On The Road In The 1970's--Part 54

In the early 1960's, Civil Rights Movement activists were interviewed on a daily basis and on many weekend news interview television shows; especially before the Jim Crow laws in the South, that perpetuated legalized segregation in that region and legalized the special, caste and national oppression in the USA which Afro-Americans experienced, were finally legally prohibited by passage of 1964 Civil Rights Act.

So if you were a corporate TV news show junkie, like I then was in the early 1960's, who was always especially passionate about ending racial discrimination against Afro-Americans in the USA, it was easier to find out what was happening in the Black Liberation Movement than it later became in the decades after 1970. And if you had told me in the summer of 1963 that in 2020 institutional racism would still be existing in the USA, I probably would have thought that you were crazy with regard to what U.S. society would look like in the 21st-century.

Yet at the same time, whenever I took a late Sunday evening bath on the second floor of the part of the duplex house my parents rented in the summer of 1963, and listened to my AM transistor radio while I was taking a bath, and often heard far-away AM radio stations transmitting from some of the stations in the South--in which one of the rabidly white racist and anti-Semitic Southern radio evangelist-types might still be demagogically defending Jim Crow and characterizing the early 1960's Civil Rights Movement as an "Un-American Communist Conspiracy"--I sometimes wondered whether I was overestimating the pace in which U.S. racism, in the South at least, would be quickly ended by the Civil Rights Movement and my generation, by the early 1970's.

Liberal Democratic politician/president JFK, however, by this time had made a TV speech, after Birmingham police attacked with police dogs Civil Rights Movement demonstrators, in the spring of 1963, promising that the U.S. federal government would do more to end racial discrimination in the South; and the national TV network news shows also seemed supportive then of the Civil Rights Movement's campaign to end racial discrimination in the South. So by the end of the summer of 1963, what I sometimes heard on the AM radio channels on a Sunday night being broadcast from the South (perhaps on radio shows or broadcasts that were being funded by right-wing billionaire H.L. Hunt's right-wing radio propaganda broadcasting apparatus) did not end up bothering me that much or decrease my optimism about how quickly U.S. racism throughout the whole nation would be ended.