Robert S McElvaine - The Times They Were a-Changin: 1964, the Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn

Copyright 2022 by Robert S. McElvaine

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930527

Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

Cover photography: Fannie Lou Hamer image Warren K. Leffler and Adam Cuerden; John Lewis image Bettmann / Getty Images; Lyndon Johnson image Keystone / Stringer / Getty Images; Nashville protest image Bettmann / Getty Images; Textures duncan1890 / Getty Images and Olga_Z / Getty Images

ISBN: 978-1-950994-10-6

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-950994-12-0

Printed in the United States of America

Also by Robert S. McElvaine

Down & Out in the Great Depression:

Letters from the Forgotten Man

The Great Depression: America 19291941

The End of the Conservative Era: Liberalism after Reagan

Mario Cuomo: A Biography

Whats Left?A New Democratic Vision for America

The Depression and New Deal: A History in Documents

Eves Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Encyclopedia of the Great Depression (editor-in-chief)

Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America

for

Brett

a child of the sixties

born in 1988

1964 threatens to be the most explosive year America has ever witnessed.... You let that white man know, if this is a country of freedom, let it be a country of freedom; and if its not a country of freedom, change it.

Malcolm X

(April 1964)

If the young people of the Southyoung black people, young women, young mencould change the world then, then we can do it again now.

John Lewis

(March 2020)

Today, old battles have become new again.

Representative Terri Sewell (D-AL)

(August 2021)

C ONTENTS

P REFACE

A SCENE FROM THE NIGHT calendar 1964 began illustrates how the times they were a-changin in that momentous year of upheavals that continue to reverberate in so many ways today:

Lyndon Baines Johnson had been president for twenty-nine days. He was home in Texas for the holidays after an extraordinarily successful start to his administration. Almost immediately after John F. Kennedys assassination, Johnson had hired as his personal secretary a woman named Geraldine Whittington. On New Years Eve, Johnson chose to go party-hopping in Austin. The exhausted First Lady decided to stay home, so the president took some of his staff with him on a helicopter to the state capital. One of the parties was for the birthday of Horace Busby, a longtime associate and aide to LBJ, at the Forty Acres Club. When the presidential party arrived, Johnson took Whittingtons arm and they walked in.

What of it? you ask.

Gerri Whittington was African American (her hiring by Johnson a few weeks earlier was itself a milestone), and the Forty Acres Club was rigidly segregated. But when they walked in, no one said a word. The next day, a University of Texas professor called the club to ask if he could bring black guests. All such requests in the past had been summarily rejected. This time, the professor was told, Yes, sir. The president of the United States integrated us on New Years Eve.

Now , it was 1964.

The United States is now, historian Nancy MacLean wrote in her 2017 book, Democracy in Chains , at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s. and the overturning of a nation of the people, by the people and for the people.

As I complete this book in late 2021, the inflection point MacLean described has become much more apparent. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has undertaken an effort to rewrite the American social compact... a fundamental reorientation of the role of government not seen since the days of Lyndon B. Johnsons Great Society. Simultaneously, his opponents have amped up to an extraordinary degree their efforts to undermine democracy in order to regain and then retain power.

Those who seek to turn us back appreciate that control over how the past is perceived goes a long way toward gaining control over the present and future, and today they are engaged in an all-out effort to misrepresent the American past.

It was in the extended 1964 that the social contract and the inclusive democracy they are working to undermine came to fruition. A careful examination of the time when the battle lines of today were drawn is of substantial value in understanding the present.

It was different then.

For one thing, the only notable Nazi in 1964 America was Dr. Strangelove.

There was hi-fi, but no one had yet heard of Wi-Fi. People still listened to music on AM radio. The latest technological advance in this area was the transistor radio, which made reception of the music on those AM stations portable. At home, people listened to music on phonographs that played discs that were decidedly non-compact. The newest versions provided stereophonic sound.

People tended to know several of their neighbors well, talk with them regularly, and even have them over of an evening. Far more kids played pickup games of baseball, football, and basketball on vacant lots in the neighborhood and driveway courts than participated in various organized Little Leagues and such. The number of American kids playing what the rest of the world calls football was scarcely above nil.

Interracial marriage was illegal in a third of American states.

Peoplea term that was then widely taken by white people as a synonym for whitesgenerally felt safe in their hometowns, even after dark. Howard Johnsons reigned as king of highway food. McDonalds still charged fifteen cents apiece for its hamburgers.

It made a difference what season it was, especially in a grocery store. Apples and pears were to be found only in the fall and early winter; strawberries were confined to late spring; peaches, plums, and tomatoes to the summer. Although air-conditioning was no longer so unusual that it commanded comment, it was far from ubiquitous.