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Chapter Twelve: I Have a Dream Today
- Michigan State University Press
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| 157 CHAPTER TWELVE I Have a Dream Today T he year 1963 was one that both lifted and trounced human souls. With prophetic irony, the heralded musical Camelot closed at New York’s Majestic Theater on January 5 after 873 performances. The term “Camelot,” implying a short-lived dream, would come to pertain to the Kennedy presidency just months after his assassination in Dallas in November. George C. Wallace was sworn in as governor of Alabama. Taking the oath of office on January 14, he declared, “Segregation now; segregation tomorrow; segregation forever!” Nikita S. Khrushchev, who shook the Marxist world at the 1956 Twentieth Party Congress, and now often dismissed John F. Kennedy as an unformed amateur, claimed that the Soviet Union had a major megaton nuclear bomb in its arsenal. Americans smoked cigarettes freely, watched The Andy Griffith Show on television and the new, triple-screen “Cinerama” comedy It’s a Mad, 158| CHAPTER TWELVE Mad, Mad, Mad World, starring Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Ethel Merman, and Edie Adams, in movie theaters—while conducting bomb shelter exercises at home, work, and school. The Dallas Texans of the American Football League relocated to Kansas City and renamed themselves the Chiefs. A new quartet known as “The Beatles” came out of Liverpool and began their first tour in Britain. Birmingham, Alabama, experienced a particularly bloody race riot in May. A few weeks later, the Ayatollah Khomeini was arrested by the state regime in Iran; in June, the American Heart Association released a first-ever statement that cigarette smoking is harmful. Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini succeeded the much-loved John XXIII as Pope Paul VI. President Kennedy made a triumphal journey to West Berlin and to his ancestral Ireland. In September, both CBS and NBC News expanded their evening networks from fifteen to thirty minutes. The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed by Klansmen during Sunday school, killing four little African American girls, including a childhood friend of future secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. The Outer Limits premiered on ABC television; The Judy Garland Show premiered on CBS; a massive hurricane devastated Haiti, killing 6,000 and injuring 100,000. Nelson Mandela went on trial in South Africa in the fall; he would ultimately serve a twenty-seven-year sentence for trying to end apartheid. The Los Angeles Dodgers, led by pitcher Sandy Koufax, swept the New York Yankees in the World Series. President Kennedy, uncharacteristically working closely with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, began planning a November trip to Texas in order to heal a Democratic Party feud that threatened his chances in that critical state for the 1964 election. Millions of Americans witnessed the first-ever live murder on television when,onSundaymorning,November24,JackRuby,aDallasthugandnightclub owner, killed JFK’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, as Oswald was being transferred from the downtown police jail to another facility. Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped for a week starting on December 9; President Lyndon B. Johnson was already pressing the flesh of Washington legislators to ratify I HAVE A DREAM TODAY| 159 President Kennedy’s proposed civil rights bill; the young Beach Boys made their first appearance on Shindig. Throughout 1963, a small cluster of men that surrounded Martin Luther King Jr. was developing ideas for a dramatic, national rally in Washington, DC, to push Congress to enact jobs and human rights legislation. The group, which included Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Bayard Rustin, Wyatt Tee Walker,andClarenceJones,amongothers,alsofeaturedtwowhitemen:Harry Wachtel and Stanley Levison. The ruminating and planning for a watershed march on the nation’s capital continued through the ups and downs of the Birmingham campaign. The men were buoyed by the sclc’s solid victory in Birmingham—the pact that essentially ended segregation there and brought down the police regime of Eugene “Bull” Connor. The strategizing for Washington was not even upended by the horrific events of September 15, 1963, when those white terrorists bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and again forced King into his painful role as the chief eulogizer of black anguish and anger. Proposed marches on Washington did not have a particularly rewarding history. Stanley told Martin: “It’s a good idea and we should attempt it. But even FDR fought Randolph on such a thing.” ThereferencewastoA.PhilipRandolph’soriginalefforttogenerateamass citizens’ protest for jobs for blacks during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR oversaw a new national industrialization as the nation entered into the fray of World War ii. Randolph was president...