Although I didn’t
appreciate it at the time, 1963 was a year that changed my life, and undoubtedly
the lives of many others as well.
From the vantage point
of 50 years on, I can see plainly how greatly I was affected by four memorable events
that occurred that year: civil rights demonstrations and protests, particularly
in North Carolina and Alabama, in the spring; passage of the North Carolina
“Speaker Ban Law” in July; the Great March on Washington on August 28; and the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November. Looking back, I am pretty sure that if these
events had not happened when and as they did, my life and career would very
likely have been very different.
When my sophomore year
at UNC wound down in the spring of 1963 I was a hopelessly naïve and
self-centered 18-year-old who had only the vaguest thoughts beyond immediate
existential issues, which centered on hanging out with my fraternity brothers,
playing gin rummy with my roommate, making out with my frisky freshman girlfriend,
and compiling a decent GPA without exerting too much effort. Then
the world began to intrude on my life of comfortable complacency in the person
of Theophilus Eugene Connor.
T.E. “Bull” Connor was
the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other
civil rights leaders organized anti-segregation boycotts and demonstrations in
Birmingham in May of 1963, Connor responded by ordering police and firemen to
turn police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses on the demonstrators, many of
whom were children. The shocking images
of the violent confrontations that television brought into my fraternity’s
chapter room hit me in my gut. For me –
and, I now know, for many other white southerners – those images caused me to
think seriously for the first time about something that up until then I had
more or less taken for granted: racial segregation.
I know that some of you
who just read the previous sentence are saying to yourselves, “How is that
possible? How could anyone have been so
blithe about something so inherently evil and unfair?” Believe me, over the years I have asked
myself the same questions many times.
But unthinkable as it may seem today, the truth is that I was no
different from most people who grew up during the 1950s and early 1960s in places
where racial segregation was legally required: it was just “the way things
were,” and we just accepted it.
In retrospect, I think
that one of the reasons I had never thought deeply about segregation prior to
1963 is that the system was remarkably successful at accomplishing its
underlying purpose, which was to prevent the “mixing” of blacks and
whites. As far as I was concerned, my family and
friends lived in one world and “colored people,” as my mother referred to them,
lived in another. By law we attended
separate schools, sat in separate sections of movie theaters (after buying our
tickets at separate box offices and entering via separate doors), ate in
separate restaurants, and drank from separate drinking fountains. By custom and practice we attended separate
churches, listened to different radio stations, and patronized different banks
and merchants.
Because my parents did
not regularly have “help,” I infrequently came into direct contact with African-Americans
as a youngster. On the rare instance
when I did, such as when Arlington Grey, a huge black man, came to our house to
dig a hole for our fuel oil tank, my parents treated them courteously, just
like they treated everyone. When I
visited in the homes of my few friends whose families employed maids or
gardeners, I probably should have been taken aback that the servants were
addressed only by their first names and that they came and went via the back
door, but I wasn’t. That was” just the way things were.”
Regardless of how things
were in my world, I knew in my gut and my heart that loosing police dogs on
children was not the way things were supposed to be. I was outraged by Bull Connor’s actions and
mesmerized by the hatred and bigotry reflected in his eyes. “Nothing good,” I thought, “can come of
this.”
As it turned out, I was
wrong; some good things did happen because Bull Connor saw a crusade led by brave
little black boys and girls as a serious threat to his way of life. By responding with violence and hatred, he
almost singlehandedly fired black peoples’ determination and white peoples’
disgust, thereby stimulating more protests by the former and more support for
them by the latter. Sometimes I wonder
what would (or wouldn’t) have happened if he had had the political savvy to pat
the children on their heads and hand them ice cream cones instead of attacking
them with water and dogs.
North Carolina was among
the places where public protests intensified in response to the events in
Birmingham. Galvanized by the images of
youngsters fleeing from fire hoses and police dogs, students from Shaw
University staged sit-ins at Raleigh theaters and restaurants, protested at the
Sir Walter Hotel where most members of the General Assembly stayed during the
legislative session, and swarmed over the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion
while Governor Terry Sanford hosted the annual North Carolina Symphony
Ball.
Although Governor Sanford
defused the symphony protest by appearing on the south porch of the mansion and
offering to meet with the protesters, some other prominent citizens reacted very
differently. Jesse Helms, who was then
an on-air editorialist for WRAL-TV, saw the protests as evidence of Communist
influence, especially at colleges and universities. In June he praised the Ohio legislature for
proposing a bill to restrict speakers at their universities, suggesting that it
"should also provide a lesson for the rest of us." Four days later, on the verge of its
adjournment, the General Assembly enacted what became known as “the Speaker Ban
Law.” I wasn’t even aware of the law
until shortly before I returned to Chapel Hill for my junior year, and even
then I didn’t appreciate the degree to which it eventually would influence my
life and career. An explanation of how
and why it did so is material for another article; suffice it to say that over
the ensuing two years the fight to repeal or overturn the law awakened me to
the importance of the First Amendment issues that have been the primary focus
of both my law practice and my teaching gigs for more than three decades.
While the Speaker Ban
Law’s influence on my life unfolded over time, the effect of the August 28
March on Washington was immediate and electric. That afternoon, on the day before my 19th
birthday, I sat on the floor in front of my parents' television and watched the
coverage of the March on Washington. Violence and chaos had been feared and
predicted, but the immense and diverse crowd was not merely peaceful, but
joyful. Joan Baez sang. Mahalia Jackson sang. And then Dr. King began to speak. Even as his
cadences and metaphors unfolded I knew that I was hearing something very
special, and when he reached his peroration and thundered "Free at last!
Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" a shiver ran down
my spine. Every time I have heard the speech since then I have experienced the
same sensation.
By the end of that day
my apathy and indifference about segregation was over. I promised myself that whatever else might
happen, I would make a point of never again turning a blind eye to discrimination. Whether I have kept that promise is for
others to say.
As a direct result of
the sobering and eye-opening events of the spring and summer of 1963, I
returned to school that fall imbued with heightened purpose and seriousness,
one manifestation of which was working regularly at The Daily Tar Heel. On November 22, I was planning to report to
the newspaper’s office around two o’clock.
I was eating lunch at my fraternity house when someone rushed in saying “the President has been shot.” I
joined the crowd that gathered in the television room and stood watching as a
shirt-sleeved Walter Cronkite gravely reported the stunning updates from Dallas
relayed via the AP and UPI tickers and jangling telephones in the CBS newsroom. As he
spoke into a visible desk microphone, Cronkite repeatedly put on his heavy
black-framed eyeglasses, then took them off to look into the camera. Finally, he took them off one more time and
wearily announced the official “news flash” confirming that the President had
died 38 minutes earlier at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time.
I was stunned, dismayed
and disoriented by what I had just heard.
Questions tumbled through my mind.
How could such a shocking thing happen?
Who did it? What did it mean for
the country? I certainly didn’t
know. What I did know that this was news
– big news – and I needed to get out of the fraternity house and to the DTH
office as quickly as possible. My
impulse was to DO something, and that something was gathering information that
might answer the questions roiling my mind, whether it came from the wire
machines or television screen in the newsroom or from talking with my colleagues
or from interviewing University officials and others older and wiser than
me. A list of such people whose views we
might want to include in our coverage was already forming in my mind as I
crossed first Rosemary and then Franklin streets and headed up the sidewalk in
front of Spencer dorm.
My brief walking route
to Graham Memorial took me past Chapel Hill’s venerable Episcopal Church, the
Chapel of the Cross. Like most college
students, I had hardly darkened the door of a church since leaving home, and if
I had ever been inside an Episcopal church it was only because my the members
of my high school Key Club made monthly rotating visits to each other’s home
churches, but in my confused and disconsolate state the church suddenly seemed
like the place I needed to be. I tried
the door to the historic chapel on the west side of the church; to my surprise,
it was open. I stepped inside.
Entering the chapel, I
crossed a threshold between turmoil and serenity. Autumnal afternoon sun suffused the silent
space with soft golden light. A small
brass cross stood between two candlesticks on the altar table, which was
covered with a green cloth. The pews and
ceiling, dark with age, spoke and smelled of history. For
the first time in my life I needed, and had found, a sanctuary.
I sat down, alone, and
tried to untangle the confusion, apprehension and dismay that were tying my
brain in knots. After a while I said a
silent prayer for our Country and for myself.
Then I got up, opened the door, and walked out into the rest of my life.
