It is Friday, November 22, and the radio crackles with stories about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy exactly 50 years ago today. Many stations are encouraging listeners to call in with their memories about where they were when they heard JFK was dead, and what they remember about the day and the era. Most remembrances are positive, thank goodness for that. I grew up in Southwest Virginia, at a time JFK was forcing public schools to finally desegregate. My first remembrances of JFK's death are unfortunately not positive ones.
My classmates and I were on a school bus, riding home from another uneventful, boring day in third grade, when someone heard the news on a transistor radio. We all just looked at each other, stunned to silence. How was that even possible? Why would someone shoot the president? Especially one so young and full of life, with such a glamorous wife. To us JFK seemed more like an older brother, or a charming roguish uncle, rather than a stodgy old-man president. He gave us hope, even at our age.
The silence burst when one of the older Deharts, a sixth grader, jumped up and screamed: "Yeah...they got the nig--- lover! He got just what he deserved!" The bus driver yelled at him and he sat down, but he was still beaming. "Yes," he said again. "Yes. With him gone none of us will ever have to worry about going to school with a bunch of nig----."
When we got off the bus I started the quarter-mile walk to my house, the 100-year-old farmhouse that stood apart in distance and time from the late 1950s brick ranches that had been built all around us. These one-story houses with outside entrances to their unfinished concrete basements were home to the blue-collar elite that had moved to our area to take good-paying union jobs with the railroad and the phone company, and with the new General Electric plant that had just been built in my hometown to replace the one the company closed in Upstate New York.
My next-door neighbor was the best. He liked to fish, as did I, and his children were too young to tag along, so he took me with him bass fishing in his boat, and trout fishing in streams in the nearby mountains. His father was retired from a career in the Navy, lived with his son and family part of the time, and told me vivid tales about his days traveling the world, "fighting the Japs," and his work in a place called "The Pentagon" after "the war" ended. As I walked home that day he was on the front porch, waving. I expected him to be sad, since he had told me about meeting JFK, and some president named "Ike" before him, but he was in a great mood.
"Did you hear the news?" he asked. "Someone shot JFK. Good for them. Good for them. He deserved it for what he did to our guys in Cuba."
I vaguely remember asking what was Cuba, and his very long and rambling answer, and his saying "if you were old enough you and I could have a drink to celebrate." But it would be years before I understood about the "Bay of Pigs" debacle and JFK's role in pulling the air support that created a disaster for CIA-trained operatives sent to Cuba to overthrow the new government headed by Fidel Castro.
It was such a confusing day I didn't know what to expect when my dad came home from work. Would he be happy too? No, definitely not. My dad was born and raised on a farm in Upstate New York, but he attended Cornell and probably would have been a veterinarian if the Great Depression had not prevented his staying in college. Most of the time he had a different view of the world than our neighbors and my classmates. I don't remember all he had to say, but I remember him saying "idiots" several times when talking about people being glad JFK was dead. Whenever we talked about things that were confusing to me, compared to the way he told me they were when he was growing up in New York State, he would always say something like "just hang in there. People are way behind down here. Someday things will change."
He was right, of course. When I went to middle school, I was among the first white kids sent to a formerly all-black intermediate school: Oswald shooting JFK didn't prevent that after all. It was sort of the opposite of being among the first black students admitted to the University of Alabama, and it was not a good time. At least I learned how to fight effectively, even when outnumbered. High school was better, because I was again a member of a white majority. My freshman year we had our one big "race riot" in my hometown. It was sparked by a brutal football game against a long-time rival that was a mostly "black" school being shut down to finalize desegregation in the region. They beat us on the field, knocking us out of a return to the state championship game, and they beat us in the parking lot too. It was not a good time. Licking our wounds the next week we decided we were very glad their school was being closed down and their athletic prowess would be split between two formerly "white" schools. With their talent diluted, we beat them on the field and in the parking lot the rest of my high school years.
Yet many things have not changed, even now, 50 years later. I live in North Carolina, on the fringe of the "elite" Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill "Triangle" area, in one of the two highest-taxed and best educated counties in the state. And yet, three times in the past week, I have heard people drop the "n" word in conversation as casually as if they were commenting on the weather. At least they looked around before they said it; that much has changed.
_______________
Copyright © 2013 by Paul Clark
| Comment box is located below |
We were told by my quantum mechanics professor, Bob Christy. The sort of toxic right-wing hate you describe was beyond imagining for budding liberal technocrats such as ourselves, but so was the quasi-worship from the left.
ReplyDeleteSince many of us were members of CORE and other such groups, we honored Kennedy for his efforts to make America live up to its promise; but he was, after all, only a politician. I had, only the previous year, done a background check on Nixon (my first act as a voter) and had been angered enough at what I learned to despise the entire profession.
Chuck, do you still think that Kennedy "was only a politician"?
ReplyDeleteA good question. I haven't really thought about it seriously in decades. My first thought is, "yes, I still think so." And yet....I think of him, and then I think of Cruz, Cheney, W., or Boehner. A giant among midgets.
ReplyDeleteRight, hard to put them all in one-size-fits-all clothing.
DeleteI must be very insulated or something, because I am 70 years old and have never heard of anyone being glad Kennedy was shot! and it shocks me.
ReplyDeleteYeah, when I shared those stories with some friends at Harvard a few years ago, while looking at the JFK statue with them, it shocked all who heard it. As with many things, it all depends on where you are raised. The good news is that most of the people who felt that way back then are dead or at least frail and harmless by now. The bad news is most of their children think the same as their parents, but they are slick enough to keep it a secret from outsiders, mostly by looking around before they speak.
ReplyDeleteAs pointless and idealistic as it may be, to this day I give both JFK and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, the benefit of the doubt: I believe they would have been much more than "just politicians" if they had been given the chance. RFK's quote "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?" still gets my vote as the ultimate idealist credo.
Don't know how I missed your piece Paul. It must have posted late and I was gone all day. Anyway, I remember how it was in Mississippi before JFK was elected. They hated him and this was when the south was Democrat. I returned back to the States in the Jan. after he was killed. I don't remember hearing one person say they were sad he had been shot. I had been in France on Nov. 22 and the difference in how the French took the news and the hate that still existed in Mississippi toward him was unbelievable. I never heard my family in Mississippi say anything one way or the other. My mother, however, cried that whole day as we listened to the BBC, in France.
ReplyDeleteHow, does it go: "Only the good die young!" There must be some truth it that saying, if not, I wouldn't have lived this long.
Good piece Paul---your voice has been missed.
Thank you Kono, had enough of a break from other responsibilities to weigh in briefly. Nixon out-polled Kennedy by 5.4% in my home state, Virginia, and in my area of the state it was much higher. As with the situation in Mississippi, Kennedy did not have much support in Virginia, even among Democrats.
DeleteDesegregation was so unpopular in Virginia in the 1960s, Alabama Governor George Wallace captured 24% of the popular vote in the 1968 presidential election, and won several of the state's Southside predominantly agricultural counties. He also won much of the area of North Carolina where I now live, and he did so running as an independent, primarily with a strongly anti-desegregation platform. People who think the racial prejudice mindset was deeply rooted only in the Deep South have never spent much time outside the major cities in Virginia and North Carolina. That is why they don't understand how deep that sentiment still runs in those areas even today.
Tears, grief and horrendous shock is what I remember about this horrible day.....
ReplyDeleteThanks for visiting, Paul. Well done.
ReplyDelete