Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [93]
12:00 p.m. (2) Love of Life
(4) Say When (color)
(7) Father Knows Best (re-run)
(9) News: John Wingate
12:15 p.m. (9) Republican National Convention Highlights
12:30 p.m. (2) Search for Tomorrow
(4) Truth or Consequences (color)
(5) Cartoon Playtime
(7) Tennessee Ernie Ford
(9) Joe Franklin’s Memory Lane
At 12:30 p.m., Lyndon Johnson convinced his wife to take a stroll. The president was not just looking for exercise. With the Republican Convention filling the airwaves, he hoped to recapture the nation’s attention. “I think it would look very spontaneous,” Johnson’s press secretary told him. Exiting the White House, Lyndon and Lady Bird walked with reporters and a single Secret Service agent through the gates and onto Pennsylvania Avenue. For the next half hour, the president and first lady strolled hand in hand. Tourists turned in disbelief. “You mean that’s President and Mrs. Johnson? Well, how about that! Look, Bobby it’s the president.” Others rose from park benches to shake the president’s hand. The Johnsons made a loop around the neighborhood before returning to the White House.
By July 16, 1964, another year of violence and marches across the South had widened America’s racial gap. With the Civil Rights Act now law, a “white backlash” was brewing. “They’re always doing something for the niggers,” a Chicago man said. “When are they going to do something for the white people?” A Harris poll revealed that nearly 60 percent of whites feared that Negroes wanted to take their jobs, and a quarter thought black men wanted to take their women. Most whites said they supported integration, yet three of five thought social clubs and neighborhoods should be allowed to exclude blacks. California voters were piling up signatures for a ballot initiative that would soon strike down the state’s Fair Housing Law. Yet racial resentment was just the tip of America’s disquieting mood.
Behind the facade that still looked like the 1950s lurked fears that the times were changing much too quickly. At home, the Kennedy assassination, followed by the string of shocking murders, had shaken the illusion that America was a peaceful nation. The Supreme Court had banned school prayer, “the pill” was loosening sexual mores, and talk of bombing Vietnam, of sending thousands more “advisers,” led to a growing unease. In the July 16 New York Times, James Reston noted “the deep feeling of regret in American life: regret over the loss of religious faith; regret over the loss of simplicity and fidelity; regret over the loss of the frontier spirit of pugnacious individuality; regret, in short, over the loss of America’s innocent and idealistic youth.”
A few names that would stick to the 1960s were already in the public eye. Richard Nixon was in San Francisco that day, preparing to nominate Barry Goldwater for president. Future Easy Rider star Jack Nicholson was making B movies like Back Door to Hell. Gloria Steinem was known not as a feminist but as the freelancer who went undercover to write about Playboy bunnies. Comedian Lenny Bruce was in a Manhattan courtroom, on trial for obscenity. In Flint, Michigan, the first generation of Ford Mustangs was rolling off the assembly line. But most of the upcoming 1960s lay hidden. Jimi Hendrix was backing a rhythm and blues band touring the South. Abbie Hoffman was in Worcester, Massachusetts, working for SNCC and worrying that it was too late to go to Mississippi. (The following summer, Hoffman would teach at the McComb Freedom School.) Truman Capote was at home on Long Island, waiting for two killers in Kansas to be executed so he could finish In Cold Blood. Neil Armstrong was one of several Apollo astronauts in training.
And on this “so-called Freedom Day,” a 1939 International Harvester