In 1964, when I was 15 yrs old, LBJ signed the Civil Rights legislation started by JFK that would put an end to the Jim Crow laws and a NY Times article accompanied by a photo of 13-year-old Gene Young of Kansas City being shorn by a white barber at the Muehlebach Hotel shop, a previously Whites Only barbershop, read:
NEGROES IN SOUTH TEST RIGHTS ACT; RESISTANCE LIGHTA Steak House in Virginia and a Pool in Georgia Are Integrated Peacefully BIRMINGHAM IS OBEYING Chamber of Commerce Asks Compliance in Jackson -- Atlanta Cafe Defiant Negroes in South Test New Law; Resistance Light in Most Areas
By Peter Millones
July 4, 1964, Saturday
Negroes ate steak side by side with whites in a Danville, Va., restaurant yesterday for the first time. A Negro boy got a haircut in a previously all-white hotel barbershop in Kansas City, Mo. And Negroes went swimming in a previously segregated swimming pool in Savannah, Ga......
Imagine that.
Mind you, as Franks Rich points out his excellent column today
"that Norman Rockwell-like tableau was paired with the image of a white businessman, Lester Maddox, and a teenage accomplice respectively wielding a pistol and an ax handle as they turned away blacks from Maddox's restaurant in Atlanta. The summer of 1964, which had begun with the lynching of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., would soon erupt in a bloody wave of terrorism, marked by dozens of bombings of black churches, homes and businesses. "
So it goes...when you live in a society that is "still very much a work in progress".
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