"SIXTY YEARS AGO"

 “SIXTY YEARS AGO”

I entered my segregated high school as a freshman in 1960.  We were required to take civics in that year, and our teacher Ms. Frizzell had a creative assignment for us.  It was a presidential election year, and the two main candidates were Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat John F. Kennedy.  Ms. Frizzell’s assignment was for each of us to do our research, then use that research to choose which candidate we would vote for, if we could vote.  The assignment was due about November 1 of that year.  I did my due diligence, and I decided that I would vote for Richard Nixon, if I could have voted.  I chose Nixon because I liked Ike, the previous Republican president, because Kennedy was Catholic (would he obey the pope or be loyal to the USA?), and because Kennedy seemed to lean towards social justice too much (after all, I was still in deep captivity to white supremacy).

Three years later in 1963, I began my senior year, and things were in flux in my heart and mind.  The March on Washington had occurred in August, and in mid September, my white supremacist culture answered MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech by blowing up Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four young girls in Sunday school:  Addie Mae Collins,  Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley.  Even in my continuing deep captivity to racism, I was appalled by this senseless killing.  

On Friday, November 22 of that year, several of us were changing classes at Central High School, and our janitor Mr. Ellis, whom we called “Dude” (before the advent of The Big Lebowski), came up to us in the hall to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.  Dude was always joking and pulling pranks on us, so at first we thought that he was joking on this too.  Only a few minutes later, the intercom came on to announce that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and was not expected to live.  We later got the news that he had indeed died.  We were all in shock.  Though few of us liked him because of his work on civil rights, we simply could not believe that anyone would shoot the President of the United States.  Kennedy was not our favorite President, but we took it personally that someone had the temerity and the arrogance to shoot the President. They were striking a blow at the nation itself.

School let out early that day, and the nation began a three day mourning period, and it seemed to me that the earth itself had changed – Kennedy’s assassination was that kind of shock.  School was out on Monday, November 25, for the funeral and memorial services for President Kennedy.  I stayed home to watch the service, and Miss Martha, a Black woman who cleaned the beauty shop for Mother, was with me, doing some ironing for Mother one day a week.  She and I both watched the service together on TV, and my racism showed itself to me that day.  As the caisson made its way down Pennsylvania Avenue with the President’s body, we both ended up crying.  I noticed Miss Martha’s crying, and I said to myself:  “Wow, she is crying like me.  Can Black people actually be like us?”  I am ashamed to admit that now, but it was one of many revelations to me about my captivity to white supremacy and about the humanity of people classified as Black.

It is hard to overestimate the impact that the assassination of President Kennedy had on me and on so many others of my generation.  Though the civil rights movement was hitting its stride, that had not yet reached our consciousness, as it would just a few years later.  The assassination of Kennedy was a jarring blow that told us that the calmness and stability (and repression) of the 1950’s was over.  What we thought was a stable order and a stable world had been shattered in Dallas.  For me, the 1960’s would be the beginning of a powerful force calling me and many others out, calling us to seek a more just and equitable world.  I still feel a bit of sadness when I watch that caisson – it was a great loss for the Kennedys, for me, and for all of us.

I still don’t know who killed President Kennedy – I don’t believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.  Yet, to borrow from a fine song by John Prine - “we lost Davey in the Korean War, still don’t know what for, don’t matter any more,” – it don’t matter any more.  All of our lives were changed on that November day in 1963, much in the same way that 9/11 changed us and so many lives.  The assassination shattered any naivete that we had about the stability of life, and part of the chaos that ensued in the 1960’s was, for me, a direct result of those consciousness-shattering events of that day in 1963.  It was as if the earth had broken open, and new revelations were coming.  In many ways, we are still living out that impact on American culture – will we be able to go back to the 1950’s when everyone knew that white males should reign supreme, or will we affirm that tectonic shift that seeks a more inclusive, welcoming society, that seeks to live out the ideals that President Kennedy outlined in his famous inaugural speech in 1961?