“Someone told me long ago,
There’s a calm before the storm,
I know, it’s been coming for some time…”
And, while no one could plausible characterize the malaise our country has fallen into over the better part of the past fifty years, under the plague of conservative political ideology, better known as “Reaganomics,” as the calm alluded to in the above mentioned Credence Clearwater Revival lyrics, you can bet your ass the “storm” that’s coming is what they had in mind.
And, it sure as hell isn’t the one the “no nothing,” malevolent, modern day Republican Party will be able to withstand; for which, I think, especially for our children, we should all be grateful.
I’m rapidly approaching sixty (in fact I’ll be there in two weeks) and, if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear I had just been released from a time capsule, one in which I had been encased since my childhood in the 60’s. Only to find that little if anything had changed in terms of how blacks and whites perceive or relate to one another-and it just breaks my heart. But, yet, somehow, this feeling of déjà vu from my youth, has rekindled my child’s sense of wonder: my idealism and optimism once again blossoming.
I was only five years old when President Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963, but like most of us who bore witness to one of the darkest days in our nation’s history, I remember it as if it were yesterday.
It was a Friday, I know this because the night before we had had navy beans and rice for dinner. We always had navy beans and rice or something else that wasn’t too tasteful on the day before my father would come to give Mom some money. He always came on Friday, and as soon as he left, Mom would go to the grocery store and get us some really good food, like hotdogs and fish sticks.
That day, watching the big clock that hung high on the wall in the front of Mrs. Coleman’s class, and seeing that I had just recently learned how to tell time, I knew that when the little hand was on the three and the big hand was on the twelve that it was time to go home. Time was going really slowly and I couldn’t stop thinking about getting home, having a good snack, like a Scooter Pie and a glass of milk and then, a really good dinner.
The telephone on the wall next to the door in the classroom rang and Mrs. Coleman went over to answer it. She didn’t talk very long, but after she hung up she put her hand on her forehead and said, “No, God, No!”
Then, without even saying anything to us, she went back to her desk, sat in her chair, and put her head down on top of her folded arms and cried; her shoulders were shaking and everything. We were all just sitting at our desks with our eyes bugging out of our heads. I had never seen a teacher cry before and it really frightened me.
Mrs. Coleman stopped crying after a while, and whipping the tears from her face with a tissue and without getting up from her desk, she said very slowly and sadly, but still in her teacher’s voice, “Class, I am so sorry to have to tell you this, but President Kennedy was shot this afternoon in Texas. Class is dismissed.”
Walking home from school that day, everyone I saw was either crying or had etched upon their faces this look of total and utter disbelief and pain. But, in my 6 year-old mind, I thought to myself, “Well, Ms. Coleman just said that President Kennedy got shot. People get shot all the time on TV and only the bad guys die. Heck, Lucas McCain, ‘The Rifleman’ (my favorite television program at the time) gets shot all the time and he never dies.” Unfortunately, when I got home and saw Mom crying, I knew that the President had.
And then suddenly, less than three months later, seeming out of nowhere, much of our nation, especially the young, were waiting with baited breath for the Beatle’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show; lifting the morose cloud that had engulfed the country since the death of the President.
I’ll never forget that day in early 1964 when my oldest sister, Ovetta, heard me singing, “She Loves You,” in the hallway outside her bedroom while she was playing the record on her portable record player. “Hey, Ove, you like the Beatles? You want to come in and listen?” She said, looking down at me, her arms folded, a small smile on her face.
“Sure, I stuttered, as she opened the door wide. I haltingly walked in, half expecting her to change her mind, because she had told me on more than one occasion to never set foot in her room. But, Ovetta just motioned for me to sit on her bed and she put on her favorite song, “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” “You want to see what they look like,” she asked me, smiling,” her eyes bigger than they usually were.
“Okay,” I said. Ovetta reached under the mattress of her bed and pulled out a small red dairy, which had a keyhole on the front. She then went over to her dresser, opened the top drawer, reached in, and pulled out a chain with a little key on the end. She came back over to the bed and opened the dairy with the key. Ovetta took a picture from the back of it and handed it to me. “You better not bend it!” she said.
The picture was one she had cut out of the newspaper. It showed four guys smiling, with funny haircuts and suite jackets with no collars. As I looked closely, being careful not to bend it, Ovetta, in a voice I had only heard her use before on Christmas mornings when she was opening her gifts, leaned in, pointing and said, “ Now that one is John, and the one next to him is Paul, and that one is George and the little one is Ringo.”
“Whoa!” I said, even though I didn’t really care.
“And you know what else?” she said, with her eyes growing even larger and talking fast, “they’re going to be on the Ed Sullivan Show tomorrow night,” and you and I have got to make sure Mom lets us watch it. Okay?” I shook my head yes, but it really wasn’t necessary-we watched Ed Sullivan every Sunday night anyway.
That Sunday at eight o’clock, my brothers, Kenneth, Ronald and I took our seats on the floor, while Ovetta, Michael and John, joined Mom on the couch, just like we did every Sunday when we watched Ed Sullivan. Ovetta sat calmly, but she was leaning forward, her fist holding up her chin.
And then the Beatles came on. Ovetta jumped from her seat, placed her hands on her cheeks and opened her mouth wide. My brother Michael, seeing this, screwed up his face and began making a circular motion with his pointing finger near the side of his head.
The Beatles were singing “She Loves You” and although I had heard that song a million times before, that night I felt as if I were hearing it for the very first time. I immediately picked my favorite Beatle-Paul; I loved the way he opened his eyes really wide and the way his mouth formed a perfect circle when he sang oooh! If my brother Michael had not been there, I would have been standing, cupping my cheeks with my mouth wide open just like Ovetta.
And, when The Beatles played Ovetta’s favorite song, “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” she had tears streaming down her cheeks just like some of those crazy girls screaming and crying on the television set. I wondered, why the heck they were crying.
That night I dreamed I was Paul singing “She Loves You” on the Ed Sullivan Show. The next morning, when I woke up, I was still in that dream. And, as I stood before the bathrooms mirror, toothbrush in hand, mouthing the words to “She Loves You”-staring back at me was Paul.
Here I was, a seven year old, living in a housing project in a single parent household, with my seven siblings in a middle class community, experiencing the exact same euphoria a good portion of our nation was basking in. Just as we had mourned as one on November 22, 1963, we found comfort and joy in four young musical visionaries from Liverpool, England in February of 1964.
My family and I had been living in Elmwood Gardens, a housing project in Plainfield, New Jersey for about five years in the summer of 1967; everyone else called it the New Projects, but not Mom. My Little League baseball team, the Pirates, had just won the city championship, and I was brimming with feelings of elation and confidence I hoped would never end.
And then, once again, seemingly out of nowhere, on an ordinary day, later that summer of 1967, a police officer, John Gleason, was beaten to death by a mob of, as I was later to learn, people I knew and saw everyday in and around the projects. That night, the riots began.
And, I remember thinking, as I lay there in my bed with my brother Kenneth, each of us shivering with fear, the hot summer air reeking of smoke from the burning buildings a block away, and gunshots ringing out intermittently throughout the night, “Why on earth are they burning down the neighborhood? What the heck is that going to do?” One month later, we moved to a rental on the east end of town.
By the spring of 1968, I was well aware of the turmoil surrounding the civil rights movement, and the challenges to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of seeking equality through non-violent protest, emanating from the “Black Power” movement and the Black Panther Party, who were aggressively advocating for black autonomy and self-sufficiency.
And, yes, their message of black empowerment was one, which was necessary and essential to awakening the consciousness of inner city minorities, feeling trapped in a web of poverty, hopelessness and despair.
But, to my twelve-year old mind, the whole “Black Power” thing seemed absurd: wasn’t the whole point of the civil rights movement an effort to prod the nation towards becoming an integrated society where equality of opportunity was the rule rather than the exception.
And, more importantly, at the time of the backlash, Dr. King, unbeknownst to me, was beginning to link the civil rights movement with the broader issue of income inequality. In words that, unfortunately still ring resoundingly true today, Dr. King lamented, “Most of the poor people in America hold full time jobs.” And, he added, “this is criminal, to have people working on a full- time basis, and on a full-time job, getting part-time income.”
Dr. King, just as he had earlier in a speech where he jarred the establishment by issuing a blistering critique of the Vietnam War, then went on to assertively announce the new direction of the civil rights movement:
“Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For what does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter, if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee.” At the time Dr. King made those pronouncements, he was planning a poor people’s march on Washington, which he hoped would consist of African- Americans, Asians, Latinos and poor whites. Unfortunately, he was assassinated just days later.
That evening, just as news of Dr. King’s assassination was breaking, presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, was scheduled to deliver a campaign speech in predominately black, Indianapolis, Indiana. Instead of cancelling the speech, Kennedy decided to use it, not only to courageously announce, to a potentially hostile crowd, the death of Dr. King, but also to make a heartfelt appeal for racial harmony.
“The vast majority of white people and black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our lives, and want justice for all who abide in our land,” he said. And, after being interrupted by applause on several occasions during the speech, by the grief stricken African- American audience, Kennedy ended by adding, “ Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.”
As I sat watching this scene unfold on the late night news, I found myself both heartbroken, because of the death of Dr. King and at the same time, feeling a surge of euphoria, for I instinctively knew I was watching someone and something very, special.
And, it was at that moment that I fell in love with politics, will, not really politics, but with the candidacy of Bobby Kennedy. Even at the age of eleven, I was mesmerized by the way he spoke, carefully choosing each word, practically pleading with all of us to come together as one. I believed in him with all my heart. Then he was assassinated in June of 1968. For the next several days, I found myself in tears at the very thought of him, and what could have been.
I didn’t realize it then, but Bobbie’s death; coupled with that of Dr. King’s was probably the first time in my life I had experienced the feeling of total and utter despair.
With Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., both issuing a call for equality and unity, I was beginning to feel as if the country really had a chance to come together as one; we were on the verge of a genuine “Revolution.” And now they were both gone, and with them, went my political innocence.
Later that summer, I watched in amazement on the nightly news, images of the hippies in the streets of Chicago, outside the Democratic convention, chanting, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching,” while being savagely beaten by the police. Inside the hall, McCarthy was grudgingly throwing his support behind the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. “Tricky Dickey” Nixon became president and that’s when our country began its’ heartbreaking descent into the politics of demonization, lack of empathy and the total abandonment of the least fortunate amongst us
I grieve for the disadvantaged children these days, white, black, brown and yellow, who’ve had the misfortunate of coming of age, over the course of the past 30 years, in a country woefully lacking in the compassion and caring for one another that I experienced: a country where one of its’ major political parties has no qualms with seeking major cuts in the nation’s food stamps program, which in essence amounts to sending millions of children to bed hungry each and every night.
I’ll never forget seeing the unbearable hurt and sadness in my mother’s eyes, on those occasions when she had no choice, but to tuck us in without having had anything for dinner, and her sighing and saying, “I’m so sorry, but, I promise you this, things are going to get better.” And they did.
I was fortunate enough to be a child of the sixties, at the height of the civil rights movement, when President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” was in full bloom.
I shudder to think what might have become of me and my family had we not had the benefits of decent public housing, quality public education, food stamps and the generous Pell Grants and affordable National Direct Student Loans, which provided me with the opportunity to attend law school and to become an attorney, and several other of my siblings to obtain college degrees as well.
For decades, children growing up, under the same our similar circumstances as I did, are now considered nothing more than political fodder; collateral damage to the policies of a political party which seems to have lost all sense of decency. “There but for the grace of God go I,” I often hear ringing in my ears in the voice of my mother.
I’d just about given up hope; that is until now, nearly fifty years later, as I watched in amazement the phenomena that was the candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders, who has picked up the mantle and given full throat to Dr. King’s nascent push for economic equality and Senator Elizabeth Warren (sounding more and more like FDR in the clips I saw of him, on one of my all time favorites TV shows, ‘Biography’) in her condemnation of Wall Street, nearly echoing him, when he gleefully announced in a campaign speech in 1936, speaking of bankers and conservatives opposed to the “New Deal, “They are unanimous in their hatred of me-and I welcome their hatred.”
The massive crowds Senator Sanders drew and the movement he inspire of mostly the young, with his message of the perils income inequality has and is having on our nation, coupled with Senator Warren’s unabashed embrace of liberalism; Black Lives Matter’s call for accountably when unarmed blacks are shot by police officers, the beautiful “Dreamers” passionately demanding comprehensive immigration reform and the LGBT community finally beginning to garner their long overdue equal protection under our constitution, have all had a profound effect on our nation’s political discourse: interjecting the compassion, empathy and genuine determination to make America live up to its’ lofty goal of becoming a true Democracy that has been stifled for the better part of 40 years.
Unlike the case in 1968, when the counter-culture had no real voice or direction, or even in 2011, when occupy Main Street was echoing the very same themes 40 years later, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is now, in fact, the establishment, lending voice to the “real” silent majority, the “99 percent, ”yearning to be heard. And, I believe, our nation’s political narrative has changed so dramatically, that the majority of the electorate is now beginning to hear the cry of and willing to place its’ bets on the nascent, yet robust and refreshing progressive movement being offered by the left-wing of the Democratic Party.
And, most importantly, restoring hope and a sense of belonging to our nation’s youths; leaving our nominee, Hillary Clinton, no choice, but to hop on board, and, to my delight, much of what she is now saying on the stump, illustrates, to me, she has felt the “Bern,” and there is no turning back for her or the Democratic establishment.
Its’ been a long time coming, but it now appears as if the tide is turning, so much so, that I can’t help but find myself smiling, as the ole, 1969 Thunderclap Newman anthem, “Something In The Air” bounces around in my head:
“We’ve got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution’s here
And you know it’s right!