I wasn’t alive in the 60s. For the Dopers that were, what do you remember? I’m most interested in what the “breakfast table” or “water cooler” discussions were like back then regarding the Civil Rights movement.
My parents were very much in favor of it, as was I. But we didn’t really do much, and were in a place where it wasn’t an issue mostly because the community was nearly all white.
I’d be curious how much it was covered by the mainstream media. It was a little before my time and I grew up in southern Minnesota which was almost entirely white. My stories are:
–1985, a few years out of college on a business trip to Atlanta. I picked up a local arts/entertainment rag that had a long article about the 20th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches. I was astounded that citizens marching for voting rights could be beaten to death, and it really wasn’t that long ago. I was alive when it happened, though very young.
–Living in North Carolina, I was talking to someone roughly my age about the forced integration of schools in the state in the 1970s. He recalled being at the school windows with the other white students watching the buses of black kids pulling up, and having the teachers tell them that they didn’t have to associate with those animals.
Living in North Carolina really opened my eyes to a lot of the subtle race issues that were not very apparent to a born and raised northerner.
It was on the evening news at night, with Cronkite and Huntley/Brinkley reporting it for their respective networks, that much I remember about the Selma stuff. My extended family (grandparents, aunts, uncles) thought the protesters had it coming to them, for disobeying the police, but my parents weren’t so sure. (This was in the midwest.)
Like Qadgop the Mercotan, I watched it on the evening news. We also got Time Magazine, and so I followed it according to their slant. I was in high school for much of this period, in a conservative town in a liberal state. The messages were pretty mixed!
The debates in school tended to come down to simplistic basics.
“If I own a restaurant, I should be allowed to refuse service to anyone I want.”
vs.
“Social divisions on the basis of race violate the ideal of Equal Justice.”
Neither viewpoint is stupid. I’m glad that, in the end, the U.S. rejected the first and has accepted the second. I think we’re a better place for it.
(I also think that the naked racism expressed by some who were opposed to integration helped “poison the well” of that viewpoint. The lynchings and death-threats and other criminality also tended to smirch that viewpoint.)
It was big news among the people I knew (basically all liberals). Selma, Little Rock, George Wallace, were all big news. When Wallace wasn’t assassinated, my first reaction was, “botch job”, although he may have suffered more.
As for the rights of restaurant owners to refuse service on the basis of race, well restaurants and other public services operate under government license. I would have allowed a category of unlicensed restaurant that is subject to no laws whatever (except they must announce that fact), but once the government licenses them they can and should be required to adhere to be open to the public. In the case of public transport, they were required by law to be segregated. That’s indefensible under any interpretation.
n/m
The Cronkite stuff.
Its a little late for what you are talking about, but I’m a pawn of the initial Louisville busing experience. We had armed federal marshalls on our buses because there were threats to blow up school children. Anyone who could pull their white kids from the suburban public schools did so and there were no spots available in private schools - they were full to the gills.
The kids they bussed in weren’t necessarily black - and my across the street neighbor and friend was black and went to school with us. But the black kids in the 'burbs were middle class, and the kids in the city - whatever color they were - were poor.
I participated in some “equal housing” protests when I was in high school (early 60s). Then, in college, was a member of a few civil-rights groups . . . which gradually morphed into the anti-war movement. I hung out with a very liberal/radical crowd back then.
I remember that there were many park gatherings were Chicano activists and civil rights leaders spoke to people about ways we could make a difference. I was particularly excited about Reies Lopez Tijerina and la alianza of New Mexico, because so much of my family was from there, and the goals of his group were my goals at the time.
When we participated in the unbelievably big turn out (30,000+)for the last Los Angeles Chicano Moratorium March, no one could have told us that a student walk out to protest discrimination and a peaceful march downtown could turn into a horrible riot, which sadly caused the deaths of four Chicanos, including one new reporter, and hundreds of arrests.
I was a freshman in college in 1965, and while downtown shopping one day with some girls from my dorm, we happened upon a march taking place at the county courthouse, in sympathy with the Selma marchers. I told my companions I was going to march. They acted like it was the weirdest thing anyone had ever done. I kept on being involved with the movement but didn’t talk about it much with those girls in the dorm. I had never had much encouragement at home in the midwest to be involved in civil rights but for some reason it just seemed like the thing to do. I could never understand why people’s skin color or ancestry was so important to other people (yes, I know…naive).
I, too, remember the nightly news most. There was some discussion in the schools, but not much. The newspapers regularly had big headlines about it.
Funny…all my relatives on my mother’s side are from Alabama. I seem to recall that they were roughly evenly divided on the issue, but very, very vociferous about it.
I’m too young to remember it, I was born in 1966, but my grandmother owned a diner in Virginia at some point in the 60s. Somewhere in my family albums is a picture of her proudly behind the counter, a sign on the wall reads “No Coloreds.” She was exactly the kind of nasty bitch you are all picturing.
I was right in the middle of it, in Texarkana. There’d been a race riot at Lake Texarkana in 1959 but the somewhat liberal local newspaperman deliberately downplayed it. Even though we were close to Little Rock geographically, “all deliberate speed” in school desegregation took a while. There was a lot of foot-dragging on the issue. Around 1967, the local school board tried a “freedom of choice” plan in which all schools were supposedly open enrollment, but I only remember two black kids showing up in my class. I don’t imagine any white kids decided to go to Carver or Dunbar, the colored schools.
I think the schools were officially desegregated in 1969, and to my surprise I was assigned to a black sixth-grade teacher. My parents weren’t extremely racist, but they had the attitudes of the time and place and I—having mostly inherited those—was not happy about it. But Mrs. Sheppard was from New Jersey, didn’t speak or act as Southern blacks did, and made a special effort to engage me. I liked her a great deal after a week or so, and integration began to seem perfectly natural to me. A year or so later, all schools named for people were renamed for the street they fronted in the hope that the “colored schools” would lose their stigma, and students like my sister were assigned to schools that weren’t the closest to home. I don’t believe there was any large-scale busing, but I could be wrong.
Racist attitudes were much more ingrained in those of high school age, and there were big brawls at the high school. Those didn’t last too long, but by the time I got there in 73-74-75, there were still quasi-official quotas that ensured that class officers, majorettes, cheerleaders, class favorites were all integrated rather than subject to the tyranny of the (white) majority. Mixed tables in the lunchroom were unusual; almost unknown. Still, individual friendships did arise in classes and activities. I don’t recall any cross-racial dating.
I don’t remember too many other vestiges of segregation. I never saw (or noticed) separate water fountains or restrooms. A sign at the roller rink supposedly reserved the right to refuse service to anyone, which I now understand was related to the issue. Churches remained segregated, and I remember that the deacons at my Southern Baptist congregation had discussed how they would handle the issue, if it ever arose, of a black worshipper showing up in a pew. Residential segregation was pretty pronounced until the 1980s, by which time I was long gone. There was some white flight into a more rural school district north of town, but by the mid-80s that was more about class (and drug crime) than race.