Last week, I pulled from the bookshelves in my study a book that has sat unread for years and began reading it. Titled The 60s: The Story of a Decade, and published in 2016, it gathers essays by some of the most insightful and literary thinkers and writers of the 1960s, all published in The New Yorker magazine.
The 60s is the decade in which I grew up. When 1960 dawned, I was in 3rd grade, 2½ months from turning 9; by the end of the decade, I was in the middle of my freshman year at Oklahoma Baptist University. In the intervening years, my family and I had moved from Dallas, TX, to Kansas City, MO (1962), where I had grown into my teenage years.
It was a tumultuous decade. I can’t imagine a more fascinating decade in which to come of age. In many ways, I feel like I sleepwalked through the 1960s – I wish I had been more sensitive to all that was going on in our nation and our world, but isn’t that the way it always is? We’re preoccupied with our own “world,” especially as teenagers trying to grow up while dealing with a host of insecurities. Nevertheless, you couldn’t live through that decade without noticing the promise, the tumult, and the fear wrought by its personalities and events.
Here are just a few things – good, bad, and tragic – that made the 1960s such a fascinating decade:
- the Space Race, culminating in two men landing on the Moon the summer between high school & college, but only after the 1967 deaths of three astronauts in a fire on the launch pad threatened to scuttle the Apollo program
- the Cold War, reaching a fever pitch with the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962)
- change at the Kremlin (October 1964), with Nikita Khrushchev replaced by Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin
- the Civil Rights Movement and its seminal events
- the March on Washington (August 1963)
- the murder of four Black girls (September 1963) in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama
- the use, by Bull Connor, Birmingham commissioner of public safety, of fire hoses and police dogs against Civil Rights protesters
- the 1964 passage, by Congress, of the Civil Rights Act, followed by the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act
- the murder of three Civil Rights workers (June 1964), in Philadelphia, Mississippi
- the Watts (1965) and Detroit (1967) riots
- the hate-filled 1968 presidential candidacy of George Wallace, Alabama governor, on a platform of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”
- the violently contentious 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago
- assassinations – Medgar Evers, President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther KIng, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy
- mass murders (not as common then as today) by Richard Speck in Chicago (July 1966), Charles Whitman at the University of Texas campus in Austin (August 1966), and the Manson “family” in exclusive areas of Los Angeles (August 1969)
Whew! What a decade! (and those are just a few of the highlights and lowlights)
James Baldwin (photo from Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture)
I’ll be sharing portions of other essays from this book in future blog posts, but I want to begin with James Baldwin’s Letter from a Region in My Mind, published in the November 17, 1962, issue of The New Yorker.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) was an American writer and civil rights activist. He was 38 when he wrote Letter from a Region in My Mind.
I’m sharing only a portion of the essay here. As I read this particular passage, I was impressed by its relevance to the current attempt by many white politicians to whitewash (literally) history, banning – in our nation’s public schools – any teaching about white supremacy, systemic racism, and the historical oppression of Blacks from the beginning of this nation and even predating its founding. Here is the powerful message that James Baldwin gave us in 1962 (bolding is my own):
The Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats—the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced. I say ‘this country’ because their frame of reference was totally American. They were hewing out of the mountain of white supremacy the stone of their individuality. I have great respect for that unsung army of black men and women who trudged down back lanes and entered back doors, saying ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, Ma’am’ in order to acquire a new roof for the schoolhouse, new books, a new chemistry lab, more beds for the dormitories, more dormitories. They did not like saying ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, Ma’am,’ but the country was in no hurry to educate Negroes, these black men and women knew that the job had to be done, and they put their pride in their pockets in order to do it. It is very hard to believe that they were in any way inferior to the white men and women who opened those back doors. It is very hard to believe that those men and women, raising their children, eating their greens, crying their curses, weeping their tears, singing their songs, making their love, as the sun rose, as the sun set, were in any way inferior to the white men and women who crept over to share these splendors after the sun went down. But we must avoid the European error; we must not suppose that, because the situation, the ways, the perceptions of black people so radically differed from those of whites, they were racially superior. I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty. The country should be proud of them, too, but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence. And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played—and play—in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know.
“The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing. One watched the lives they led. One could not be fooled about that; one watched the things they did and the excuses that they gave themselves, and if a white man was really in trouble, deep trouble, it was to the Negro’s door that he came. And one felt that if one had had that white man’s worldly advantages, one would never have become as bewildered and as joyless and as thoughtlessly cruel as he. The Negro came to the white man for a roof or for five dollars or for a letter to the judge; the white man came to the Negro for love. But he was not often able to give what he came seeking. The price was too high; he had too much to lose. And the Negro knew this, too. When one knows this about a man, it is impossible for one to hate him, but unless he becomes a man—becomes equal—it is also impossible for one to love him. Ultimately, one tends to avoid him, for the universal characteristic of children is to assume that they have a monopoly on trouble, and therefore a monopoly on you. (Ask any Negro what he knows about the white people with whom he works. And then ask the white people with whom he works what they know about him.)
“How can the American Negro past be used? It is entirely possible that this dishonored past will rise up soon to smite all of us. There are some wars, for example (if anyone on the globe is still mad enough to go to war) that the American Negro will not support, however many of his people may be coerced—and there is a limit to the number of people any government can put in prison, and a rigid limit indeed to the practicality of such a course. A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. ‘The problem of the twentieth century,’ wrote W. E. B. Du Bois around sixty years ago, ‘is the problem of the color line.’ A fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world—here, there, or anywhere. It is for this reason that everything white Americans think they believe in must now be reexamined. What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color. But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle. Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk—eviction, imprisonment, torture, death. For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion—and the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion. I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand—and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.
“. . . If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!“