Bob Dylan & Joan Baez: 1963 March on Washington

Source:Reuters– Joan Baez and Bob Dylan performing at the 1963 March On Washington.
“Singers Joan Baez and Bob Dylan perform together during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in this August 28, 1963 file photo shot by U.S. Information Agency photographer Rowland Scherman and provided to Reuters by the U.S. National Archives in Washington on August 21, 2013. In the coming week, Washington will play host to an array of events marking the 50th anniversary of the march and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech.
REUTERS/Rowland Scherman/U.S. Information Agency/U.S. National Archives (UNITED STATES – Tags: POLITICS ANNIVERSARY ENTERTAINMENT) ATTENTION EDITORS – THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS.THIS PICTURE IS DISTRIBUTED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED BY REUTERS, AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS”

From Reuters

“Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Freedom Singers, and Len Chandler performing ‘Eyes On The Prize’ at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28th 1963. The song is a well-known folk song largely associated with the Civil Rights Movement.

Source is straight from the archives, albeit covered with a logo and timestamps.”

Source:History In Motion– Eyes On The Prize performed by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, and others.

From History In Motion

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez 1963 March on Washington. Acesse:Laura Chiatti.”

Source:An Blog– 1963 March On Washington.

From An Blog

Eyes On The Prize is the perfect song I believe to close out the 1963 March On Washington, because it told the American Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King and his followers not to lose focus and that there’s still much work to do.

Keep in mind, this is in the late summer of 1963 in Washington, when it’s still hot and humid around there and a few months before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and just a couple months after President Kennedy publicly endorsed the civil rights legislation that was in Congress.

The 1964 Civil Rights Law hadn’t even been passed yet, that didn’t happen to the summer of the 1964. Which meant African-Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities could still be denied their constitutional rights and access to American society simply because of their race or ethnicity.

I think what the summer of 1963 is about with the March On Washington sort of being the Super Bowl of that summer (even though the Super Bowl was 4 years away) is that to paraphrase Bob Dylan: times were a changin. I believe the 1950s finally ended in the summer of 63 culturally and a lot of younger Americans recognized the new America where America would be for everyone. Not just for Anglo-Saxon males.

The civil rights movement was part of the new America, but Hippies come into force politically and culturally in 1965 with so many Americans now feeling the freedom to be themselves and not have to live and think just like their parents and grandparents.

You can also se this post on Blogger.

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Revolution Volume I: The 1960s Counter Culture & Rise of The New Left

Source:Amazon– Roger Kimball’s book.

Source:The Daily Press

“In The Long March, Roger Kimball, the author of Tenured Radicals, shows how the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s and ’70s took hold in America, lodging in our hearts and minds, and affecting our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. Believing that this dramatic change “cannot be understood apart from the seductive personalities who articulated its goals,” he intersperses his argument with incisive…

From Amazon

“I’m into the study of revolutions, not the coopting of revolutionary rhetoric to sell capitalist merch. I’ve cut together clips of 1960s radicals discussing the politics of their time to give young people a sense of the intense revolutionary fervor of that era. Americans today have been presented with a flattened out, cliche image of 60s radicalism and have lost any sense of just how tumultuous that period was. This is what America looks like when it’s actually working. I’ll be tracing the history of revolutionary and countercultural movements in America from the 60s to the 90s in an ongoing series of youtube clips. (I added on the Church of the SubGenius at the end but that comes much later.)”

Source:Roger Dolittle– Dr. Martin L. King speaking at the 1963 March On Washington. Perhaps the best speech ever given in American history.

From Roger Dolittle

I believe the best way to look at the New-Left political movement and Students For a Democratic Society, which is definitely part of that movement, is to look at the Irish nationalist movement in Northern Ireland, Britain and it’s relationship with the Irish Republican Army. Or the Palestinian nationalist movement in Palestine and its relationship with Palestine and Israel. SDS aren’t Nationalists, but they were the military wing of their political movement.

Source:Students For a Democratic Society– protesting the Vietnam War.

Radicalism is not new to America, we were founded thanks to a revolution, a revolutionary war with the United Kingdom. And I believe every generation at least in the 20th Century is different with different values from the previous generation, at least when they’re young and then perhaps moderate and become part of mainstream society as they get older and become more experienced. So it’s not radicalism that’s new to America, but perhaps each generation as their own culture revolutionary movements.

I think what’s different from the 1960s with young Baby Boomers and perhaps Silent Generation babies that were perhaps seen as the mentors and role models of the Baby Boomer Hippies and radicals, is socialism and communism and the beliefs that those things aren’t actually wrong and bad and that the Cold War, especially in Vietnam and America’s involvement there was wrong.

I believe what the young radicals in America believed was that the people who were wrong, were the American establishment which was made of Conservatives and Progressives who were seen as trying to push American liberal democracy and capitalism onto the rest of the world, especially in the third world like in Asia and Latin America.

What these young folks believed that the people who were wrong were the people who were running America and they wanted a change. And even a revolutionary change in America as far as how it was governed. And decided to speak out and organize and even use violent means to accomplish their political goals.

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Raymond Fisher: ‘Martin Luther King and Malcolm X Debate’

Source:Raymond Fisher– Minister Malcolm X, I believe being interviewed at Berkeley, California in the 1960s.

Source:The Daily Press

“American history as it’s usually taught likes to focus on rivalries, and there are many involving big personalities and major historical stakes. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. These figures are set up to represent the “both sides” we expect of every political question. While the issues are oversimplified (there are always more than two sides and politics isn’t a sport) the figures in question genuinely represented very different perspectives on power and progress.

When it comes to the history of the Civil Rights movement, we are given another such rivalry, between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Their ideas and influence are pitted against each other as though they had shared a debate stage. In fact, the two leaders met only once, during Senate debates on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “King was stepping out of a news conference,” writes DeNeen L. Brown at The Washington Post, when Malcolm X, dressed in an elegant black overcoat and wearing his signature horn-rimmed glasses, greeted him.”

From Open Culture

“Martin Luther King and Malcolm X Debate”

Source:Raymond Fisher– Nation of Islam Minister Malcolm X, at the University of California Berkeley, in 1963.

From Raymond Fisher 

This was the ultimate debate (that never happened in person between Reverend King and Minister Malcolm X) as it related to the civil rights movement and perhaps generally as well, because it involved the two most effective and intelligent spokespeople when it came to civil rights and equal rights. And two of the most effective spokespeople when it came to individual freedom in general.

Before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and to a certain extent after that, African-Americans didn’t have the same freedom as Caucasian-Americans. Even though they had the same constitutional rights under law as every other American in the country.

African-Americans simply weren’t getting their constitutional rights enforced. Which is exactly what Dr. Martin King and Minister Malcolm X were trying to accomplish. They wanted African-Americans to have the same freedom as any other American in the country, they just had two different approaches.

The MLK approach was to show the country that they were freedom fighters fighting for freedom, but they weren’t trying to destroy the country. Just the system that held them down and we’re going to accomplish it by exercising their constitutional rights of Freedom of Speech and Assembly.

Malcolm X’s approach was different, that the way to destroy the system, was by any means necessary, even if that means violence. That what they were fighting for which was their own freedom just as the Caucasian community had, should already be there’s. And that the racists should just get-out-of-the-way, or they’ll be run over. That there wasn’t any negotiation, because African-Americans already had the freedom under law and under the Constitution that every other community had in America. Which meant that racist Southern Anglo-Saxon bigots and other racist Caucasians, should either step aside, or they’ll be forcefully removed by the African-American community.

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Bob Parker: CBS News- 1968: A Year That Changed America

Source:Bob Parker– from CBS News’s 1978 documentary about the year 1968.

Source:The Daily Press

“1968 A Year that Changed America with Harry Reasoner. A look back on the year 1968, produced by CBS News in 1978.”

From Bob Parker

“Time Magazine January 11 1988 1968 The Year That Shaped a Generation ”

Source:Amazon– TIME Magazine’s cover about the year 1968.

From Amazon

I think one thing that separates America and makes us stronger than anyone else is that we can go through a year like 1968 and get through it and survive it and still remain one country. Unlike other countries that tend to go through such division between the people and their government and overall establishment of the country in one year and you see them come apart. With the government falling and perhaps even leading to some type of civil war. Egypt comes to mind pretty fast and what is going on in Syria and Venezuela right now are other good examples.

Having said all of that, it’s hard to find anything good about 1968 other than maybe the music and the fact that we started to get along better as far as race relations. Where racism and other types of bigotry started to really go out of style. And bigots were left to hide their bigotry or pay serious prices for it. But other than that 1968 was one big disaster after another. A year full of violence with murders and assassinations, the President of the United States deciding not to even bother running for reelection because there were so many people who literally hated him in both parties.

And that is just about the domestic scene in America, but then you go to the Vietnam War itself with Americans finally figuring out that we are not just losing the war, but it is probably lost. And we started seeing all of those dead American soldiers coming home from it.

I guess one good thing about 1968 is that Americans finally woke up and figured out that their government not only doesn’t always tell the truth, but they even lie to their people. The Johnson Administration saying that they were making progress in Vietnam when they knew the opposite was true and that Communist Vietnam was getting stronger.

1968 represents the 1960s as well as it could possibly be. A year of revolution, protest, violence, people coming together from multiple races to be part of the same movement. Where millions of Americans became free to be themselves and no long feel like they had to live a certain way of life in order to fit in or even be good people.

1968 was a shakeup of the entire United States and perhaps was something that the country needed. Even with all the violence and the lost of lives in that decade so Americans would know about the problems in the country, but also what could be done about them. And what also makes us great as a country which is our freedom and diversity.

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