America Dreaming

by Laban Carrick Hill

  Civil Rights protesters marching in Birmingham

  * * *

  While in jail, King wrote his now legendary “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which was a statement of purpose for the Civil Rights Movement. Here is an excerpt:

  You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn’t negotiating a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored…. So must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood….

  * * *

  On May 2, hundreds of kids filed out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church singing “We Shall Overcome.” The police arrested the children by the dozen, by the score, and finally by the hundreds. By nightfall there were 959 children in the Birmingham jail. The next day all hell broke loose. The city commissioner in charge of the police, Eugene “Bull” Connor, set up ambushes in preparation for the protesters. The jail was full so Connor decided to prevent blacks from protesting by using extreme measures. The police refused to allow five hundred black protesters to leave the church. In the streets, they clubbed black protesters, savaged them with dogs, and sprayed fire hoses at them. Children were sent spinning down the street by the bursts of water. Others were beaten to the ground.

  Wreckage of a bomb exploded near King’s motel in Birmingham

  * * *

  Inside the grounds of the Birmingham jail the children were forced to stand for hours in the rain. Other children were given strong laxatives and placed in cells with no toilets. Girls were forced to scrub the dirty jail floors with toothbrushes.

  * * *

  Television cameras recorded for the nation white men, their faces flushed and twisted into expressions of hatred, zealously attacking unarmed children and adults.

  Now phase three was launched. King sent thousands of protesters into the streets. Heavily outnumbered, the Birmingham police lashed out with renewed fury. The city became a bloodbath. Connor realized the protests were beyond his control and called Governor George Wallace, who sent almost the entire Alabama state police. At this point the Justice Department was forced to step in and persuade local business leaders to use their influence on the city’s white establishment. Robert Kennedy contacted King and asked him to accept this chance to negotiate. A four-point peace agreement was hammered out:

  1. Customers’ restrooms in downtown stores were desegregated.

  2. The stores would hire black sales assistants and clerks.

  3. All jailed demonstrators were to be released.

  4. Biracial committees were created to remedy black grievances.

  Despite this agreement, Birmingham was to descend into more violence. The home of King’s brother and the A. G. Gaston Motel were bombed in an attempt to assassinate King. Neither bombings injured anyone, but in response, blacks rioted in the streets, smashing store windows and setting fire to parked cars. Peace eventually was restored, but Birmingham would remain a dangerous place for months to come.

  THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON

  August 28, 1963

  When more than 250,000 marchers descended on the nation’s capital chanting, “Pass that bill! Pass that bill! Pass that bill!” veteran civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph’s dream had finally come true. As the gray wise man of the Movement at seventy-four, Randolph first proposed the march in 1940. Twenty-three years later, when Bayard Rustin suggested that now was the time, Randolph heartily agreed. On the hot, humid day of August 28, Randolph and Rustin led a massive march onto the National Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The event was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and was meant to pressure the president to push through Congress his bill to “make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the population that race has no place in American life or law.” Blacks called this bill the “Second Emancipation Proclamation,” referring to Lincoln’s proclamation to free the slaves exactly one hundred years before. This proclamation was meant to finish what Lincoln had begun.

  From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, major figures from every branch of the Civil Rights Movement spoke to the crowd. There were performances by gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and folksingers Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Despite the sense of unity in the crowd, behind the scenes the struggle between the younger generation and the Movement’s older, more conservative leaders threatened to split them. SNCC chairman John Lewis planned to deliver an impassioned speech that included a threat that the Movement would “march through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did,” referring to the Union general who burned his way through the South. This rift was one of the first clear signs that the younger leaders were becoming impatient with the movement’s strategy of nonviolence and negotiation. In the end Lewis backed down, but this would not be the case in the future.

  Despite this tension, the march’s crowning moment was when Martin Luther King Jr. stepped up to the podium. He began slowly and bitterly, “There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.” As King paused and looked out at the crowd, he realized their mood was joyous, and did not match the solemnity of his prepared speech. Instead, he launched into a speech that he had been polishing and practicing before church groups and community groups for years. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!” The cadence of his repeated “I have a dream” statement inspired the crowd and the nation. It became the keynote refrain for the Civil Rights Movement.

  The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was the first mass protest march on the capital and set the stage for many more to come in the next decade. This mass march would become the standard that other groups would use to lobby for their goals.

  THE BIRMINGHAM CHURCH BOMBING

  September 15, 1963

  Just over two weeks later, Birmingham would once again be in the nation’s headlines. Shortly before 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, September 15, a bomb exploded at one of the most active churches in the city. The explosion rocked the building. Walls and ceilings collapsed. Lying among the rubble were twenty injured black children. Four little girls—Addie May Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—were dead. Within hours African Americans were rioting in the streets, clashing with crowds of working-class whites. The police were able to clear the streets, but not before two more black youths were killed.

  The bombing of the Sunday school was the fifty-first racial bombing in Birmingham since 1946. Not one of the preceding fifty blasts had led to an arrest and conviction. The two white men who perpetrated this bombing were arrested and then released.

  “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!

  Since 1947, more than thirty bombs had gone off in Birmingham, causing blacks to refer to the city as both “Tragic City” and “Bombingham.”

  Between 1956 and 1963, not a single month passed without a racial bombing in the eleven states of the Old Confederacy.

  THE SECOND EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

  July 2, 1964

  “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans can be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated�
��.”

  President Kennedy spoke these words in a televised speech on the evening of June 11, 1963. Earlier in the day, Alabama Governor George Wallace “stood at the schoolhouse door” and refused admission to a black student. Later that night after Kennedy’s speech, Medgar Evers, the first full-time representative of the NAACP in Mississippi, would return home after watching Kennedy’s speech and be assassinated on his doorstep in front of his wife and children. Evers had devoted his life to the Civil Rights Movement. He had gained national attention for his investigations into violent crimes against blacks and had led a boycott against Jackson, Mississippi, merchants.

  Kennedy’s speech marked a change in the federal government’s resolve to enforce equal rights for black Americans, but Kennedy would not live to see his civil rights legislation signed into law. After his assassination, the newly sworn-in president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, would make it his mission to ensure Kennedy’s legacy. At the top of that list was Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act. In his first address to Congress, Johnson said, “First, no memorial or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It’s time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”

  On July 2, the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act finally passed Congress, despite heavy opposition by Southern Democrats. The act changed the country in fundamental ways. In addition to attacking racial discrimination, it tore down America’s long-standing tradition of second-class citizenship for women. It outlawed job discrimination based on race or gender. It outlawed discrimination in all public accommodations, including restaurants, hotels, waiting rooms, and theaters. It prohibited the federal government from funding any program at the national, state, or local level that discriminated. The Justice Department was given greater powers to fight against school discrimination, and a new federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was created to fight employers who practiced discrimination.

  The Civil Rights Movement, almost a century after the end of the Civil War, finally succeeded in enlisting the federal government in the fight against racial injustice. Then, virtually on their own, a block of moderate Democrat and Republican congressmen extended that fight to include justice for women as well.

  Clearly, for those involved in the Movement at the time, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 appeared to be the answer to achieving racial justice in America.

  For the Boomer Generation that was just coming of age, the lessons from the successes and failures of the Civil Rights Movement were just the beginning.

  “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny and I say segregation now… Segregation tomorrow… Segregation forever.”

  —George C. Wallace (pictured standing at the schoolhouse door) in his inaugural address upon becoming governor of Alabama on January 14, 1963

  “You never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the face of a young child.”

  —President Johnson on his reasons for supporting civil rights

  YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION

  THE RADICAL YOUTH MOVEMENT

  NEW GENERATION NOW

  “We’re more popular than Jesus.”

  — John Lennon of the Beatles, 1966

  That’s the way it felt, not just for Lennon and the Beatles, but for everyone who grew up in the ’60s. The ’50s had taught them day in and day out that as children they were the center of the universe, at least in America. The result of this unheard-of attention was the largest generation of teenagers with an inevitable sense of entitlement. Boomers not only felt pride in their domination, but that satisfaction often tipped into an inflated sense of importance.

  Their dominance easily led to a logical fallacy: Since the American economy was driven by their whims and desires, then the country as a whole should be driven by the opinions and ideas of these adolescents. Whether that arrogance would intensify into the kind of hubris of ancient tragedy, however, would not be determined until the end of the decade. For now, it simply manifested in a confidence that they could make the world into whatever they desired.

  The Beatles arrived on the scene in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. The country was in crisis. More specifically, the youth of America felt a sense of alienation and disappointment in their authority figures. Not only had they lost a president who had given them hope, but the nation had just come out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where nuclear weapons had very nearly been pointed at it. Simultaneously, President Johnson was escalating the troop commitment to a war in Vietnam, a place nobody could even find on a map. That meant that Boomers were being drafted to fight in a conflict that they did not understand and were not remotely committed to. For many of the white middle-class teens going off to college, it seemed as though everything their parents had preached about—conformity buying contentment—could not protect them from nuclear threats and death in a jungle on the other side of the world.

  Besides these external anxieties, the country was witnessing real, concrete evil from within. Each night television stations reported on white racists denying civil rights to African Americans and attacking, even murdering, those who stood up to protest. The utopian world of plenitude and suburban bliss was simply a thin veneer that was quickly cracking. It was at this point that the “generation gap” really became apparent. Because their parents’ generation was so intent on protecting the status quo, teens and young adults were quickly becoming skeptical of the values they had been raised on.

  The Beatles embodied the generation gap—they launched a new era of independent singer-songwriters delivering their own messages.

  John, Paul, George, and Ringo—the Fab Four—arrived at just the right time. Their innovative combination of African-American R&B with their own brilliant and intuitive song composition returned rock-and-roll to its roots, which surprisingly had been lost over the previous five years. Hit factories like the Brill Building moved away from rock’s African-American origins toward bubblegum pop written by professionals and performed by groups created by record labels.

  The Beatles, despite performing songs on similar topics, launched a new era of performers who sang their own songs. “They broke out of three-chord rock and four-chord teenybop,” writes Lennon biographer Jon Wiener. More specifically, they brought unpredictable twists to a music genre that had become incredibly predictable. Both Lennon and McCartney were self-made musicians who did not know how to read music and refused to learn. Their compositions contained none of the preconceived notions about what chord follows another. Instead, they were open to exploit whatever sounded good to them: beginning and ending songs in the wrong key, employing modal, pentatonic, and Indian scales, incorporating studio effects and exotic instruments, and shuffling rhythms and idioms. As the decade progressed, they experimented with everything from tape loops to drugs to chance techniques borrowed from the intellectual avant-garde.

  From the beginning, the Fab Four tapped into the burgeoning mass culture and used it for their own ends. Rather than reinforcing parental conformity as the path to contentment, John, Paul, George, and Ringo keyed into the mass consumption notions of the new always being better, and the new became anything white suburban America had never experienced—namely working-class England and black America. The Beatles also introduced a whole generation of Boomers to the Beat sensibility of a reverence for the margins of American culture. In this way the Beatles were able to tap into the mass market and deliver their own message to the masses without intervention from authority figures.

  Where that message would take them was not yet clear. What was clear was the reality that the competing values of restraint and instant gratification could not be resolved. Something new had to replace it. Kennedy’s vision of a New Frontier had clearly not worked. His assassination and the Vietnam War escalation would dem
onstrate this. In the coming years, Boomers would find themselves being pulled to one pole or the other. Both directions meant to change the world and create the utopia they had been promised as children. One direction was defined by nineteenth-century values of hard work and seriousness, the other by pleasure and hedonism. One would embrace political radicalism, the other cultural radicalism.

  BRINGING DOWN THE SYSTEM

  * * *

  You say you want a revolution

  Well, you know

  we all want to change the world.

  —“Revolution,” the Beatles

  * * *

  It was as if they could read the future. By June of 1966, the Beatles had dropped their “Yeah Yeah” sound and put out a record of startling originality, Yesterday and Today. Even the cover displayed a more radical and edgy look. On it, the mop tops had cast aside their cute pop look and replaced it with a gruesome photo of them dressed in bloody butchers’ aprons wielding knives and accompanied by a box of sausages, a plate of raw meat, two hundred nails, and dismembered heads of baby dolls. Response to the cover photo by retailers was immediate. Stores refused to carry the album. Capitol Records had to recall them and glue a bland stock photo of the band on the album sleeve.