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In Spivey’s ’60s classes at Miami, students grasp the sense of purpose in 1963’s pivotal chapter in the civil rights movement, with its hundreds of demonstrations that year alone.
With other lecturers — and with music, film and the personal recollections of participants — he tries to bring the ferment of the time alive for students. “We try and make them feel the era,” he said.
Ticking off milestones, the professor mentions Birmingham. That city was a bulwark of the resistance to progress toward civil rights begun with prior years’ lunch counter sit-ins and “freedom rides.” And it was there that King and others went to launch Project C, for “confrontation.”
With a series of marches, they wanted to provoke a reaction and draw public attention. Hundreds were arrested, including King, whose galvanizing “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is course reading for students now.
“Injustice anywhere,” its best-known line says, “is a threat to justice everywhere.”
TV images and newspaper reports from Birmingham showed peaceful marchers, including children, being attacked by snapping police dogs and blasted by fire hoses.
“Then the water hit them,” an AP reporter on the scene wrote. “Cowering first with hands over their heads, then on their knees or clinging together with their arms around each other, they tried to hold their ground.” A man’s T-shirt was ripped off by the fire hose blast, and afterward a woman was bleeding from the nose and a young girl’s eyes were cut, the story said.
Facing howls of outrage, local officials eventually agreed to a list of reforms, which King declared “the most significant victory for justice we’ve ever seen in the South.”
Public pressure also moved the White House, which had taken a cautious stance on civil rights.
“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” Kennedy said in a June 1963 speech, formally supporting a sweeping Civil Rights Act. “Are we to say to the world — and much more importantly to each other — that this is the land of the free, except for the Negroes…?”
Resistance was far from over, of course. On the very night of Kennedy’s speech, Medgar Evers, NAACP field director in Mississippi, was gunned down in his driveway by a klansman.
And Birmingham itself would witness in September an especially heartless attack, the
bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four children preparing for Sunday school. When Spivey’s students are shown Spike Lee’s film, “Four Little Girls,” tears flow again, decades later.
Between these Birmingham chapters came what may be the signature moment of the civil rights movement, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963.
“By special train, plane, buses by the thousand, private automobiles and even in some cases on foot, the marchers poured into the capital,” an AP story reported. An estimated 250,000 people, mostly black but many white, met at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial to hear King pronounce, “I have a dream…”
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Civil rights advances of 1963 spilled into a broader sense of possibilities.
Many people had long hoped for relief from the specter of atomic war — what Kennedy called the “darkening prospect of mass destruction on earth” as he announced the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in July.
“Yesterday a shaft of light cut into the darkness,” he said. “For the first time, an agreement has been reached on bringing the forces of nuclear destruction under control.”
For years, people had staged “ban the bomb” street demonstrations — but almost unnoticed in 1963, they were joined by a few early protesters against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war, where Kennedy had been sending American military “advisers.”
In the continuum of popular culture, no single year is definitive. Still, by 1963, record buyers, radio stations, even jukebox operators were embracing a broadening range of entertainment. There was the “Motown sound” of black pop songs — singer-songwriter Smokey Robinson has spoken of “the barriers that we broke down with music” — and audiences would soon embrace the “British invasion.”
“The ’60s revolution in music and style began somewhere, maybe here,” say the liner notes for a just-released Beatles collection, “First Recordings: 50th Anniversary Edition,” which received a nomination for this year’s Grammy awards.
The music never really went away (the Rolling Stones’ recent tour was playfully called “Fifty and Counting”). Spivey’s ’60s class ends with a sing-along, and Varon at the New School marvels at how many of his students know the old lyrics.
A quieter revolution made 1963 “a lever,” in the words of historian Stephanie Coontz, who also teaches ’60s courses. In February of that year, writer Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique.”
At the time, magazines and TV constantly reinforced a view of the American woman and her assigned place: She would marry, raise children, and not work outside the home, which she would maintain with products and appliances designed to make her middle-class life efficient and ideal.
The trouble, Friedan recognized, was that for many this was not ideal, but suffocating, said Coontz, author of the 2011 book “A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.”
When she reviews the sexism of those days with her students today — “head and master” laws in many states making wives legally subject to husbands, help-wanted ads seeking “pretty looking, cheerful gal” for office work, and the like — “jaws literally drop,” she said.
For middle-class women who read Friedan’s book, it was a revelation. They’d been told “they should not want anything more out of life — and were ‘sick’ when they did. These people Friedan literally rescued,” Coontz said in an interview. “People I interviewed said … they were considering suicide.”
The book told them they were not alone and change might come.
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Transformative change is a central theme of ’60s courses; some even offer ’60s-style civic outreach projects as substitutes for traditional research papers. Students learn how Kennedy pushed variations of this message in 1963.
In June in Berlin, where a communist-built wall showed the Cold War divide most sharply, he envisioned the ultimate triumph of freedom. “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin,” he said, “and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ “
That same month, promoting peace was his theme in a commencement address. “In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet,” he told the graduates. “We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
Five months later, he traveled to Texas, for political fence-mending ahead of the 1964 election. He was waving at the cheering crowds that lined his sunny Dallas motorcade route when the rifle shots came at 12:30 p.m. Central time.
Newsreel footage shows cheers turning to shrieks, as TV announcers break into soap operas with bulletins. Soon there would be nonstop coverage, which, though common now, was like nothing seen before on television. Broadcasts brought the nation together in a shared experience of bewilderment and grief.
Just as today’s generation remembers the moment of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the memory of Nov. 22, 1963, remains crystalline and, inevitably, becomes a teaching tool.
“All of a sudden, we heard all of these rumors. Then somebody had a transistor radio,” recalls Spivey, then a high school student, describing how he brings the moment to life in class today. “And I remember standing by the lockers, just listening. … Students crying, in this predominantly black school in Chicago, kids saying, ‘What’s going to happen to us now?'”
Hundreds of miles east, Hine was heading into high school debate team practice, where at first everyone thought a student was joking when he blurted the inconceivable news. He wasn’t kidding, though, and the feeling absorbed then has resonated ever since.
“Up until that point,” Hine said, “there was this widespread belief in big business, big government, big thinking to lead us into a better future. The assassination didn’t completely undo this, but it showed that some things are far more fragile than we ever imagined them to be.”
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