Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (19 page)

The huge success of the Bond series quickly influenced the television programs that young viewers found attractive. One of the most popular Bond spinoffs was NBC's
Man from U.N.C.L.E
., which pitted a UN-like force of agents against a criminal outlaw conspiracy called Thrush. The two top U.N.C.L.E. agents are an American and a citizen of Soviet
Georgia, played by David McCallum, who became the more popular character to young viewers. The spy mania of the mid-sixties also induced NBC to launch the groundbreaking
I Spy
, which paired a white agent, played by Robert Culp, and an African-American operative, played by Bill Cosby, in a series of global adventures largely filmed on location. Cosby became the first black star of a prime-time dramatic series, and the humorous yet socially equal bonding between the two characters became a hopeful sign of changing racial attitudes.

Aside from the action and adventure of numerous spy series, a combination of fantasy, comedy-horror, and science fiction became the subject of numerous cafeteria and after-school conversations. A quintet of comedies featuring comic relations between witches, aliens, genies, and more normal humans attracted even the youngest children.
The Addams Family, The Munsters, Bewitched, My Favorite Martian
, and
I Dream of Jeannie
took lighthearted and occasionally satiric views of situations that in earlier eras had produced terror. Samantha Stevens turned the witch as hag into a glamorous, caring housewife while Tim O'Hara's Martian “Uncle Martin” turned the alien invader persona into a social-life counselor with extraordinary but often comic powers.

The more serious side of this genre emerged with the premiere of
Star Trek
in September 1966, and offered young viewers the tantalizing prospect of an interracial, even interspecies, crew and a basically optimistic view of the world that Boomer descendants would inherit. Most of the crew of the
USS Enterprise
seemed only slightly older than the Boomer viewers, and the plots frequently pitted the impetuous, youthful energy of Captain Kirk against the calm,
logical wisdom of Mr. Spock, producing different yet complementary role models. Even young children thrilling to the threats posed by a Salt Creature or Klingon could not help but gain a sense that living in a rapidly changing yet essentially tolerant society was not an unfavorable experience for their own future.

The music, film, and television of the mid-sixties each, in their own way, contributed to a youth culture that challenged Boomers to believe change was good and at least some of the realities of the early postwar world might be challenged. The Great Society offered affluence, increasing educational opportunity, and hope for a more equitable society as Boomers approached adulthood. Yet the Johnson administration's policies in Southeast Asia, the increasingly impersonal and overcrowded atmosphere of the American higher education system, and an emerging generational confrontation over the definition of acceptable personal behavior were all encouraging a fortunate young generation to question the system its elders had constructed.

ONLY DAYS
before the United States entered the decade that was to be the Soaring Sixties, Clark Kerr, president of the burgeoning University of California, appraised the students who would be attending college over the next decade: “The employers will love them. They aren't going to press many grievances. They are going to be easy to handle. There aren't going to be any riots.” Three thousand miles to the east, as Kerr offered his prediction, four of these “easy to handle” students were preparing the opening shot of the sixties confrontation between students and the American establishment. Ezell Blair, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond were freshmen at North Carolina A&T, an all-black college in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were attending school in a community with relatively good educational facilities for minority pupils and were welcome to spend their money in the city's large Woolworth's department store. But while white customers could relax from their shopping by enjoying a snack or meal at the store's
lunch counter, this foursome and other members of their race were excluded from that service. On February 1, 1960, the students left campus, headed downtown, sat down at the counter, and ordered coffee. As an astonished policeman paced behind them with no clue how to react, a few white customers cursed the students while others simply shrugged and continued shopping. A few white women even encouraged them, though the students returned to campus without their coffee. Back at school, everyone from the college dean to the student body treated them as heroes. The president of the college asked them why they had even wanted service at a counter with a reputation for tasteless food. The next day more than a dozen classmates joined them at the counter; two days later the first white student participated in the great lunch-counter sit-in while the protest idea spread outward to Durham and Winston-Salem. By Valentine's Day college students in communities from Florida to Tennessee were crowding segregated department store lunch counters amid growing national media attention.

One of the largest and best-organized lunch-counter sitins emerged in Nashville and included Fisk University student and later civil rights leader and legislator John Lewis. As Lewis noted, “We had on that first day over five hundred students in front of Fisk University chapel to be transported downtown to the First Baptist Church, to be organized into small groups to go down to sit in at the lunch counters.

“We went into the five-and-tens, Woolworth's, Kresge's, and McClellan's, because these stores were known all across the South and for the most part all across the country. We took our seats in a very orderly, peaceful fashion. The students were dressed like they were on their way to church or going to a big social affair. They had their books, and we
stayed there at the lunch counter, studying and preparing our homework, because we were denied service. The managers ordered that the lunch counters be closed, that the restaurants be closed, and we'd just sit there, all day long.”

Only a few weeks after the beginning of the 1960s, students at North Carolina A&T sat in at a Woolworth's lunch counter and demonstrated the impact of nonviolent protest against the Establishment.
(Jack Moebes/CORBIS)

By mid-April seventy-eight cities in Southern and border states had become part of the sit-in movement. Fifty thousand black students and white sympathizers had participated, enduring anything from sheer boredom to vicious attacks by largely young, white townspeople. Two thousand protesters, including Lewis, were arrested as Northern counterparts threw up picket lines around stores operated by chains that were discriminating in the South. Then, as protesters confronted Nashville mayor Ben West on the steps of city hall, he admitted that discrimination at lunch
counters was wrong, and six Nashville counters began serving minority customers in response.

Those first sit-ins of the sixties were organized chiefly by college students who were among the older siblings of the postwar generation. But Boomers would soon be involved in the civil rights movement, and a few of them would not even live to see college. The success of the lunch-counter sit-ins encouraged Martin Luther King to utilize nonviolent protest to end the segregation of public facilities in those parts of the Deep South where the lunch-counter campaign had made little or no impact. In 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, became the battleground in a Children's Crusade pitting Public Safety Director Eugene “Bull” Connor, and his attack dogs and fire hoses, against Boomer teens and children as young as six.

Birmingham in 1963 was one of the most segregated cities in America with “Colored” signs over water fountains, no black police or firefighters, and a chief of public safety who had already orchestrated brutal attacks on so-called Freedom Riders attempting to integrate transportation facilities. Early in the year the jails were filling with adult demonstrators, including Dr. King, in a community that was running out of money to pay their bail. Reverend James Bevel, a veteran of the Nashville sit-ins, suggested massing huge numbers of high school students who could put pressure on the city with less of an economic threat to families if they were arrested as their parents would still be on the job. As Bevel noted, “We started organizing the prom queens of the high school, the basketball stars, the football stars, to get the influence and power leaders involved. They, in turn, got all the other students involved. The students had a community they'd been in since elementary school, so they had bonded
quite well. So if one would go to jail, that had a direct effect upon another because they were classmates.”

While civil rights demonstrations were planned as peaceful protests, official response was often violent. Television images of vicious dogs attacking protesters, including children, greatly increased white sympathy for civil rights goals.
(Library of Congress)

These Boomer teens were given workshops to help them overcome the fear of Bull Connor's canine assault force and the possibility of jail life. Then they began recruiting their elementary-school-age siblings and neighbors, arguing that “Six days in Jefferson County Jail is more educational than six months in our segregated Birmingham schools.” May 2, 1963, was dubbed D-Day. As 959 six- to eight-year-old children walked out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Connor unleashed the dogs and fire hoses. Some of the firefighters used tripod-mounted water cannons designed to fight fires at long range with the power to knock bricks out of a wall from a hundred feet away. As small children rolled down
the street under the force of this aquatic artillery, national television cameras recorded the stunning violence for evening news programs. The next day another thousand children were mobilized in the church, and Connor responded with even more attack dogs and fire hoses powerful enough to rip the bark off trees. By nightfall, city jails were filled with nearly two thousand children, and much of the nation watched in disgust as Bull Connor ensured his place in the rogues' gallery of American folklore.

These images of unprovoked and vicious assaults on children apparently sickened President Kennedy too. His staff members organized a temporary truce in which Birmingham stores would be desegregated in exchange for a halt to the protest marches. But hard-core segregationists set off a bombing campaign that included extensive damage to the motel in which Martin Luther King was staying. Then, on September 15, 1963, eighteen days after the March on Washington, the bombers struck again. On a peaceful Sunday the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was nearly demolished by a powerful explosion. Four young girls, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Cynthia Wesley, had just finished a Sunday school lesson and were in the basement changing into their choir robes. Fifteen sticks of explosives ripped through the room killing the girls, aged eleven to fourteen, and injuring twenty others as an Alabama Klan member nicknamed Dynamite Bob Chambliss watched his handiwork snuff out the young lives. The protests begun by four young students in North Carolina three years earlier had now resulted in the first child martyrs of the 1960s civil rights campaign.