Monday, October 14, 2013

1963: The Year That Changed My Life -- and Many Others




            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.
           

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