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17 The Bay Area Civil RightsMovement
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dent was dead. Some girls started crying and the teacher kept saying “Not the President.” If it was any time in my life so far, I wanted to cry so hard, but I just sat there staring at the ®oor. Only the colleges were closed, the high schools were left to individual principals. We stayed in school. While watching the TV, I couldn’t help but admire the way Mrs. Kennedy had controlled herself. Comparing Mrs. Johnson to Mrs. Kennedy, it seem all lop-sided. She spoke all those languages and could speak right to the people. I was amazed that most of the funeral arrangements were made by her. You must feel proud to have seen the President. I had hoped someday to see him before his term ran out. After this I just may become a life long Democrat. I remember the ¤ghts we had over Kennedy and Nixon, but just a few months ago I really liked President Kennedy and I will probably think of him as the greatest President. When we stopped in Okla. in 1960, we watched the Democratic Convention , and William wanted to see Lyndon Johnson become the candidate for Pres. Now he is. Right now we are watching a special called “Four Dark Days—From Dallas to Arlington.” When they told that he was going to be buried in Arlington by the Custis-Lee Mansion and I knew exactly where it would be. I’m glad that there will be a light by his grave, because it symbolizes the kind of man and President he was. Please write me soon. We have kept papers from these days. If you were unable to purchase them. I’ll send them to you so that you can read them. Love Linda 17 The Bay Area Civil Rights Movement The Civil Rights Movement came to the Bay Area with a bang in the fall of 1963. Until then, it was mostly a southern movement. We read 84 l At Berkeley in the Sixties about it, we sympathized with it, we raised some funds for southern projects, we applauded speakers from southern schools who described their experiences to us, but we were not participants. There was a brief®urry of activity in the spring of 1960 when the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-in prompted sympathy pickets of Woolworth and Kress ¤veand -dime stores. The Berkeley pickets only lasted until summer sent the students packing. In Oakland, several dozen Negro residents continued picketing until March of 1961. In 1962, the Cal student government collected money, food, and clothing for the southern students, but the administration curbed this as prohibited “off-campus” activity. The SLATE summer conference “The Negro in American Society” brought three to four hundred persons together in July of 1962, leading to the formation of Bay Area Friends of SNCC, but it too was primarily concerned with support for southern activists.1 We did work for fair housing, but except for the brief ¤ght against the Berkeley repeal ordinance, that did not require mass participation. The civil rights cauldron had been bubbling in the South for almost ten years; in 1963 it boiled over. During that year almost 1,000 civil rights demonstrations occurred in at least 115 cities, more than 20,000 people were arrested, 10 persons were killed, and there were 35 bombings .2 Not all of these penetrated the consciousness of Cal students, involved as we were in our studies and in local issues. But there were so many demonstrations, and some were so important, that few of us could remain unmoved. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., launched a campaign to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, reputed to be the most segregated city in the United States. The city fathers had shown a determination to keep the races separate matched only by the willingness of the white population to use violence against the 40 percent who were black. For days, SCLC led Birmingham Negroes in marches to which the police responded with snarling dogs, electric cattle prods, and ¤re hoses. The scenes of schoolchildren and ministers trying to pray while snapped at by police dogs and knocked down by streams of high-pressure water were nightly fare on the TV news and daily headlines in the papers.3 Two days after SCLC reached agreement with civic leaders, the city was rent with bombings and riots. Public Safety Commissioner “Bull” Connor, who...