"A TUMULTUOUS TIME"

 “A TUMULTOUS TIME”

August is always a hot month in the South, and so it is this summer.  We are also in a hot and tumultuous time politically, with a close Presidential race and Congressional races.  The Democratic convention will start next week in Chicago, and that is a call back to the chaotic Democratic convention of 1968 in Chicago.  I’ll write more on that next week, but this week, I want to remember the tumultuous summer of 1964, especially the month of August, 1964. Sixty years ago, the country was in more turmoil than it is now, if that is even possible.  Lyndon Johnson had become President in November, 1963, after the assassination of President John Kennedy, an event that shocked the nation, whether you supported Kennedy or not.  It was as if the 1960’s was saying to the mundane 1950’s – “your time is up, there are sweeping changes coming.”  

        Indeed, today’s tuumultous times are in many ways an echo of those struggles – do we want to return to a time when everyone agreed that white men should be in control, or do we want to be in conversation about a multiracial democracy with shared power and influence?  The idea behind “Make America Great Again” is to seek to return to that time of the 1940’s and 1950’s when everyone acknowledged that those classified as “white” males should be in control.  The 1960’s are a central part of that conversation, and especially 60 years ago in 1964.

The summer of 1964 began with the Mississippi Summer Project (later to be renamed Mississippi Freedom Summer) being instituted by SNCC and CORE.  Its creative director was the great visionary and organizer Bob Moses of SNCC, with assistance from Dave Dennis of CORE.  The idea was to bring white volunteers from the North to work in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, hoping to get as many Black people registered to vote as possible.  This was before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, so registering to vote in Mississippi was an act that could cost a Black person their lives in 1964.  The idea was that bringing white students down to Mississippi would lessen the violence, and what violence that did occur would be magnified to the nation because there would also likely be white victims, rather than just the Black victims, who were often ignored by the national media.  Reverend James Lawson was a leader of non-violent training for the many white volunteers, who soon came to Mississippi.

The summer began in high hopes.  Congress passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 on July 2, the most significant civil rights bill passed by Congress since 1875, almost 90 years.  The bill outlawed discrimination and segregation in the USA on the basis of race, religion, sex, or creed.  It also emphasized the need for integration in public schools and made it illegal to discriminate in employment practices.  It was the beginning of the end of the neo-slavery that had plagued the South and the country since the end of Reconstruction.  It was a difficult political achievement, but President Lyndon Johnson used his considerable political skills to get it done.  Indeed, when he signed the Civil Rights Bill, he noted that Democrats would lose the South for at least a generation, which has proved to be prescient, with the shift from Democrats to Republicans lasting longer than a generation.

The white, Southern resistance had already begun, however.  On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers – James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman – were kidnapped by the KKK.  A massive search for them began and continued through most of the summer.  I had just graduated from high school in May of that year, and although I was still firmly in the grip of the power of racism, I had begun to wonder about its accuracy and power.  

        Sitting in front of me as I write this today is the Memphis Press-Scimitar of August 5, 1964, a paper that I have saved for these 60 years.  It was the afternoon paper at that time, and we received it at my home in Helena, Arkansas, with its being the “Mid-South Edition.”  I saved it because it has two glaring headlines: one is a smaller headline “Bodies of Civil Rights Trio Identified.” The article supporting it indicates that the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman had been found in shallow graves at a farm pond site near Philadelphia, Mississippi.  They had all been beaten severely and shot to death.  And, yes, that Philadelphia is also the place where Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign of 1980, as if to make certain that everyone understood what his platform would be.   It took a long time to find some of the murderers, and some were convicted in 1970. But it would be over 40 years before the main leader Edgar Ray Killen would be convicted.  He died in prison in 2018.

The main headline in that Memphis Press-Scimitar, however, was not the discovery of the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.  The main headline was in dark black one inch type:  “NAVY PLANES DESTROY 25 PT’S, HIT FIVE NORTH VIET NAM BASES.”  The article under it indicated that the US Navy had responded to attacks by the North Vietnamese on U.S. destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy.  President Johnson had addressed the nation on Tuesday, August 4, and had indicated that these military attacks had taken place.  He also indicated that he would seek Congressional support for protecting American troops in the area.  Two days later on August 7, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving LBJ the power to prosecute this campaign as necessary.  The House of Representatives passed the Resolution unanimously, and the Senate voted 88-2 to support (dissenting were Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska).  It was the beginning of the disastrous Vietnam War, in which over 50,000 American troops were killed and millions of Vietnamese killed. The huge protest over this war drove Johnson not to seek re-election in 1968 and led to the election of Richard Nixon as president.

So, this one day headline in the Memphis Press-Scimitar points to the turbulence of the 1960’s and points us to the turbulence of our own time.  In many ways, this election of 2024 is eerily similar to that of 1968, with a defeated presidential candidate running again for the Republicans, and the sitting Vice-President (Hubert Humphrey)stepping in for the President who had declined to seek re-election.  I hope that the similarity ends there, because the once-defeated candidate, Richard Nixon,  won in 1968.  If Trump wins in 2024, we will look back at the election of 1876, where the gains of Reconstruction were wiped out, just as Trump has promised to take us back to the 1950’s if he wins. The power to prevent that retrenchment lies in our hands and hearts, so let us take care of business in this tumultuous time.