_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [41]
They marched down the street in front of a bar whose customers deserted the jukebox and crowded into the doorway to gape at Young and his followers.
“Freedom, freedom…,” their voices growing stronger in the night air.
They shuffled their out-of-cadence feet by the pool room, where the familiar snap of cue balls ceased, where the arguments inside stopped abruptly while some stared and some ran outside to join the marchers’ ranks.
Before I’ll be a slave,
I’ll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord,
And be free…
They sang and they marched, and Andy Young led them by the red-hot smell of sizzling ribs in the Bar-B-Q and on past teeming shotgun houses where blacks stood in astonished awe.
Oh, deep in my heart,
I do believe,
We shall overcome,
Someday…
We watched the marchers turn right at the main street to the downtown park and head for the “Old Slave Market.” Cameraman Bill Cavanaugh and soundman Red Davis kept up. We kept filming because we knew tonight would not be the same. Too many new faces were in town; there were too many civil rights activists, and too many segregationists had been alerted in six or seven states. Each television crew began loading fresh film for their entrance into the “whites only” world.
Ain’t gonna let nobody,
Turn me around,
Turn me around,
Turn me around…
They marched into the park in a small tidal wave, carrying in the audacity of its forward motion the seeds of its own destruction; for whites had gathered in the park, another group at the “Old Slave Market,” and still another across from the park at the foot of the bridge. Others just sat in their cars and stared.
Andrew Young and his band were hurling the gauntlet, throwing it at the feet of the segregationists. They moved into the “Old Slave Market,” in a tighter band now, ranks close together, feet shuffling, pounding together beneath linked arms and hands. Still singing as Young held up a hand, marking time, standing fast while his feet tramped. Up and down, a dull thudding boom of hundreds of feet. From the back others shoved and pushed, eager to see what was happening. Young brought his hand down, and with a crash of silence the thudding boom of feet ended. The youthful black leader surveyed the whites before him, his head turning slowly.
Suddenly, Young went to his knees in prayer. On the spot where blacks were sold into slavery more than one hundred years before, he began to pray as white faces moved toward him, cursing. Other whites stood gaping, disbelieving. A man in prayer was being beaten. The scene would be shown again and again on television screens across America.
The response? Outrage! Four little girls had lost their lives to a bomb beneath their church in Birmingham. Marchers had been beaten. Cattle prods and dogs had been used on black children. America’s future was located on Cape Canaveral’s launch pads just 110 miles away. It was time! It was finally time to get rid of the Jim Crow injustices, and President Johnson and the Congress moved. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, and President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed it into law. Segregation in LBJ’s native South had finally been ended.
And the overwhelming majority of Americans, black and white, felt good.
That November, Lyndon Johnson was elected President in his own right, and qualified and dedicated people raised his Manned Spacecraft Center near Houston. From what was once worthless wasteland grew a cutting-edge high-tech center that would see astronauts to the moon and back safely.
But before the lunar trips there had to be Project Gemini—a two-man spacecraft that would test and perfect all the key techniques needed to reach the moon, rendezvousing and docking with