The year 1963 was crucial in the fight for justice and equality for all Americans. In Beaufort, South Carolina, our television screen filled with civil rights demonstrators; nuns’ habits and clergymen’s collars punctuated the crowd. I’d grown up under Jim Crow, the legislated separation of the races: I attended a segregated school, entered the white waiting room at the doctor’s office and sat downstairs in the movie theater, while “colored” moviegoers, as we said then, trudged up to the balcony.
At the dinner table, my father preached integration, not in sermons exactly but in short bursts more like sermonettes, 25 words or less. My mother supported integration, too, but she was terrified that the violence we saw on TV would visit Beaufort, that white Southerners were so riled up the Klan would target Catholics, too. Oh, for goodness’ sake, my father said. They’re not after us.
My sister and I did witness three or four men dressed in Klan robes, but from our hiding perch we only laughed at the silly men playing dress-up. Then, because it was the Klan, we skedaddled. We later learned in the local paper that they’d been waiting for their fellow Klansmen to march through downtown. During my childhood, that show of white supremacy was the only demonstration or sit-in in our little town — and white folks wanted to keep it that way. We were shocked when the owners of the two drugstores, where we loved to watch the counter girls portion out syrup and fizz, dismantled their soda fountains. One after the other, they remodeled. To make more room for cosmetics, our druggist said. In the car, my father scoffed. Cosmetics. You can’t have a sit-in if there’s no place to sit.
The whole family tuned in on that June night when President Kennedy appeared on TV to appeal for a collective examination of conscience, a phrase that made our Catholic ears ring. He was proposing new civil rights legislation. The president spoke to us calmly and forcefully from the screen — so like the way my father spoke, I was sure Beaufort would come around to their way of thinking. The whole country was bound to come around, even South Carolina. I was filled with self-satisfaction that my family was on the right team.
But the very next morning the Today show brought us the assassination of Medgar Evers, the young NAACP leader in Jackson, Mississippi. Waves of shame that I was a Southerner washed over me. Maybe my mother shouldn’t have been as scared as she was, but she wasn’t crazy to fear the Klan. They were out for blood.
School had just begun that year when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Over the weekend, when TV rebroadcast King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, my father sat in the armchair to take it in, his eyes brimming.
I had just started junior high, where one of my new friends counted a signer of the Declaration of Independence among her ancestors. We both came from families where politics was served with supper, but the politics couldn’t have been more different. Our friendship was based on our mutual fascination with how the other could be so utterly wrong — neither of us budged a quarter inch. One day our loud recess argument about integration attracted a little crowd under the basketball hoops. When we trooped back into social studies, the teacher asked us to continue our debate for the class.
My fervor, I’m afraid, mainly involved my fondness for the sound of my own voice. Luckily, all my father’s dinner-table phrases tumbled out: simple justice, moral courage, human dignity. For a moment, the clarity of those phrases made me believe I held the class in the palm of my hand. But when my friend said that the inevitable result of integration would be INTERMARRIAGE, the teacher wrote the word “miscegenation” on the board and a shiver ran through the room.
At the end of our debate, the class voted by secret ballot whether schools should be integrated, and the teacher announced the results dramatically: Integration lost badly, as I’d known it would. Still, my friends’ voting for segregation was hard to fathom. We’d seen fire hoses on TV, kids herded into paddy wagons. We lived in a town where inequality was visible, ramshackle cabins a few blocks from grand mansions built by the enslaved.
A few weeks later, the same teacher had us write essays arguing for or against the institution of slavery. Now I was downright bewildered — some of my friends chose the affirmative. They said Beaufort’s climate resembled western Africa’s and defended the generosity of slaveholders (the doctors they provided, the gospels they taught). They’d spent their whole lives hearing this remarkable fiction, that slavery was actually a charitable endeavor that had bettered the lives of poor Africans.
In 1963, the shocks kept coming: It was also the year of the Birmingham church bombing that killed four little Black girls and the assassination of President Kennedy. The killing would continue throughout the ’60s: voting rights activists Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney; Malcolm X; King himself. But by the end of the ’60s, moral outrage, civil rights legislation and education about the injustices so many Americans had suffered under Jim Crow had finally nudged us along a crooked path toward integration. We made slow but visible progress.
Today, however, demagogues once again stoke fear, distort history and challenge human and civil rights. As Americans celebrate a momentous birthday, we need to remind ourselves of grave injustices, not suppress those memories. And we need to remind ourselves of the courage and clarity of the Civil Rights Movement. Remembering both the tragedies and the triumphs of a year like 1963 will honor the truth and make us stronger.
Valerie Sayers, professor emerita of English, is the author of seven books. Her essays and stories appear widely.