Diane McWhorter
MY FELLOW sixth-graders and I were changing into our gym suits at the Brooke Hill School for Girls in Birmingham, Ala., when it was announced that the president had been shot. Claps and cheers rang out. I didn't join in because I was standing next to my best friend, Caroline McCarley, a big Kennedy fan and the lone Democrat in the class. (She is running John Edwards's presidential campaign in New Hampshire.) A bit later, an older student told us that the president had died. At least no one applauded then, in contrast to the rejoicing among the rest of the city's white schoolchildren.
I was having my birthday party that Friday night. My mother decided not to cancel it -- the freezer had been stocked with frozen waffles and link sausages for breakfast. That slumber party turned into a clandestine wake, an opportunity to express illicit grief out from under the adults who had brainwashed us to be little Kennedy haters. (My visceral dislike of him had for some reason focused on his frisky hair.) Way into the early morning hours, we held seances to try to bring back our dead president.
With my game face on for the coming week of televised mourning, I asked my father why we hated Kennedy. Bitterly, he explained that the president had failed to provide "air cover" for the Bay of Pigs invasion. But I knew it really had something to do with Martin Luther King Jr.'s mass demonstrations of that spring, when our city officials had fought back child freedom marchers with firehoses and police dogs. What Kennedy, with typical understatement, called those "events of Birmingham" had led him to introduce the segregation-ending bill then languishing in Congress -- ultimately his gleaming legacy, the Civil Rights Act of 1964.The assassination was the second of the apocalypses that would assure its passage. On a Sunday morning two months earlier, Klansmen had bombed Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, though I have no recollection of where I was when I heard that four girls had died in the blast. They were black, and my hometown was, for a short time longer, the Johannesburg of America.
Diane McWhorter is author of the Pulitzer Prize winning "Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of The Civil Rights Revolution."
