2. Explorations Sledging
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From the emotional highs of Martin Luther King’s iconic speech to
the devastation wreaked by JFK’s assassination, nothing would
be the same for the United States after1963, says Dale Cressman
Clockwise from this picture
Images of African American
children being sprayed by police
with fire hoses in Alabama
shocked President Kennedy;
Martin Luther King in full flow;
commuters take in the
news of 22 November
3. F
i f t y yea r s a go t h i s mont h,
Rev Martin Luther King Jr rose
b e fo r e a s e a o f hu m a n it y
blanketing the Washington Mall to
deliver his most memorable and
consequential speech. What King’s
audience didn’t know was that it would not be
the speech he had planned on giving. The
evening before, as a quarter of a million people
made their way to the nation’s capital – by bus,
by train, even on roller skates – King struggled
to find the right words, crossing out entire
sections and rewriting over and over again what
he hoped would change minds and move hearts.
We now recognise this speech as the
emotional high point of 1963 for America;
there were also many low points, but the lowest
would come just three months later, when John
F Kennedy’s murder shook America to its core.
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Clockwise from above
A quarter of a million
people blanket the
Washington Mall; in
Birmingham, Alabama, a
demonstrator is attacked
by a police dog; Life
magazine reports on the
funeral of assassinated
civil rights leader Medgar
Evers, just two months
before the March on
Washington
By year’s end, it was evident that the country
would never be the same. In fact, 1963 was such
a seminal year that some observers claim it was
the year ‘the 1960s’ really began in America –
both politically and culturally.
From the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, King
began to deliver the speech he had written the
previous night, then he decided to go off script
and revert to what he knew best – preaching.
Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was standing a
few feet away. ‘Tell ’em about the dream, Martin,’
she was heard to say. King then ad-libbed a
sequence he had used previously, before smaller
audiences: ‘I have a dream that my four little
children will one day live in a nation where they
will not be judged by the colour of their skin but
by the content of their character.’
King’s passionate, poetic sermon electrified
the crowd. ‘Never have so many people cried,
whether they wanted to or not,’ said comedian
and activist Dick Gregory.
The official name of the event was the
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
The nation had never seen anything like it.
Journalist Peter Jennings later described it as
‘one of the grandest of democratic spectacles’.
Organised by a coalition of often discordant
civil rights groups, it featured musicians Bob
Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary,
and a series of speakers, each demanding that
the time had long since arrived for equality for
all Americans. For A Phillip Randolph, the man
who first proposed such a march on Washington
in 1941, ‘It was the greatest day of my life’.
It’s often forgotten is t hat of f icial
Washington was nervous in the weeks leading
up to the march. Already 1963 had been a
bloody and violent year. Just two months
earlier, Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar
Evers had been assassinated; countless others
had been beaten and jailed; and, most visibly,
in May, police in Birmingham,
Alabama, led by a man named Bull
Connors, had attacked children
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4. she asked. It turned out she was not the only
one affected by what she called ‘the problem
that has no name’. In early 1963, Friedan gave
it a name when she published The Feminine
Mystique, articulating how American culture
had mystified, distorted, even infantilised what
it meant to be a woman. Her suggestion that
women were people in their own right, as well as
being wives and mothers, came as a revelation
to many women. It was, as journalist Eleanor
Clift wrote, ‘like a match dropped on dry
tinder’. A bestseller, Friedan’s book would go
on to be regarded as one of the most influential
of the 20th century, credited with sparking a
second wave of American feminism. In June,
Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, intended
to end the practice of paying lower wages to
women. Friedan went on to lead the National
Organization of Women. Since 1963, her book
has sold three million copies.
It was a seminal year in terms of popular
culture, too. James Bond first landed in
American cinemas, with Sean Connery
starring in Doctor No. The Beach
Boys topped the charts with Surfin’
with police dogs and fire hoses. The pictures
and film of the attacks sickened Kennedy. Even
so, he and his advisors were so worried that a
march on Washington would spawn similar
violence they tried to convince organisers to call
it off. Failing to do so, officials prepared the city
by closing bars and liquor stores and alerting the
National Guard. By the time the participants
converged on Washington it was a deserted city;
residents largely stayed at home and turned on
their TVs. The rest of the country watched on
television, too, giving King the platform that
transformed him into a national leader.
In the end, the march generated a sense of
pride and hope for many Americans. Senator
Hubert Humphrey later said it was the day
in which he was ‘most encouraged [that]
democracy would work’. King’s speech inspired
Curtis Mayfield to write the optimistic folk
anthem People Get Ready. But the country did not
change immediately: weeks later, four young
girls were killed in a Birmingham, Alabama,
church bombing. Nevertheless, King’s speech
provided a tipping point in the civil rights’
struggle. The following year, Congress would
finally pass Kennedy’s civil rights legislation.
A tipping point came for American women in
1963, too, a few months later when a freelance
writer named Betty Friedan wondered whether
other women shared her discontent with a life
confined largely to domestic chores. ‘Is this all?’
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Explorations America: 1963
USA, Dylan released his breakout album, The
Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and America took notice
of The Beatles. The Fab Five first appeared in
American news reports in late 1963, just as I
Wanna Hold Your Hand became a hit in the UK.
Soon afterward, a disc jockey played the song for
listeners in Washington, DC. Not content to wait
for the release of the song in the US, he obtained
a recording from a BOAC (a precursor to
British Airways) flight attendant, who had
purchased the 45 in Britain.
It seemed that after the insecurity of the
1950s, the country was finally finding its feet
and gaining a sense of national purpose.
Though President Eisenhower was personally
popular, the 1950s were underlined
by Cold War fears and economic
recession, with a feeling that
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Clockwise from
above John F
Kennedy signs the
Nuclear Test Ban
Treaty; The Beach
Boys’ Surfin’ USA
tops the charts;
Betty Friedan
sparks a second
wave of feminism
JANUARY
Alabama Governor George Wallace
declares ‘segregation forever’
FEBRUARY
The Feminine Mystique
is published
APRIL
Martin Luther King is jailed in
Birmingham, Alabama
MAY
Birmingham police fill jails with
child marchers
JUNE
John F Kennedy delivers landmark
speeches on peace and civil rights
JUNE
Civil rights leader Medgar Evers
is assassinated in Mississippi
AUGUST
Martin Luther King makes his I have
a Dream speech in Washington, DC
AUGUST
The US and USSR sign a limited
nuclear test ban treaty
SEPTEMBER
Four young girls die in the bombing
of a church in Birmingham
NOVEMBER
President John F Kennedy is
assassinated in Dallas
NOVEMBER
Television viewers are introduced
to The Beatles
1963 IN
DATES
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Explorations America: 1963
were thought to be the best of his career. His
trip to Europe later that month was triumphant.
After declaring ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ to West
Germans at the Berlin Wall, JFK told his
associates, ‘We’ll never have another day like
this one, as long as we live.’
The sentiment proved prescient five months
later, as Americans gathered around their TV
sets for four long days in November. ‘Where
were you when you heard the news?’ people
asked – and continue to ask, all these years
later. Three shots fired from a sixth-storey
window in Dealey Plaza changed everything.
Thanks to TV, the news from Dallas travelled
quickly that Friday afternoon, but it was not
easily believed. ‘Women wept, and men wept,’
The New York Times reported. ‘Bitterness,
shame, anguish, disbelief, emptiness
mingled inextricably in one’s mind,’
Arthur Schlesinger Jr recalled.
There was fear the shooting was
part of an international conspiracy
to undermine the US government.
Later, it was determined Kennedy was
killed by a lone gunman – although
many continue to believe it was the
result of a wider conspiracy. Live
television, taken for granted today,
first proved its mettle when reporting
on the assassination, bringing the USA
together for one vast, communal wake.
The shock of the assassination
and the sadness of the requiem
shook the nation’s confidence as it
had not been shaken in decades. In
the following years, that confidence
would be further dented as the
Vietnam War, riots and the deaths of
Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther
King, would contribute to the near
unravelling of the country’s social
cohesion. Innocence was lost and
idealism gave way to cynicism. Only
in hindsight, could one look back
and recognise 1963 as the end of
one era and beginning of another.
‘Life changed forever,’ legendary
newspaper editor Ben Bradlee
later wrote, ‘in the middle of a nice
day, at the end of a good week, in a
wonderful year of what looked like
an extraordinary decade of promise.’
GO ON THEN…
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America’s superpower status was eroding and
the world was passing it by. Hope had come with
the election of the energetic, youthful Kennedy
– the youngest man ever to become President
– and by 1963 there was a palpable sense the
country was moving again. Kennedy’s appeal to
‘Ask what you can do for your country’ inspired
many Americans to take up public service. His
Peace Corps sent thousands of idealistic young
people into the world to fight disease, poverty
and illiteracy. Anything seemed possible for
America: Life magazine suggested LSD might
be used to improve cognition and the hydrogen
bomb could be employed for building projects
such as the Panama Canal. Even world peace
seemed possible, when in the summer of 1963,
the US signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty with
the USSR, banning nuclear weapons tests in
the atmosphere, in outer space and under water.
Reality was, of course, more complicated with
a dark underbelly to this new-found optimism:
Kennedy had difficulty achieving any kind of
legislative agenda. And, though he had made
progress with the Soviets, the situation in
Vietnam was quickly deteriorating. Nevertheless,
he seemed to hit his stride in the last year of his
life. His poll numbers skyrocketed following his
handling of the October 1962 Cuban Missile
Crisis. In June, his ‘peace speech’ at American
University and his civil rights speech, delivered
the following evening from the Oval Office,
A dark day
22 November:
Kennedy’s motorcade,
in Main Street, Dallas,
moments before
his assassination;
Walter Cronkite
memorably breaks
the news on live
TV (below)
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