The summer that I was 14, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, beating a much tougher filibuster than still exists. You needed 67 votes in those days to invoke cloture. and President Johnson worked with Senate Republican leader Everette Dirksen and Democrat Hubert Humphrey to shut down the Dixiecrats.
It’s sort of ironic that I was visiting the Capitol that summer, and I had the chance to meet two senators in a room just off the chamber.
Those two.
Two great men of the type who don’t much exist anymore.
A few years later, when my friend was working as a gate agent for TWA at Dulles Airport, three senators showed up to check in for a flight — liberal Humphrey, moderate Republican Charles Percy and conservative icon Barry Goldwater. My friend, who was a little naive about politics, seated the three men close together hoping they would argue on the flight.
Instead, a flight attendant told him later that they had been drinking together, clowning around and flirting with the flight attendants. Yes, they were of different parties, but what my friend didn’t know was that they were members of the most exclusive club in the world.
Different times indeed. In 1960, in one of the presidential debates between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy, Nixon explained to the audience that he and his opponent wanted the same things for America. It was only methods and timetables that separated them.
That consensus gave us Civil Rights in 1964 and voting rights in 1965. At age 15, I was really believed that we could all but eliminate racism in my lifetime. Certainly by the far-off year 2020, we would no longer be judging people by the color of their skin.
Transcendent soul singer Sam Cooke sang a lovely song called “A Change is Gonna Come,” and we believed him.
But by the time that song came out in 1965, Cooke was already dead, murdered in a Los Angeles motel.
And while things did get better, they got worse again. I figured once my generation was in the driver’s seat, most of the racists would be dead and gone. And I had the nerve to call my friend naive.
“It’s been a long, a long time coming, but I know a change gonna come …”
Such a beautiful song, and it was completely appropriate that Senator Barack Obama quoted it on Election night when he became the first African-American elected president.
We were the first country to freely elect as our leader someone from a minority less than 15 percent of the population. It’s a good thing, as Martha Stewart might say, but it also infuriated our racists so much that they took things to new depths. We saw postcards with the White House lawn covered by watermelons, and pictures where the Obamas were chimpanzees.
When the president ran for re-election, there was a particularly crude bumper sticker.
Are we horrible people. Maybe not, but we certainly aren’t as pure as we would like to think.
We’re learning a great deal about ourselves in the murder trial going on in Minneapolis, and it will be very interesting to see if former police officer Derek Chauvin is convicted of killing George Floyd by putting his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes.
If he isn’t convicted, look for all hell to break loose in American cities.
If that happens, we need to realize that this country really is falling apart.