolina State College. It was the most effective means of communication between protestors and the movement leadership.6
Gene Johnson and Loretta Thomas were a part of the group as well.7 Gene, a neighbor, was notable for telling many offbeat jokes throughout the night. Loretta, the daughter of a civil rights leader Charles Thomas in Orangeburg, was petite and pretty. She was a former head majorette in the Wilkinson High band. We sat across from each other, stealing glances, and exchanging bits of personal information. Loretta was impressed that I would be attending Fisk University in the fall.
Disembarking from the train at Union Station on that hot and humid day, we confronted a mass of Black folk. Ike Williams, from Charleston, a member of our group, described the scene as follows: “I remember that Union Station swelling with ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Just like a choir—it was almost like Judgment Day and all of the believers coming together singing a great hymn, and that hymn was ‘We Shall Overcome.’”8 On the morning of August 28, more that 2,000 chartered buses, 21 special trains, 10 chartered aircraft, and countless autos from across the nation descended upon Washington. The March on Washington, at that time, was the largest gathering of demonstrators for human rights in the history of the nation. There was confusion about the starting point of the march, so we just headed down Constitution Avenue toward the Lincoln Memorial. We were sandwiched among thousands of excited faces. I have only experienced this kind of Black energy once since then—at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration. Most of our group got separated Page 103 →in the sea of humanity, but a few of us, including Joseph Fuller, managed to garner a vantage point just below the tripod on the right side of the steps leading to the Lincoln Memorial.
The program started with a vibrant rendition of the National Anthem by Marian Anderson. She also sang a spirited version of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” This was Anderson’s second singing appearance at the Lincoln Memorial. After being denied the right to sing at Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution because of its racial segregation policy, President Franklin Roosevelt, at Eleanor Roosevelt’s instigation, arranged for Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial on April 9, 1939. While growing up, my mother had spoken often of her musical prowess as the premiere contralto.
Many leading civil rights leaders spoke, including A. Philip Randolph, director of the March; John Lewis, national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and James Farmer, head of the Congress of Racial Equality. Interspersed among the speakers was the booming voice of Mahalia Jackson singing, “I’ve been buked, and I’ve been scorned.”
As the three-hour long program neared the end, the anticipation of its final speaker was palpable. Then the moment came. Standing in the shadow of the Great Emancipator, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fired up and inspired the crowd with his eloquent “I Have a Dream” speech: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”
I left the event with euphoric exhaustion and quiet reflection on Dr. King’s parting words that “unearned suffering is redemptive” and that we must “not wallow in the valley of despair.”
Our group was subdued on the long train ride home. We had witnessed something historic and were trying to grasp its significance, savoring every thought. Did Dr. King’s words move the moral conscience of the nation? Were we at a turning point in the civil Page 104 →rights movement? Would the event lead to more favorable civil rights legislation? These were a few of the questions we pondered on the trip home.
Dr. King’s oration stuck with me for many days after I returned home. I first realized the power of words in high school. One afternoon in 1961, while surfing the three channels on our black-and-white television set after school, I landed on Johnny Carson’s weekly game show on ABC, Who Do You Trust? After laughing my way through the episode, I remained on the channel, and President Kennedy appeared in one of his weekly press conferences. I started to listen and was mesmerized by his use of the English language. He spoke with an unusual (to me) Boston accent and a cadence punctuated with body language, especially pointing his finger. He mixed humor with his message and handled himself with consummate aplomb.
After the press conference, I started mimicking the cadence of his language and gestures and tuned in weekly to the press conferences to revel in JFK’s words. Several years later upon the death of Winston Churchill, I stayed up all night listening to Churchill’s speeches that were played on BBC radio to commemorate his life. JFK shared Churchill’s passion for the English language and both used it effectively in their political careers. While attending Fisk University, a friend, Micky McCarthy, observed that I sounded like JFK in my speech mannerisms.
I am fascinated with the various ways the English language is spoken. Growing up in the South, there was the distinct drawl of Southern white people, the broken and mixed English of lower-class Black people carried over from the days of slavery, and the moderately accented language of educated Black people. The variations of spoken English were especially noticeable among Black people in school and church, where attendees were from different socioeconomic classes. I recall switching back and forth with word pronunciation and enunciation depending on the circumstance of who was Page 105 →present. This automatic verbal reflex continues to this day, a method of relating better to the person with whom I am speaking. This behavior is not directed exclusively at Black people but at Southern white people as well.
In high school, we read Shakespeare and Dickens and were taught to model ourselves after those who spoke the Queen’s English. I started paying particularly close attention to diction, syntax, and cadence in language delivery when I got hooked on watching the press conferences of President Kennedy. It was not long before I started tweaking the pattern of my spoken language. By the time I entered college, my speech pattern was fully formed.
Rooming with Nick Wheeler-Robinson at Harvard had a large influence in tilting my speech pattern towards BBC English. Nick, a Brit educated at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, was well-read and, to my mind, spoke perfect English. The expressiveness of his speech delivery, especially when he read poetry, was mesmerizing. My exposure to Nick started a slow, yet deliberate, process of studying English culture. It prompted frequent trips to London to immerse myself in English society. Since the game of cricket had a large influence on the cultural formation of England, I was naturally attracted to the game and tried to understand its impact on English society.
Enrollment at Fisk University
In September 1963, I enrolled in the early admission program at Fisk University, formerly the Fisk Free Colored School and the second oldest historically Black college, founded in 1866 in Nashville, Tennessee. As a young civil rights activist, I imagined myself walking in the shoes of W. E. B. Du Bois, an earlier graduate in 1885. (Professor Du Bois had died one week before I enrolled.) Professor Du Bois cofounded the NAACP, and edited its magazine, The Crisis, for nearly twenty-five years. I was very successful in high school, ranking second academically in my class and was ready to leave. I had Page 106 →exhausted the upper-courses curriculum by the end of my third year. I am indebted to my mother for respecting my decision to attend college, 500 miles away from home, without finishing high school.
Fisk had a rich cultural history and an excellent academic reputation. Located on Jefferson Street about two miles from downtown Nashville, the historic campus includes notable neo-Gothic and Victorian buildings, including Jubilee Hall. The Carl Van Vechten Gallery at Fisk boasted the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, consisting of European modernists (Cezanne, Renoir, Picasso) and American artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe.
Most of my teachers were white, transplanted from other colleges and universities, with a mission to enhance Black education. Several Black professors played a major academic role, most significantly Arna Bontemps, a poet and novelist and noted member of the Harlem Renaissance, whom I had the pleasure of meeting. He was the college’s librarian located in Cravath Hall. Mr. Bontemps was Langston Hughes’s best friend, who was also on the faculty at Fisk during an earlier day; they co-authored the acclaimed 1949 anthology titled The Poetry of the Negro. As a tribute to Langston Hughes, I made a recording of his signature poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, for my elocution class. Hughes used rivers as a metaphor for the totality of the African American experience—from the beginning of civilization on the Euphrates to the Congo, Nile, and the Mississippi River. One of Arna Bontemps’s children, Arna Alexander Bontemps, was a classmate at Fisk.
Fisk reinforced confidence in my academic ability by assigning me to the Basic College dormitory. That dorm was for male high achievers. I lived and dined with a group of guys who placed a premium on studying and doing well. Late night study was the norm, only punctuated by a visit to the food truck for a stromboli sandwich. It felt like we were the living embodiment of Professor Du Bois’s “talented tenth,” leaders of thought and culture who would advance the cause of Black people. Recognizing that its mission was Page 107 →developing future leaders, Fisk required all students to take a course in elocution.
I was invited to enroll in the honors Western Civilization class taught by Professor Theodore S. Currier. He had an impressive and enigmatic intellect. He was also quirky, owning two identical Lincoln Continental cars of different colors. Professor Currier was a chain smoker and had a habit of pacing the floor throughout his lectures. We were mesmerized by his elegant mind. He was sixty years old when he taught me, and his brilliance did not wane over the years from the time he was the senior faculty member of the History Department at age twenty-eight. He was a mentor to the renowned historian, John Hope Franklin, and constantly talked about him as a role model. Years later in a conversation with John Hope at Harvard, I referenced Ted Currier, which elicited a smile from him. Professor Currier was so confident of John Hope’s ability that he financed his former student’s first year of graduate studies at Harvard University.9
I took pre-calculus from a dynamic mathematician and physicist, Professor Nelson Fuson. He chaired the Physics Department and was a Quaker pacifist who was active in the civil rights movement in Nashville. He excited me by teaching me how to calculate and prove pi. I was introduced to the Beatles at his house. His children had the new release: “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” It was the Beatles’ first US number one hit, and the start of the British invasion of the American music industry. Professor Charlotte Spivack mesmerized me in her English course. She made English literature exciting. She taught me how to read poetry, and I still read the poetry book from her class.
My quintessential course was an honors colloquium titled “The Good Society,” taught by Professor Myron Lunine. The colloquium dealt with questions concerning the nature of justice, the dimensions of freedom, the meaning of equality, the role of government, and the purpose of education. We read the classical philosophers, including Plato, Rousseau, Locke, and Burke. My final course paper, “Property Rights Versus Human Rights: Possible Burkean and Lockean Page 108 →Positions,” was selected as the freshman entry to the Fisk Honors Review.10 In it, I analyzed the Negro’s continued oppression against the societal dilemma of reconciling the competing interests of property rights versus human rights. My paper was an argument for congressional action in enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
I made many wonderful friendships during my freshman year. My roommate, Fred Powell, was a fellow early entrant from Fairmont, North Carolina. After graduating magna cum laude, he later studied medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is now a doctor. Moses McKissick, the son of an old Nashville family that established the first African American architecture firm in the United States, was my mentor. He made many helpful suggestions on how I could improve my honors paper. He later attended the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. Roswell Beck from Florence, South Carolina, a fine trumpet player, persuaded me to join his three-piece combo as piano player. We played Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” at the opening class assembly. Following in the footsteps of his father, he became a doctor after graduating from Meharry Medical College in Nashville. Noah Griffin, a charismatic person with a lovely voice, later attended Harvard Law School with me. Noah’s father was a social activist who headed the NAACP in San Francisco, and Noah went home to follow in his footsteps. Mickey McCarthy from Birmingham, Alabama, taught me how to bowl and invited me to attend a Ray Charles concert with him in downtown Nashville. Fisk had an endless contingent of very smart women. In fact, my freshman class of 276 consisted of 190 women and only 86 men. I had a crush on Ramona Hoage, a go-getter in my class who graduated magna cum laude. I met her earlier at her grandparents’ house on Oak Street in Orangeburg. Later in life as an academic and activist, Romona was credited with introducing the term “African American.”
My year at Fisk was a time of turmoil in the larger society. Student demonstrations and sit-ins were common throughout the Page 109 →country, including in Nashville. John Lewis was a classmate at Fisk University, although I did not know him. He headed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at the time and led many protest marches in Nashville and elsewhere. He was jailed many times for protest activities, including his participation in the Freedom Rides during the summer of 1961. Later, John became an influential congressman from Atlanta, Georgia.
With my roommate Fred Powell during our freshman year at Fisk University, 1963. Author’s collection.
I remember when Martin Luther King made a speech to the Fisk student body in the college gym. He was every bit as eloquent as he was when I first saw him at the March on Washington a few months earlier.
On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. None of us could make sense of it and concluded that it was a symptom of the turbulent 1960s. We were all glued to the TV as we watched the riderless horse and caisson, carrying President Kennedy’s body, meander through the streets of Washington, DC. The Page 110 →caisson made a clickity-clack sound to the rhythm of a somber drum cadence and Chopin’s Funeral March. That was the saddest day for America in my short lifetime.
Dr. King’s moral imperative combined with President Lyndon Johnson’s political acumen resulted in passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most comprehensive civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. The Voting Rights Act would follow in 1965 after a bloody confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. It is sobering to note that the record African American voter turnout for Barack Obama would not have been possible before the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The civil rights laws were also an assault on gender inequality. Women changed the way they defined themselves in the 1960s. In 1966, the National Organization for Women was founded.
Symptoms of the Sixties
The Sixties gave currency to the belief that no problem—whether poverty, illiteracy, war, or space travel—was too big to be solved. We became ambassadors to the world by joining the Peace Corps in record numbers. We vested ourselves in the Head Start program to stamp out illiteracy at a very early age. And we landed a man on the moon on July 20, 1969.
In his American University speech on June 10, 1963, President Kennedy implored that we could achieve the peace that always eluded us:
No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we can do it again . . . Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. . . . [but] a genuine peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children.11
Page 111 →The Sixties redefined our relationships with our parents, our government, our schools, our churches, and other institutions of authority. Boomers had the sheer numbers to set dress codes (tie-dyed T-shirts, bell bottoms, boots, miniskirts, long hair, and Afros) and music trends (James Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” The Beatles’s White Album, which featured “Revolution,” Rolling Stones’s “Gimme Shelter,” Doors’s “Light My Fire”), carve out a new speech vernacular (groovy, far out, dig it, mellow, bummer), and defined a sexual revolution (epitomized by bra burning and free love) that would culminate in the Woodstock music festival in August 1969. AIDS would eventually scare us back into celibacy a couple of decades later, but Woodstock was a time to express freedom against the fiery backdrop of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Richie Havens, Joe Cocker, and the Grateful Dead. You’ve probably heard the commentary on the drug culture: “If you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there.”
Strangely, the Sixties ended as rapidly and mysteriously as they had begun. Like a small fire that quickly grew into a raging torrent, the Sixties would just as quickly consume itself in the flicker of a moment. Beginning in the psychedelic bliss of drugs and free love, the Sixties picked up steam fast and ended in turmoil. The year 1963 saw the assassination of President Kennedy; 1965 saw the assassination of Malcolm X and the race riots in Watts, a section of Los Angeles; 1967 saw the conviction of Muhammad Ali for refusing on religious grounds induction into the Army, race riots in Newark, Detroit, and Washington, DC, against an international backdrop of the Six-Day War in which Israel defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and claimed the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, and Golan Heights; 1968 saw the massive escalation of hostilities and death in Vietnam with the Tet Offensive and President Johnson announcing that he would not run for reelection; and later in 1968, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy would be assassinated only two months apart, and Richard Nixon would win a close election Page 112 →by only .7 percent of the vote over Hubert Humphrey to claim the presidency.
Did the hope, idealism, and promise that propelled us during the Sixties die with its magical leaders? John Lewis recalled that while he was devastated when Dr. King was killed, he soldiered on because Bobby Kennedy kept the flame alive. I too adored Bobby Kennedy ever since I shook his hand during the summer of 1966 while working at the US State Department.
I can still hear Bobby’s profound message of suffering and hope in quoting Aeschylus after Martin Luther King’s assassination:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need is not hatred; . . . but . . . love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another . . . Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.
When Bobby was assassinated, I shared John Lewis’s feeling that “the country was falling apart.” Andrew Young (later ambassador and mayor of Atlanta) shared that view by describing the numbness of “just going through the motions.” Tom Brokaw observed: “Kennedy and King could appeal to the center as well as to the left and mobilize those forces against the conservative tide that was about to sweep the nation.”12
Were we so disillusioned by the turn of events that we would, in the words of Timothy Leary, “turn on, tune in, drop out” and abandon our critical engagement with the world? No, that did not happen. We would continue to fight for our beliefs. But we had experienced a loss of innocence and, more important, the loss of our dream of bringing about a true revolution in the way society defines and solves problems.
Page 113 →The question unanswered to this day is whether the Sixties left a meaningful and lasting mark on the American ethos. Which raises the ancillary question: Were we boomers all that different from our parents? Granted, we certainly were a temperamental and spoiled lot who indulged in excesses made possible by the rising affluence of American society. But I don’t think that we were all that different. While many of us continued to carry the flame of revolution forward, most of us reverted to the ways of our parents and embraced the expectations and comforts of the establishment—became investment bankers, lawyers, and other professionals in the pursuit of greater wealth—and devolved into self-absorbed, egocentric individuals imbued with an entitlement mentality.
At my 25th reunion at Harvard Law School, one of the more radical members of our class, after observing our dress, speech, and thinking, concluded that the lot of us sounded and acted like a “fucking board of directors.”