We're Much the Better for It

It happened fifty years ago tonight.

A man who spent his first 26 years in Washington (beginning in 1937) sticking up for Jim Crow had a change of heart...and stuck his neck out for America.

Not his own political legacy. Not his Democratic Party.

Lyndon Baines Johnson stuck his neck out for his country when, on 7-2-1964, he signed into law the first really meaningful civil rights legislation in this country's history. 

It happened thirteen months after Johnson's predecessor and old boss (that's right- John Fitzgerald Kennedy) made the initial pitch to get this bill put together and put before Congress. And to even make that pitch required Kennedy to show his own change of heart.

On 1-20-1961, JFK gave one of the most famous and most memorable inaugural addresses in American annals. In it, the youngest chief executive ever elected called for the United States to spread democracy all over the globe. 

Too bad he didn't call for the spread of democracy throughout these fifty states. 

Yeah, I know...if Kennedy had mentioned just one domestic issue during his inaugural speech (including That One), those Southern Democrats in the Senate [like Georgia's Richard Russell, South Carolina's Strom Thurmond (that's right- Thurmond was still a Donkey back then), and the Mississippi duo of John Stennis and James Eastland] would've torn the new president to pieces. 

Maybe at the Inaugural Ball.  

It took lots of events- before and after JFK got in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue- before he could understand that a country whose name supposedly means freedom and wants to expand it all over the planet ought to ensure freedom for all its citizens.  

That understanding was probably one of the reasons Lee Harvey Oswald ended the presidency of a man born in Brookline, MA 1,036 days after that term of office began.  

And so, from the time LBJ raised his right hand, he decided to make the passage of the Civil Rights Act a top priority. 

The man from near Stonewall, TX was going to finish JFK's unfinished business.  

To do all that, Johnson had to pull out all the tricks that served him in good stead as the Senate Democratic leader (LBJ was minority leader from 1953-1955, then majority leader from 1955-1961). He knew what the US senators he left behind when he joined Kennedy's administration wanted...and he knew how to appeal to that.

Yes, it got coarse...but Johnson got it done.

And when it was all over, 27 of the 34 Senate Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act. Meanwhile, 46 of the 66 Democrats then in this country's Senate went all in.  

With the Voting Rights Act passing in 1965 and the Fair Housing Act getting signed into law three years later, America began to open up...at long last.

And that even with so many Democrats who didn't want the new legislation to get on the books switching over to the GOP.

Thurmond was one of the defectors...and he helped shape the current Republican tone. (That's right...that angry, blustery, obstructionist tone that keeps making headlines.)

What today's Republicans- the ones the 1948 Dixiecrat presidential nominee left behind when he passed away in 2003- don't accept and don't understand is this:

A nation works best when ALL its citizens get to have their say...whether it's at a polling place during an election or someplace else where people can get their opinions noticed. 

I'm glad the Civil Rights Act of 1964 got the ball rolling.

Fifty Years Ago Today

It changed America's spirit.

It changed politics.

It changed history.  

It helped turn television into America's leading source for news and information.

And, yes...it made for a somber Thanksgiving and a somber Christmas.

On what turned out to be a sunny day in Dallas, TX, one of three bullets fired from the Texas Book Depository ended a history-making presidency one thousand days after that tenure began.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the youngest ever elected to the most talked-about political job there is (he was 43 years and almost six months old when elected on 11-2-1960), the first Roman Catholic person to get the job, and, as things turned out...the last standing US senator to win a presidential election in this country during the 20th Century.

And the fourth (and most recent chief executive) gunned down by an assassin.

I'd turned eight years of age eleven days earlier. And I was one of the millions of Americans who cried when it happened. 

Yep, I was born during the Dwight Eisenhower years...but I barely remember living through Ike's second term. Compared to memories of Eisenhower's last four years as commander in chief, I've got more memories of JFK's abbreviated term of office.

And those memories include his inaugural speech, his handling of the Cuban missile crisis, a nuclear test-ban treaty signed during the JFK years, America finally getting its space program rolling (okay, flying), the creation of the Peace Corps, and Kennedy's stand on civil rights. 

It took Joseph's and Rose's second son a good while to get hip to the message that advancing freedom all over the world (a message the 35th President brought out in his inaugural address) also means advancing freedom right here in these fifty states.

But after 250,000 assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial on 8-28-1963, that did it.

And those Southern Democrats Kennedy spent most of 1960 trying to woo in order to take the White House back from the Republicans were just going to have to get hip, too.

Almost a week ago, someone from the Associated Press turned in an article talking about the speech JFK gave in response to the 1963 March on Washington. (The AP article made it to this past Monday's Omaha World-Herald, and that's where I saw the report.) 

One thing the article's author put in really struck me. It was the observation that, in lots of American homes during the bulk of the 1960s, you'd find pictures of three prominent people: Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., and...John F. Kennedy. 

Three symbols of hope.

Three symbols who ended up brutally murdered.

And these three symbols were killed before any of them could reach the age of fifty.     

When Kennedy took a bullet from Lee Harvey Oswald, it began the demise of America's famous "can-do" spirit. 

Don't think so? 

Think about all the talk about health-care reform...and about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. Think about all the talk surrounding whether immigration reform should take place here in the United States. Think about what's being said as to whether effective gun-control laws can ever get passed here. And now we talk about whether we should see to it that all of our country's children get a decent education...rather than how. 

One thing's for sure: Oswald's act (no, I'm not into conspiracy theories...especially about just how Bobby's and Ted's and Joseph the Younger's brother died) led to the 1965 proposal of the Constitution's 25th Amendment...an amendment that finally got ratified on 2-10-1967.

When Lyndon Johnson moved up to the presidency this afternoon in 1963, the nation went without a vice president...until LBJ's 1964 runningmate, Hubert Humphrey, became America's second-in-command on 1-20-1965.

Never again would America's government run sans a vice president.    

I've been going on YouTube to check out how ABC, CBS, and NBC (as well as WFAA-TV, the ABC station in the Metroplex) covered the events of 11-22-1963. 

Words such as "disbelief," "anger," "sadness," and "indignation" were reported to have come out of so many people's mouths that day.

Some of the mouths belonged to key government officials.

Speaking of key government officials...some of today's government officials would absolutely love to see the next US senator to have won the White House (that's right, the man in there now, Barack Obama) removed from the White House.

And at least one big-name hate-radio (oops...talk radio) host would love to see Obama (a US senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008) gunned down. 

Really now...do we HAVE to go through this again, with another history-making chief executive?  

Haven't we learned anything from the events that took place fifty years ago today?

Watching "American Experience"

This past Monday, my favorite PBS series, American Experience, presented one of the most riveting documentaries in the program's history.

Nebraska's PBS stations (they're called NET) have since been rerunning this week's American Experience, and as a matter of fact, the program's back on the air right now this afternoon...just as I'm typing out this post.

This week's AE focused on an event that took place fifty years ago this very month...an event that helped shape the America we've got now.

On 5-4-1961, twelve people set out on regularly-scheduled buses from Washington, DC, with the goal of making it to New Orleans, LA, two weeks later.

All they wanted to do was test- and put an end to- America's Jim Crow laws, especially as they pertained to interstate travel.

The Freedom Rides of 1961 were designed as a way to, among other things, get this country's brand-new chief executive (and his people) to start thinking about- and acting on- putting domestic issues (especially the BIG one, civil rights) on the front burner.

That's right: John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech was more than "the torch has been passed" and "Ask not what your country can do you for you...ask what you can do for your country." During that address, JFK talked about spreading freedom all over the world.

He just didn't talk about spreading that freedom all over these fifty states.

Two buses- a Greyhound and a Trailways- pulled out of the nation's capital that first Thursday in the fifth month of 1961.

The Greyhound bus didn't make it, because a mob at Forsyth & Son Grocery, just outside Anniston, AL, firebombed it.

But the six people who'd traveled on that Greyhound bus made it alive.

The Anniston incident didn't stop the Freedom Riders. Neither did mob violence in Birmingham and Montgomery, the Camellia State's two biggest cities...and neither did then Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett's decision to throw one rider after another- 340 in all- in jail (Parchman Farm, one of the worst jails in the world).

And not even Bobby Kennedy's plea to get the Freedom Riders to get off the road and let the government do its job could stop the trips.

RFK's plea came not long after Montgomery was put under martial law...in the wake of vandalism directed at that city's First Baptist Church. (First Baptist was the one where Ralph Abernathy- the man who became the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated almost seven years later- preached.)

Martial law came to Alabama's capital city all of eighteen days into the Freedom Rides.

At last, thanks mainly to MLK's and RFK's frequent telephone conversations, did the US government finally decide to give the riders protection.

And you can bet the whole planet was watching.

They were watching a country whose very name is supposed to mean "freedom" continue a situation that couldn't possibly mean "freedom."

Like it or not, the mob violence- and Barnett's and John Patterson's (Alabama's then governor; in fact, George Wallace's predecessor) endorsing of said violence, to say nothing of Birmingham Police Chief Bull Connor's hand in creating and endorsing that violence- gave the United States a real egg stain.

And that violence couldn't prevent the September 1961 ruling that, at long last, outlawed segregation in interstate travel...from the bus stations to the buses themselves.

The documentary, "Freedom Riders," showed interviews of people on both sides of the Jim Crow-in-travel issue...from original Freedom Rider John Lewis (now, of course, a US representative from Georgia) to Patterson himself.

To this day, I'm not really sure if Patterson ever showed any, any, ANY remorse for his hand in helping to make the Freedom Rides some kind of difficult.

One thing I'm really sure about is this: People such as Lewis, Jim Zwerg, Diane Nash, Hank Thomas, Genevieve Houghton, Benjamin Cox, Jim Peck, Bernard Lafayette, and hundreds of others, did something completely and totally courageous...and America is much the better for it.