A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost

By Frye Gaillard

“There are many different ways to remember the sixties,” Frye Gaillard writes, “and this is mine. There was in these years the sense of a steady unfolding of time, as if history were on a forced march, and the changes spread to every corner of our lives. As future generations debate the meaning of the decade, I hope to offer a sense of how it felt to have lived it. A Hard Rain is one writer’s reconstruction and remembrance of a transcendent era—one that, for better or worse, lives with us still.”

With A Hard Rain Gaillard gives us a deeply personal history, bringing his keen storyteller’s eye to this pivotal time in American life. He explores the competing story arcs of tragedy and hope through the political and social movements of the times: civil rights, black power, women’s liberation, the war in Vietnam, and the protests movements against it.

Gaillard also examines the cultural manifestations of change in the era—music, literature, art, religion, and science—and so we meet not only the Brothers Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, but also Gloria Steinem, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Harper Lee, Mister Rogers, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Billy Graham, Thomas Merton, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Angela Davis, Barry Goldwater, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Berrigan Brothers. As Gaillard remembers these influential people, he weaves together a compelling story about an iconic American decade of change, conflict, and progress.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Release date: Jul 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781603064545

Frye Gaillard

FRYE GAILLARD is the writer-in-residence in the English and history departments at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of thirty books, including With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions; Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award; The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, winner of the Gustavus Myers Award; and If I Were a Carpenter, the first independent, book-length study of Habitat for Humanity. He lives in Mobile, Alabama.

Book preview

PART I

Possibilities

1960—We Shall Overcome: The Sit-ins, the subversive joy of rock ’n’ roll, Harper Lee and Black Like Me, Inspiration from JFK, the Pill, a conservative manifesto, A ten-dollar fine

1961—Ask Not: Eisenhower farewell, the JFK inaugural, The New Frontier and the race for space, The Bay of Pigs and the Freedom Rides, The Berlin Wall, Roger Maris and Babe Ruth, A song in Alabama

1962—If I Had a Hammer: The novelists, Silent Spring, The Other America, A crime to be gay, orbiting the earth, Marilyn Monroe, Johnny Carson, James Baldwin, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Ole Miss and the Cuban Missile Crisis, George Wallace wins, a farewell to Eleanor Roosevelt

1963—I Have a Dream: George Wallace, Birmingham, the Schoolhouse Door, Medgar Evers, Eudora Welty, the President speaks, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Patsy Cline, Dr. King and the March on Washington, The bombing of a church, the assassination of JFK

1

The Movement

For Franklin McCain, there are moments when the memory of it comes rushing back—the feeling he had when he took his place at the counter, on the padded swivel stool beneath the laminated signs promoting lemon pie. He and his friends had given little thought to the history they would be making. They were barely eighteen, and only much later did they marvel at the mystery of what they achieved. All they knew on this particular day, February 1, 1960, was that the world was not what they thought it should be. Everywhere they turned there were whites-only signs and a way of life in the South and beyond that was rooted in the common affront of segregation.

As a young black man, McCain got the message—the insult was never very far from his mind. With Joe McNeill, David Richmond and Ezell Blair, his three closest friends at North Carolina A&T University, he made a decision so basic and clear that he couldn’t believe they hadn’t thought of it before. For the sake of their dignity and pride, they simply would not take it anymore. As far as McCain and the others were concerned, the laws of segregation no longer applied.

Thus did they make their way on this cold afternoon to the Woolworth’s lunch counter, a popular gathering place in downtown Greensboro, and took seats on the white people’s stools. It was the first sit-in of the 1960s, the day the sputtering civil rights movement finally came alive. There had been a victory here and there—the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott, for example, which introduced the nation to Martin Luther King—but in the intervening years, King had struggled over what to do next. He had preached in pulpits across the South, and delivered his speeches all over the world, winning acclaim for his eloquence and passion. But the civil rights movement he was seeking to build was so far a series of disconnected events, a caricature of his dreams.

Then came Greensboro, where history began in a college bull session. On the night of January 31, 1960, it was too cold outside, they decided, to go anywhere, so they gathered as they had many times in a dorm room shared by McNeill and Blair. McCain and Richmond were there as well. They were just four college freshmen talking about the world. Their conversation soon turned to the issue of race, and they began to rail against their parents, who had struggled so bravely to make it in America and urged their sons to do the same. But parents and sons, for no reason other than the color of their skin, were demeaned every day by segregated buses, restaurants, and schools. Why, these young men wanted to know, had the older generations allowed it to happen? Why hadn’t they fought back?

But then a more disturbing question arose. What had they done, the four of them right there in the room? They talked about the dignity of Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, and the heroism of the Little Rock Nine, those remarkable Arkansas high school students who, in 1957, had braved white mobs—eventually with the help of federal troops—to batter the walls of segregation there. But in Greensboro, they themselves had done absolutely nothing. The more they talked, the worse they felt, and their mood sank lower by the hour.

I felt dirty, remembered McCain. I felt ashamed.

Finally, in the early morning quiet of February 1, just an hour or two before dawn, Joe McNeill looked at the others and demanded simply: Let’s do something.

From there the ideas came in a torrent. They would go that day—no need to put it off—to confront the reality of Southern segregation. Specifically, as soon as their classes were over, they would march to the Woolworth’s store downtown. That particular establishment was especially galling. The clerks were happy to take the black students’ money for school supplies or anything else, except for food. The Woolworth’s lunch counter served only whites.

McNeill and his friends, who would soon become known as the Greensboro Four, decided to confront that policy directly. They would take seats and demand to be served.

Many years later, Ezell Blair remembered the surge of terror when it occurred to him that they were really serious. Like most young blacks of his generation, he knew about Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who in 1955 visited relatives in Mississippi. Showing off for his country cousins, Till had said something fresh to a white woman, and for that breach of Southern etiquette he was murdered—his mutilated body dumped from a bridge into the murky Tallahatchie River. Two white men were arrested but soon acquitted by an all-white jury, despite eyewitness testimony against them. Black parents all across the South warned their sons to be more cautious, or they could become the next Emmett Till.

As he tossed and turned in his bed in Greensboro, Blair felt mounting dread. Till, after all, had been murdered for a trivial act—a harmless aside to a white woman—while Blair and his friends were planning nothing less than a frontal assault on segregation. Later, he remembered how he woke up early and called his parents. His mother, Corene, was a member of the NAACP, and when he asked her opinion, she told him simply to do what he must and to carry himself with dignity and grace. There was nothing more to say.

Joe McNeill, who would later become a general in the U.S. Army, pointed out that they were all afraid. Under the circumstances it was normal. The question was how they would manage the fear.

For McCain, especially, the answer was easy. They might go to jail, or maybe they would even be killed. But in a segregated world, they had to be willing to pay such a price. We had nothing to lose, he later explained. His anger, quite simply, was stronger than his fear, and he could see that the others felt the same. Their moment of personal liberation was at hand.

The following morning, they all went to class. McCain remembered how he fretted through chemistry and English composition, until finally it was time to meet his friends. They didn’t talk much on the thirty-minute walk from campus to town, and when they reached Woolworth’s they split into pairs—McCain and McNeill, Richmond and Blair. They bought school supplies and kept the receipts, then McCain and McNeill, who happened to be closest, decided to move toward the counter. McCain said they hesitated for a minute, maybe even five, before they took their seats, to the general astonishment of people all around. For McCain it was a moment unique in his life, a sense of exhilaration and relief.

I can’t even describe it, he said. Never have I experienced such an incredible emotion, such an uplift. As a journalist friend of mine once put it, ‘My soul was rested.’

But the moment soon became more tense. McNeill remembered that a Greensboro policeman quickly arrived and began pacing back and forth behind the stools, tapping his nightstick in the palm of his hand.

Joe, said McCain, I think this is it.

Yeah, said McNeill, I think so. The gesture, however, was merely a bluff, and when the two young men didn’t flinch, the policeman seemed confused. So was everybody else in authority, and as Richmond and Blair made their way toward the stools, the waitress tried once again to explain: We don’t serve Negroes here.

But McCain replied with manicured politeness, pointing to the school supplies they had bought, I beg to disagree. You do serve us and you have.

We have the receipts to prove it, McNeill added stubbornly.

The standoff continued until almost five p.m., when the Woolworth’s manager closed the counter. As stiffly polite as they had been from the start, McCain and his friends got up and left. They reveled in their moment of deliverance, but they knew already that this was something much bigger than themselves.

TWO THINGS HAPPENED THAT same night, as word of their action began to ripple outward and to capture the attention of the young. On the campus of North Carolina A&T, the Greensboro Four called a meeting of student leaders. They talked about their afternoon adventure and the shimmering possibilities that lay just ahead, and they were startled when at first nobody believed them. Nobody could imagine that four college freshmen, acting on their own, had defied white supremacy and lived to tell it. The lone exception was Albert Rozier, the student newspaper editor. The following morning he published an extra edition of the A&T Register—the first in its history—and suddenly it seemed as if the whole world knew. The sit-ins continued that week in Greensboro, and with mounting publicity the protesters numbered well into the hundreds—with black students joined by a sprinkling of whites.

Several hundred miles away, meanwhile, a young black man was driving alone through the hills of Virginia, the radio crackling through the cold morning air. Charles Jones, a theology student at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, was on his way to North Carolina when he heard the astonishing story on the news. Four college freshmen—teenagers!—had taken a stand against segregation and called on others to do the same. As an African American, the grandson of slaves, Jones was proud of his ancestors’ perseverance and believed that every generation must build on the past. But how? What could he and others like him do to push the cause of freedom even further?

At the age of twenty-three, Jones was wrestling with that very question when he heard the news on his car radio, and there in the loneliness of rural Virginia, he found himself shouting to the great, empty sky: Thank you, God! This is how we can do it. As soon as he made it back to Charlotte, he, too, called a meeting of the campus leadership, telling his friends, I don’t know about y’all, but tomorrow morning I’m going downtown, and I’m gon’ do what the students in Greensboro did.

And so the sit-ins continued to spread. Jones and his friends began sitting in at a half-dozen restaurants, coming back day after day. There were racial insults and scattered acts of violence as young white toughs came to heckle and threaten, and on the first day a policeman struck a student squarely in her face. But the police mostly were professional, and, perhaps more importantly, so were the reporters who covered the story. The local morning newspaper, the Charlotte Observer, recounted not only what the demonstrators did but their explanations about why. The journalists seemed drawn to Jones’s eloquence as he quoted the Constitution and the Old Testament prophets and talked about brotherhood and justice.

The stories went out on the national wires, and Jones was sure the Charlotte demonstrations inspired supporters all over the country. Whatever the reason, by the end of February the sit-ins had spread beyond the South and to more than fifty towns. About a thousand people, many of them white, formed a picket line around a Woolworth’s store in Harlem, and students from Rutgers, Antioch, and Yale rushed to join the demonstrations. But it was in the South, the most conservative part of the country, where the roots of social change reached deepest, nourished by leaders whose names are largely forgotten.

In Nashville, Tennessee, a city that would soon emerge as the new epicenter of the sit-in movement, three ministers—two black, one white, two of them Southern, one of them not—became the unofficial advisers to a remarkable group of activist students.

Kelly Miller Smith was one of those mentors—a Baptist minister whose church was a staging ground for the movement. Three years earlier, he had volunteered his six-year-old daughter, Joy, to be a civil rights pioneer. The city of Nashville, like a handful of other Southern towns, including Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and Greensboro, decided to begin incremental desegregation of public schools. But instead of starting with high school, as the other cities had, Nashville chose to take its first steps at the elementary level, where prejudice might not be as ingrained. That was the hope. And so on the morning of September 9, 1957, Kelly Miller Smith held tight to Joy’s hand as he enrolled her in a previously all-white school.

The day went smoothly enough for Joy, but at other Nashville schools the story was different. Nineteen African American children broke the color barrier that morning at a total of eight different schools, and many were greeted by angry mobs. That night a bomb exploded at Hattie Cotton Elementary, where a lone black child had enrolled, and a wave of fear swept through the city. But on the morning of September 10, Kelly Miller Smith once again led his daughter by the hand to the doorway of her first grade class.

Death threats followed against Kelly and Joy, and a white minister, Will Campbell, came to Smith’s house to help keep watch. As they peered from a window, searching for danger in the shadows outside, Campbell asked a question he couldn’t quite suppress.

Kelly, what if something happens to little Joy?

As Campbell would remember it later, Smith opened his Bible and began to read the story of Abraham and Isaac—how God demanded the sacrifice of a son, and Abraham had been prepared to obey. But there in the thicket, a ram was caught by the horns, and God relented, allowing instead the sacrifice of the ram. Lord, said Smith, quietly closing his Bible, make the thicket tight and the ram’s horns long. Amen.

Such was the understanding of faith that Smith brought to the dangers of the civil rights movement. The Bible, he thought, was full of hard sayings, and it was a point on which Will Campbell agreed. Campbell was a Mississippi Baptist, thirty-six years old, who had earned a divinity degree from Yale, and he had simply never believed, even as a boy growing up in the South, that the Brotherhood of Man should include only whites. By 1960, he was deeply committed to the cause of civil rights, and he joined Kelly Smith in supporting the sit-ins.

FOR MANY OF THE young Nashville activists it was heartening indeed when a white man decided to share in the risks. But their most important mentor by far, the man who taught them nonviolence as a way of life, was Methodist minister James Lawson.

Lawson was black, a thirty-one-year-old activist from Ohio who had served a year in prison for refusing to fight in the Korean War. Upon his release, he became a missionary to India, where he immersed himself in Mohandas Gandhi’s theories of nonviolence. In 1957, after returning to the United States, he met and befriended Dr. Martin Luther King, a man he already admired from a distance. He remembered Gandhi’s prophecy that perhaps one day a black man from America would take up the cause of nonviolence and push it to heights more impressive than the Mahatma himself had achieved.

Lawson thought King might be that man. The admiration between them was mutual. King had never met anybody like Lawson, with such a tightly woven understanding of the philosophy of Gandhi and the gospel of Jesus. King immediately urged his Methodist friend to move to the South and impart his knowledge to the civil rights movement. Lawson agreed. He moved to Nashville and in the fall of 1958 began holding workshops at Kelly Miller Smith’s First Baptist Church. It was a venerated institution, the oldest black church in Nashville, with roots going back to the 1830s. Frederick Douglass had spoken there, and later Martin Luther King, but no one had the impact that James Lawson did as the 1950s drew to a close. He was teaching, in effect, a Christian adaptation of Gandhi, the radical pursuit of brotherhood and justice that would soon become the animating force of the sit-ins.

In Lawson’s understanding, this was not a tactic, but a way of living rooted in the notion of redemptive suffering. For some it was counterintuitive, this idea that pain can open the heart to compassion, and that a heart without malice can transform other hearts, turning enemies into friends. In Lawson’s hands, the sheer magnitude of the idealism was mesmerizing for many of the students, tied as it was to the notion of freedom, and they left the meetings with their heads in a spin.

There was something of a mystic about him, remembered John Lewis, a farm boy from south Alabama who had come to Nashville to study theology, something holy about his manner. . . .

Lawson told them they were about to start a war. But only one side would fight with violence. Theirs would not. They would accept the blows that might rain down when they challenged the laws of racial segregation. But self-discipline and tolerance would not be enough—they must also love the people who abused them, must see and respect the humanity of their attackers, who were also victims, in their own ways, of the hate-filled system in which they lived. If that system were ever to change, Lawson declared, the means employed to bring about that change must be consistent with the ends they were seeking to attain. And so it was not enough simply to resist the urge to hit back. "The urge can’t be there, Lawson said. You have to have no desire to hit back."

Slowly but surely, the lessons took hold, buttressed by readings from Gandhi, Thoreau, and Reinhold Niebuhr. And there were the practical workshops as well, classes on how to protect their bodies from attack. By the early weeks of 1960 Lawson thought they were ready—fully prepared to descend on the restaurants and stores downtown and demand to be served the same as anybody else. They were startled to learn in early February that they had been upstaged, that four young men in Greensboro, with no training at all, had launched the movement they had been planning with such care. But they took their places in the wave of dissent, and the Nashville sit-ins became the strongest in the South. Week after week, as winter drifted into spring, the students kept coming, kept sitting in, always polite, but always persistent, dressed as if they were going to church.

By the end of March, hundreds had been arrested, and the city gradually became more tense. Roving bands of white teenagers began showing up at the sit-ins, pushing, taunting, stubbing lit cigarettes onto the demonstrators’ skins. The violent climax came on the morning of April 19, when a bomb exploded at the home of Z. Alexander Looby, a veteran Nashville attorney, born in 1899 in the Caribbean nation of Dominica. As a young black man, Looby came to America on a whaling ship, determined to pursue an education, which he did at Howard University and later the Columbia University School of Law. In Nashville, he became the lead attorney for the sit-in students, a man of legendary physical courage who had spent decades battling for the rights of African Americans. So powerful was the bomb hurled through the front window of his home that the house was nearly destroyed in the blast. Down the street, more than 140 windows were shattered at Meharry Medical College, and dozens of people were cut by the glass.

Miraculously, neither Looby nor his wife were hurt, but outrage at the attempt on their lives swept through the black community. The sit-in leaders decided at once to march in protest, and they demanded that Nashville Mayor Ben West meet them on the steps of city hall.

In many ways it was as if the 1960s came alive that day, for such processions became a defining image of the decade. In Nashville on April 19, some three thousand people shuffled silently three abreast through the streets of downtown, their numbers swelling for blocks through the city. As they began to mass outside city hall, a young white man at the top of the steps pulled out his guitar and began to sing. Guy Carawan was a folk singer in the tradition of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, an activist born in California now living in the mountains of Tennessee. On this particular day, he chose as his anthem a traditional African American hymn, reshaping the lyrics to fit the occasion. With his friends Zilphia Horton and Seeger, he changed the pronoun from I to We. The echoes of faith were unmistakable, and though the chord progressions were somber, his message rang with redemption and the hope of social change—We shall overcome someday.

As a part of his job at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, Carawan had taught the song to a few of the leaders of the civil rights movement. But this was the moment of public unveiling when its powers of inspiration were fully on display.

It was not, however, the most remarkable moment of the march. That would come a few minutes later in a face-off between the demonstrators and the mayor. It was not going well at first. C. T. Vivian, a fiery leader of the sit-ins, read a statement, accusing Mayor West of a failure to lead.

West responded with anger: I deny the statement and resent to the bottom of my soul the implications of what you have just read.

Standing nearby, a young woman named Diane Nash, also a stalwart in the Nashville movement, listened to the confrontation with dismay. She remembered the lessons of Lawson’s workshops: Love your enemies. Respect their humanity. Turn them into friends. It seemed clear enough that Vivian, whatever his fearlessness in the moment, was not doing that, so Nash stepped forward. In a voice that was soft and sure and strong, she asked Mayor West if he would use the prestige of his office to end discrimination.

I appeal to all citizens to end discrimination, West replied, to have no bigotry, no bias, no hatred.

Then, Mayor, insisted Diane, continuing to push, firmly, gently, not backing down, do you recommend that the lunch counters be desegregated?

Yes, said West.

Suddenly it was as if the whole city knew that a corner was turned. The following morning, the Nashville Tennessean trumpeted the news in a banner headline: INTEGRATE COUNTERS—MAYOR.

From that moment on, Diane Nash assumed a position of leadership in the civil rights movement that she had neither sought nor expected. She was, after all, a woman, and leadership was the province of men. That was simply the way of the world. But suddenly, in more ways than one, she found herself on the cutting edge. As African Americans, they were all on a quest for equal rights, but she knew already that she was part of another upheaval as well, a redefinition of the role of women.

She discovered that she was not alone. Other women in the sit-in movement were caught up in the same unsettling sense of possibility. They set out now to knit the pieces together.

ON EASTER WEEKEND IN 1960, just a few days before Nash’s triumph, more than two hundred student activists from forty communities in ten states gathered in Raleigh, North Carolina. The call for the meeting came from Ella Baker, regarded by many as one of the most important leaders in the civil rights movement. In 1960, she was certainly the most outspoken woman, serving as interim director of Dr. Martin Luther King’s fledgling Southern Christian Leadership Conference until King could find a man to replace her. Growing up in rural North Carolina, Baker was raised on stories of slave revolts, told by a grandmother who had been a slave and, among other horrors, was beaten by her owner when she refused to marry a man he selected.

At the age of fifty-seven, Baker was a committed apostle of grassroots democracy, the idea that charismatic leadership was not enough. She admired King’s eloquence, his ability to frame the public debate, but she also thought this movement of students, erupting so powerfully across the South, held a promise unmatched since Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat on a bus. The boycott in Montgomery was itself a movement of the masses—thousands of African American citizens who simply refused, day after day, to ride in the rear of segregated buses.

Eventually, the boycotters won, but their triumph had not led to other victories over segregation, and Baker wanted to be sure that the same thing didn’t happen with the sit-ins. She wanted to create—or more precisely, help the students themselves create—an organization to build systematically on their momentum. She arranged for the Easter meeting at Shaw University, her alma mater where she had graduated as valedictorian. Though Dr. King attended the conference and delivered a moving and powerful address, it remained for James Lawson to define the movement’s philosophy:

Love is the central motif of nonviolence. Love is the force by which God binds man to himself and man to man. Such love goes to the extreme; it remains loving and forgiving even in the midst of hostility. It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more enduring capacity to absorb evil . . . Nonviolence nurtures an atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice become actual possibilities.

It was idealism in its purest form, and the students were moved. But there was also a fierce, revolutionary edge in their public announcement of a new organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They called themselves freedom fighters and compared their struggle to the revolts against colonialism in Africa. And though their own revolt would be nonviolent, they vowed that they would carry the struggle to every nook and cranny in the South.

In the weeks that followed SNCC’s public announcement, the sit-ins began to produce results—victories in cities like Nashville, Greensboro, and Charlotte, as downtown merchants took their measure of the demonstrators’ resolve and agreed to integrate lunch counters. As the students’ visibility increased, even opponents were grudgingly impressed.

James J. Kilpatrick was the conservative editor of the Richmond News-Leader, a segregationist who stated as late as 1963 that the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race. Later, he would renounce those views and decry the absolute evil of segregation. But in 1960, even before his change of heart, he took note of the dignity of the sit-ins:

Here were the colored students, in coats, white shirts, ties, and one of them was reading Goethe and one was taking notes from a biology text. And here, on the sidewalk outside, was a gang of white boys come to heckle, a rattail rabble, slack-jawed, black-jacketed, grinning fit to kill. . . . It gives one pause.

What Kilpatrick seemed to understand, at least superficially, was that something powerful was taking shape in the South. Soon enough the whole nation would notice.

2

The Voices

Living in Mobile, Alabama, I didn’t know much about the sit-ins. Not at first. There were newspaper stories here and there and scattered grumblings among friends of my parents. But my contemporaries and I, all of us white and barely in our teens, had other things on our minds. First of all, there was rock ’n’ roll. In the summer of 1960, I remember hearing a song on the radio; the singer sounded black and the subject matter was something I had never even thought about, and certainly never expected to experience. Nevertheless, I was transfixed when Sam Cooke sang about a Southern chain gang.

All day long they work so hard

Till the sun is going’ down

Workin’ on the highways and byways

And wearing, wearing a frown

You hear them moanin’ their lives away

Then you hear somebody say

That’s the sound of the men

Workin’ on the chain gang

I had heard Sam Cooke’s music before. In 1957, he had crossed over, as people in the music business liked to say, with You Send Me, a number one ballad on the Billboard charts, and again in April 1960, he had a major hit with Wonderful World. The latter was aimed squarely at the teen market, being about a boy who is not very good in school, who doesn’t know much about history, biology, or any of his other classroom subjects, but is very sure that he is in love. The message is delivered with an innocent sweetness and a lilting rhythm that was hard for listeners to put out of their minds. Chain Gang sounded similar, with a chorus that was easy to sing along with every time it came on the radio. But the images were downright astonishing, as my friends and I listened to the song and tried to figure out why it made us care.

We didn’t know the backstory, of course—how Cooke was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues, but grew up in Chicago where his family moved when he was only three. Sam was raised on the music of the Southern church, really, for most of his neighbors were refugees from the South. He began his career in a family singing group, traveling the church circuit with his preacher-father, and later with the Soul Stirrers, a gospel group that more than lived up to its name. Shouting, straining, sweat-soaked catharsis was the way Cooke biographer Peter Guralnick described the group’s singing style. But even at the peak of this gospel success, Cooke dreamed of something more. In the mid-1950s, after extended soul-searching, he decided finally to cast his lot with secular music.

By 1960, he was a twenty-nine-year-old star, with immense vocal talent and an air of likability and charm. He seemed to love every kind of music. In 1958, he was the headliner on a national tour that included white artists—the Everly Brothers, Paul Anka, George Hamilton IV—and between shows he could often be found in the back of the bus, sitting with Hamilton or the Everlys, playing Hank Williams songs on one of their guitars. Later, he would have his own country hit with the classic Tennessee Waltz, and even in 1958 he and the others on the tour sensed that they were part of something bigger—not so much a battering as simply a dissolving of the artificial walls of racial segregation.

Even those of us who merely listened on the radio felt a vague, intoxicating sense of subversion. Nor was it only the black singers who made us feel that way. In all our pretensions to adolescent cool—our three-minute transports to a whole different world as Sam Cooke sang about chain gang workers (men he had befriended, we would later learn, on one of his tours through North Carolina)—there was another singer who made us feel it even more.

Elvis Presley, of course, was white. But his background and musical tastes bore an astonishing similarity to Cooke’s. Presley was also born in Mississippi—in the town of Tupelo roughly a hundred miles from Cooke’s birthplace. A difference was that Presley’s family did not escape. They moved to Memphis, but that was still the hot and steamy South. Before that, in the latter half of the Great Depression, their lives were constricted by small-town poverty—and by a sense of shame when Elvis’s father, Vernon Presley, was sent away to prison for passing a $4 bad check. But the family was close. Elvis grew up as an only child after his twin brother, Jesse, was stillborn, and one of the things that bonded the Presleys was a deep love of music.

As with Sam Cooke, the love affair began in the church, a Pentecostal congregation not altogether different in worship style from the ones where Cooke’s father preached. The Presleys also had a family singing group, and Elvis was forever stamped by his love of old hymns. But music of any kind became a source of meaning in his life—country music, the blues, it didn’t really matter; he was surrounded by it in north Mississippi, and even more when they moved to Memphis, where Beale Street throbbed with the music of African Americans: people much like his Tupelo neighbors when his family lived on the black side of town.

During his teenage years in Memphis, Elvis played and sang wherever he could. On one fine day in 1953, he wandered down to 706 Union Avenue. There he met a man who would change his life and, in a sense, the course of American music. Sam Phillips was an Alabamian by birth. In 1950, he opened a recording studio in Memphis. He was driven by a mix of art and commerce, a desire to make and sell good records by the African American artists in the area. Soon enough, they came in a steady stream to his door—Rufus Thomas, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Junior Parker, even a group called the Prisonaires, inmates who with Phillips’s help and the backing of Tennessee Governor Frank Clement secured a day pass from the penitentiary to cut a record at Phillips’s studio.

In all this, Phillips was partly driven by a leap of moral imagination that was quite remarkable at the time. I saw—I don’t remember when, but I saw as a child—I thought to myself: suppose that I would have been born black, he told Peter Guralnick. I think I felt from the beginning the total inequity of man’s inhumanity to his brother. And it didn’t take its place with me of getting up in the pulpit and preaching. It took on the aspect with me that someday I would act on my feelings. I would show them on an individual, one-to-one basis.

His Sun Records studio became the place to fulfill that promise, and as the records he produced started hitting the charts, Phillips began to receive publicity. It may have been, in fact, an article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal that led Elvis Presley to his studio. Elvis was eighteen on his first visit, not given to the reflectiveness of Phillips when it came to the social order of the South. But in the memory of those who knew him then, there was always a certain kindness about him—even a sweetness, some people said—and nothing of cultural condescension toward African Americans or anyone else. When it came to his personal ambitions as an artist, Presley was happy to follow in the footsteps of blacks.

It took a few months before he and Phillips finally made a record. But in the summer of 1954 they went into the Sun Records studio with guitarist Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black and cut a truly remarkable version of That’s All Right, Mama, a song originally done by blues artist Arthur Big Boy Crudup. At first they were just kind of clowning around, Elvis jumping around and acting the fool, as Moore remembered it, but Phillips, a producer with an ear for originality, was certain they were onto something important. Elvis sang with such exuberance, and you could hear in his voice the black influence as well as the white, yet he sounded so utterly himself. The same was true for the B-side of the record, Blue Moon of Kentucky, a song that began in 1946 as a hillbilly waltz by Bill Monroe. The Elvis version was certainly not that, but what was it exactly?

All over Memphis and soon the South, disc jockeys were intrigued but puzzled. Was it country? Was it rhythm and blues? Or both? And if the latter, then it was something new, like the fusing of atoms, with all the implied explosive potential. Certainly, the racists saw that potential. The White Citizens Council labeled rock ’n’ roll, as the new music came to be called, a communist plot using the music of the American Negro to undermine American youth. An Alabama WCC member put it even more crudely: We’ve set up a twenty-man committee, he said, to do away with this vulgar, animalistic, nigger rock and roll bop.

The racists didn’t stand a chance. Their objections were swept aside by the power of music. In the summer of 1960, the only remaining controversy came in the grumbling by our parents—a stubborn insistence that Elvis and the other young rock ’n’ rollers couldn’t really sing. But Elvis again proved them wrong. In July, he released It’s Now or Never, which quickly became the biggest hit of his career. There was nothing raw or gritty about it, no echo of country or the blues, the starting point for his earlier music. This was an ode to Mario Lanza, the great American tenor whose records Elvis had listened to as a boy—and perhaps more directly to Enrico Caruso, whose O Sole Mio the Elvis hit copied note for note. Only the lyrics were different.

The thing that made us proud, my friends and I at age thirteen, was that Elvis pulled it off. The spine-tingling vocal crescendo—it’s now or never, my love won’t wait—demonstrated beyond doubt that Elvis was a vocal talent to be reckoned with. That same summer, Roy Orbison showed similar range and prowess with Only the Lonely, and this music we called rock ’n’ roll sprawled into every corner of our lives. Some of it crossed old barriers of race and class; the rest of it just made us feel good. But we knew it mattered in a way we were trying to understand.

ABOUT THAT SAME TIME, another singer with a bell-like voice unlike any we had heard stepped gently onto the public stage. Joan Baez released her first album in 1960, but she was already a fixture on the folk music circuit. She was born with what she knew was a gift, a singing voice bestowed upon her, she said, by forces which confound genetics, environment, race, or ambition. Perhaps because she did not create it, she knew by her teenage years that she wanted to use it for some larger purpose.

As a high school junior in Palo Alto, California, she attended a conference sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, the social action arm of the Quakers, and listened in rapt amazement to the keynote address by Dr. Martin Luther King. Everyone in the room was mesmerized, she remembered. He talked about injustice and suffering, and about fighting with the weapons of love. . . . When he finished his speech, I was on my feet, cheering and crying.

After high school she moved with her family to Boston, where she entered Boston University, but quickly dropped out. She began to sing in clubs and coffeehouses all over town, and the crowds most often were awed by her voice, so high and pure, so delicate and strong, whatever the music seemed to require. She performed barefooted, even when the weather was cold, and with her long, dark hair and Mexican skin she possessed a kind of virginal yet vaguely flirtatious beauty. When people saw her they seldom forgot her.

In 1958 Baez met Odetta Holmes, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, who performed simply under the name Odetta. She was already one of Baez’s heroes. Odetta’s songs were an artful exploration of the human heart, though much of her music was also political. Growing up in the South during the Great Depression, she had fallen in love with protest music, which was a way for desperate people to cope. They were liberation songs, Odetta remembered. You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die or insist upon your life . . . those people who made up the songs were the ones who insisted upon life.

For Baez, Odetta embodied a sense of possibility. Then in 1959 she met Pete Seeger, whom she had seen in a concert when she was still living in Palo Alto. It had been one of the turning points of her life, and as she listened to his songs it occurred to her that this was something she could do with her life, singing to people about things that mattered. That’s what Seeger had done, going back to the 1930s and ’40s when he and Woody Guthrie rambled around, sometimes together, sometimes not, singing the songs of America’s dispossessed.

As a teenager in the 1930s, Seeger had joined the Young Communist League when he saw the magnitude of suffering in the land; compassion seemed to require something radical. But soon enough he also saw Stalin’s atrocities in the Soviet Union and Hitler’s crimes in Europe. To make his own position clear he sang a song that was, in effect, a patriotic anthem on the eve of war:

Now, as I think of our great land . . . I know it ain’t perfect, but it will be someday, just give us a little time. This is the reason that I want to fight, not ’cause everything’s perfect, or everything’s right. No, it’s just the opposite: I’m fightin’ because I want a better America, and better laws, and better homes, and jobs, and schools, and no more Jim Crow, and no more rules like . . . You can’t ride on this train ’cause you’re a Negro, You can’t live here ’cause you’re a Jew, You can’t work here ’cause you’re a union man.

That mantra of patriotic dissent defined Pete Seeger as the 1950s came to an end and the ’60s began and he wrote his unforgettable anthems: If I Had a Hammer, Turn, Turn, Turn, and Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Baez soon would follow in his path, her music becoming more political. But when they met at the Newport Folk Festival on a rainy summer day in 1959, she still preferred old ballads about tragedy and death, or gospel laments about the peace found only in the world yet to come. Her listeners had no way of knowing—for she seemed so sure of herself when she sang—that the passionate sadness throbbing in her songs reflected demons of insecurity and doubt.

But her empathy, her identification with people who hurt, was palpable, and in the summer of 1960, when she was nineteen, she cut her first album for Vanguard Records. It was entitled simply Joan Baez, and it was filled with grief and lament, songs of heartache, infidelity, and even murder, some going back to the sixteenth century. For many of us, one song stood out from the rest. Some music historians say All My Trials began its life as a Bahamian lullaby; others say it was a slave song about death, the only relief that those in bondage could really imagine. Whatever the origins, as Baez sang it, it held the gentle promise of more pointed commentary yet to come.

If living were a thing that money could buy

The rich would live and the poor would die

All my trials, Lord, soon be over

I remember, sometime after the release of her album, when I first saw Baez perform in person. She entered the small auditorium from the rear, walking barefoot down the aisle—wearing, as I recall, a long peasant dress, strumming her guitar and singing Kumbaya. By the cynical end of the 1960s, that sweet and haunting Negro spiritual would be a cliché, a parody of the search for community and peace, but I remember thinking on that particular night that I had never heard anything so lovely.

MUSICIANS, IT SHOULD BE said, were not the only artists whose work foreshadowed a decade of change. There were also the authors, moved by the admonition of William Faulkner that the only thing worth writing about was the human heart in conflict with itself. They saw in the collective heart of the nation, and especially the South, an urgent state of distress that cried out powerfully for their attention. In the spring and summer of 1960, journalist John Howard Griffin would hit a raw nerve.

In April, Griffin began an astonishing six-part series in the African American magazine, Sepia. Griffin, who was white, decided to darken his skin and pass for black, testing the segregationist assumption that discrimination was based not on color, but rather on larger, deeper flaws in the collective character of African Americans. In retrospect, the arrogance of that racist belief is shocking. But in 1960, it was the majority opinion among white Southerners. As a boy growing up in Alabama, I had never met anybody who doubted it.

In his series, Journey Into Shame, which soon became an iconic book called Black Like Me, Griffin set out to shatter that assumption. I tried to establish one simple fact, he explained, which was to reveal the insanity of a situation where a man is judged by his skin color, by his philosophical ‘accident’—rather than by who he is in his humanity.

Griffin was uniquely positioned to prove that point. Born in 1920, he grew up in Dallas, sharing the genteel racism of his family. His conversion came in stages, beginning in 1935 when he journeyed to France and became a student at the prestigious Lycee Descartes in Tours. In 1939, during the Nazi occupation, he joined the French underground and helped smuggle Jewish families to safety. He learned that the Gestapo had marked him for death, and he returned to America, where in 1941 he joined the Army Air Force.

Over the next four years in the Solomon Islands, he came to admire the courage of the islanders as they fought against the Japanese. And then one night in 1945 he was blinded by the explosion of a bomb. Suddenly he could not see, and just as suddenly, he said, he knew what it was like to be the Other, to have people assume because he was blind that he was inferior in other ways as well. A man loses his sight, Griffin wrote, but let it be understood that he loses nothing else. He does not lose his intelligence, his taste, his sensitivity, his ideals, his right to respect.

Remarkably, on January 9, 1957, Griffin’s sight returned, gradually at first, but steadily, miraculously, and inexplicably. He could only understand it as God’s will, which left him with a powerful sense of obligation. In his twelve years of blindness, he had come to see the similarity between the anti-Semitism of the Nazis and the casual racism on which he was raised. Both were rooted in vanity and arrogance, and both carried a cruelty that could be deadly for people who were different from the dominant group. Most fundamentally, during this time when he could not see, the Southern obsession with skin color struck him as even more absurd.

Griffin set out boldly to expose the lie. He met with a dermatologist in New Orleans, and they agreed on a protocol of oral medication and sunlamp treatments. Five days later, on November 7, 1959, Griffin stepped into a darkened bathroom and hesitated before he turned on the lights. He had shaved his head so that his straight, Caucasian hair wouldn’t give him away, regardless of the color of his skin. But now he froze, suddenly afraid of what he would see.

I stood in the darkness before the mirror, he wrote, my hand on the light switch. I forced myself to flick it on. In the flood of light against the white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger—a fierce, bald, very dark Negro—glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me.

Was the flicker of distaste on Griffin’s face as he saw his own black visage in the mirror a reflection of his own unconscious racism? Or was it just shock, the sudden uncertainty anyone might feel upon glancing at a mirror and seeing someone else looking back? Critics have debated those questions through the years, but few have questioned the searing honesty of Griffin’s account, or the depth of his passion and empathy and hurt. In the first installment of his Sepia series, he ends with a passage about the n-word. In retrospect, he had heard it frequently enough when he was white, but now that he wasn’t—at least temporarily—he was astonished and stung by the cruel and casual frequency of its usage.

Hey, nigger, you can’t go in. Hey, nigger, you can’t sit there. We don’t serve niggers.

Throughout his racial experiment nearly everything grew steadily worse, especially after he left New Orleans and set out for Alabama and Mississippi. He did discover moments of kindness in the company of other African Americans. Once in Mississippi, he found himself on a lonely highway and a black man stopped to give him a ride, taking him home to spend the night when he discovered that Griffin had no place to stay. Always, it seemed, there were people—almost all of them black—who were willing to give him directions or advice, offer him food, or help him find shelter. But time and time again he was startled by the gratuitous cruelty he encountered from whites—a bus driver in Mississippi who allowed his white passengers, but not the blacks, to disembark at a rest stop to use the bathroom; a white man in Alabama who gave him a ride and warned against stirring racial unrest.

Do you know what we do to troublemakers down here?

No, sir.

We either ship them off to the pen or kill them.

Griffin continued:

He spoke in a tone that sickened me, casual, merciless. I looked at him. His decent blue eyes turned yellow. I knew that nothing could touch him to have mercy once he decided a Negro should be taught a lesson. The immensity of it terrified me. But it caught him up like a lust now. He entertained it, his voice unctuous with pleasure and cruelty. The highway stretched deserted through the swamp forests. He nodded toward the solid wall of brush flying past our windows.

You can kill a nigger and toss him into that swamp and no one’ll ever know what happened to him.

John Howard Griffin lasted exactly five weeks as a black man. He couldn’t take it anymore. My heart sickened, he wrote, at the thought of any more hate.

Even before the Sepia series began in April 1960, the national media got wind of the story; everybody wanted to hear Griffin tell it—a white man turning himself black, discovering life on the other side. The sheer improbability of it, the remarkable audacity, prompted interview requests from Time and a long list of radio and television hosts, from Mike Wallace to Dave Garroway. Griffin accommodated them all. He thought the story needed to be told.

After the television shows, and even more as his series ran in Sepia, mail flooded his home in Texas—more than 6,000 letters between April and June. Most were favorable, including many from white Southerners praising his honesty. But on April 2, he was hanged in effigy in Mansfield, Texas, the town where he lived, and telephone calls and encounters on the streets carried threats of death, castration, or both. Most of the hatred came from the South. That was, after all, where his story was focused—both in Sepia and in Black Like Me, the book that followed to even greater acclaim.

Griffin later thought he had made a mistake, for the ugliness he found in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana could just as easily have been uncovered in New York, Illinois, or California. He thought he should have written that story as well. But his was at least a start, part of a larger, more terrible truth that the country, at last, might have to face.

AS THE ACCOLADES CAME and controversy swirled around Griffin, Harper Lee waited impatiently for the publication of her novel. She had no idea, of course, that To Kill a Mockingbird would become one of the most beloved and bestselling books of all time. But she did know that she had worked hard on it. As a writer she was sure of her voice, her ability to tell the story through the eyes of Scout Finch, an eight-year-old girl. It was a remarkable double narrator effect: the innocence of child, the whispered wisdom of a woman looking back. But the shape and structure of the novel gave her fits, and she spent more time than she cared to remember holed up by herself in a cold water flat in New York City, fighting the pages, trying desperately to make the pieces fit.

Once in a fit of frustration she threw the manuscript out the window and watched it blow through the Manhattan snow. Fortunately she was able to gather herself and hurry outside, retrieving the pages before it was too late.

The story she knew she had to tell was one that had long been swirling in her mind. It began with the image of an Alabama town—a place she thought that others might like even if they knew its dark underside. In the 1930s she had been a child in such a place, when racial injustice was a hard-edged thing, filled with lynchings and black men punished for things they never did, and only the strongest, most honorable white people were able to muster the strength to oppose it.

In the character of Atticus Finch, her iconic and archetypical protagonist, Harper Lee created for the millions who bought her book a lonely white Southerner who was worthy of respect. In this, her timing could not have been better. When her novel was published on July 11, 1960, the sit-in movement and the backlash against it were sweeping through the South, and many people feared—quite correctly—that the unleashed tension would only get worse.

On some level, the book itself may have added to that tension. It was by its very existence an act of protest, wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Diane McWhorter. An injustice against an innocent black man lay at its heart—a message many Southerners did not want to hear. But so many of us were drawn to the other side of the story, for here was Atticus Finch, a small-town lawyer willing to stand for what he knew was right. He defended Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of rape, and though he ultimately failed in that defense, his eloquence and calm amid all the ugly tensions of his time offered real-life hope for ours.

Atticus was not an unfamiliar character. Many of us knew somebody like him, or people at least who bore some resemblance, and as America struggled with its original sin, this figure from the pages of a splendid novel helped us believe we might make it through.

3

JFK

There was one other writer who helped put a stamp on the new decade, though not in a way that she would have dreamed. Lillian Smith was working that year on a new edition of Killers of the Dream, a groundbreaking book published in 1949. As a white woman living in the mountains of Georgia in the years just after World War II, Smith produced a work of nonfiction so astonishing in its bravery that it sent shock waves throughout the South. She believed—and this is not overstating the case—that the absurdities of racial segregation had crippled her region’s ability to think.

In rhythmic, elegant prose, Smith wrote, In this South I lived as a child, and it is of that my story is made . . . Out of the intricate weaving of unnumbered threads, I shall pick out a few strands that have to do with what we call color and race . . . and sex . . . and love . . . and dreams of the Good and the killers of dreams.

She began specifically with the story of a day when she was a girl and there were hushed and urgent conversations at her house. Neighbors reported that on the colored side of town (that was the term they used) a little white girl was living with Negroes. This could not be allowed. So the authorities were summoned, arrangements were made, and soon the little girl—over the desperate protests of her black foster family—was brought to live with the Smiths.

For a while the arrangement worked out well. Lillian was delighted with her new sweet-tempered younger sister as they played with dolls and roamed the fields near the family farm. But then one day there were more hushed whispers. All afternoon, Smith wrote, the ladies went in and out of our house talking to Mother in tones too low for children to hear. As they passed us at play, they looked at Jamie and quickly looked away, though a few stopped and stared at her as if they could not tear their eyes from her face.

What the ladies of the community had learned was that Jamie, despite her white skin, was the orphaned child of Negro parents. She was returned immediately to the foster family from which she was taken, and Lillian was sternly instructed by her mother: Don’t ever ask me about this again. Smith wrote,

As I grew older, and more experiences collected around that faithless time, as memories of older, more profound hurts crept closer, drawn to that night as if by a magnet, I began to know that people who talked of love and children did not mean it. That is a hard thing for a child to learn. I still admired my parents, there was so much that was strong and vital and sane and good about them and I never forgot this . . . Yet in my heart they were under suspicion. . . . I was shamed by their failure and frightened, for I felt they were no longer as powerful as I had thought. There was something Out There that was stronger than they and I could not bear to believe it. . . .

The thing out there was segregation, a tangled knot of arrogance, insecurity, and fear that produced a society of moral cripples—people who professed to believe in democracy, while they practiced the cruelties of white supremacy. Thus were minds torn loose from their moorings and moral values severed from the truth.

This was Smith’s devastating critique, and as she worked to update it in 1960, taking into account the recent surge of civil rights protests, she was also battling breast cancer. On May 4, two friends in Atlanta, Dr. Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta, were driving her to Emory University Hospital for one of her treatments when a white policeman noticed this strange racial grouping and pulled them over. He discovered that King, despite having moved from Montgomery to Atlanta, still had an Alabama driver’s license. For this misdemeanor, King received a one-year suspended prison sentence, and the following fall, when he was arrested during an Atlanta sit-in, the judge revoked the suspension and ordered King to spend four

Reviews for A Hard Rain

[susan0316 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The 60s were the defining years of my life. In 1961, I turned 13 so all of my formative teenager were lived during this tumultuous decade. When I think back on those years and some of the things that were accomplished, I wonder if I am remembering it correctly. Frye Gaillard's new book was a reminder for me of all that went on in those years. Some people will view A HARD RAIN as a history book, I view it as a way to remember.A HARD RAIN is a large book divided up by years in the 60s and the significant events of each year. It combines politics, the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, the Vietnam protests, the civil rights movement, the women's movement and so much more. Plus it recognizes the strong role that music played in this decade - Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Motown so many others. Reading this book brought back so many memories to me - both happy and sad. This is a book that will stay on my bookshelves as reference to dig down deeper into some of my fading memories.The author says it best: “There are many different ways to remember the sixties,” Gaillard writes, “and this is mine. There was in these years the sense of a steady unfolding of time, as if history were on a forced march, and the changes spread to every corner of our lives. As future generations debate the meaning of the decade, I hope to offer a sense of how it felt to have lived it. A Hard Rain is one writer’s reconstruction and remembrance of a transcendent era ― one that, for better or worse, lives with us still.”Thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book to read and review. All opinions are my own.