The Sixties Movement, 1960-1963 - Gary Luhmann - Bog

Time has come today. JFK speaks to a nation stuck in Fifties' conformity, let's get America moving again. JFK's charisma sparks a youth movement in the image of his personal flair. For Claire it's a deeply Southern, religious fervor, for Harlan it's a new union of youth, for Jody it's black with black in Mississippi, and for Joshua it's a call to cease nuclear tests. Come together in Ann Arbor and Madison, Atlanta and Nashville, Berkeley and San Fran to protest their parent's world for whom prosperity was enough. Sit-in Woolworth's to take a stand against a hundred years of racial separation. Come together on a freedom ride to test the law of the land. Come together north and south to create a new culture of black and white, male and female, youth and JFK to rock the boundaries of an older generation. Time has come today. Let youth have their say. Write the Student Manifesto, as statement of what youth wants and what's inimical to their dreams. Say it loudly to all the world listening, we can change the world. If not churches, unions, community, and committed citizenry, then a student movement which ties its expansion to solving problems in this world. Come together on sit-ins and freedom rides. Come together to protest racism in Albany, Georgia. Come together to force the entry of James Meridith into U of Mississippi. Come together to protest George Wallace who stands in the schoolhouse door. Call a stop to police dogs, fire hoses, and Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama. Adults see racism on TV and they now know what's going on, not east of the Iron Curtain but in our own southern cities. Be young and idealistic again. Come a more committed citizenry to march on Washington DC for civil rights and jobs for one and all. See the many, they are us. The answer blows in the wind. Hear the oratory of Dr. King as he tells us his dream of black and white, north and south, old and young, all together as God's children. Yet even as hope soars with late summer dreams, the