https://archive.md/HAPSG
"My almost pathological obsession with what historians now call “the Long
Sixties” — especially the years between JFK’s assassination in 1963 and Richard
Nixon’s Watergate downfall in 1974 — includes way too much time still listening
to the jangly pop anthems that blared in mono from WABC on an AM car radio back
when I was in middle school.
More than a half-century later, now coming from something called Pandora and a
magical device in my jeans pocket, I so often hear the hidden messages of hope
and, yes, naivety buried behind layers of power chords and a Farfisa organ like
some archeological dig.
One song that’s become a soulmate to my personal AI algorithm is Three Dog
Night’s 1972 No. 1 remake of “Black and White” — a 3-minute-and-24-second
window into what it felt like to be a 13-year-old in a moment that was supposed
to last forever until it didn’t. The song was actually written in the 1950s
(lyrics by actor Alan Arkin’s father, David, sung first by Pete Seeger) to
celebrate a nation that was finally overcoming its grim history of racial
segregation in the classroom.
“A child is Black/A child is white/Together they learn to read and write,” is
how the Three Dog Night version begins, but the line that really gets me when I
hear it nearly 53 years later is when they sing, “And now a child can
understand/That this is the law of all the land.”
By 1972, that line celebrated not only the Supreme Court’s landmark
Brown v.
Board of Education ruling — the inspiration for the original Seeger version —
but the string of remarkable mid-1960s victories by the then-slain Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. and so many other activists that had also made the 1964
Civil Rights Act, the 1965
Voting Rights Act, and federal affirmative
action the law of all the land.
The change was real — a surge in Black elected officials, even in the former
Jim Crow South, and in college enrollment for African Americans — and, for my
generational bulge of boomers born from 1946 to 1964, the backbone of a
narrative that we were the children of progress, born into the years when
America finally woke up."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
