I HAVE A DREAM

Martin Luther King

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

~ Bob Dylan

I remember the long hot summers of my childhood spent in Northern California. Though memories dim as we grow older some sights, sounds and scents remain hauntingly fresh. Moments which changed not only your life, but the world. Few would disagree that 1963 was one of those years.

My family moved a lot but stayed in the same town. It was so hot the tarmac would melt and stick to your bare feet. Cars had no air conditioning and the seats burnt your legs if you were wearing shorts. I had a beach towel I would sit on. The outside world had not yet touched me. I was fascinated by the dark purplish red grapes on the vine at my Grandmother’s house, covered in wasps so dazzlingly bright they looked like moving jewels of black onyx and fiery amber. I was beginning to understand that our family were poor and that this limited my opportunities. My Mother made my clothes, they looked old fashioned and second hand. I dressed like a little girl and stood out against the worldly wise more mature girls and boys at the mixed sex predominantly black school. I was not alone in being poor, but I was rare on two counts, I was a white girl and my parents had married and were still married. Family life was fractured or non existent in our neighbourhood where we rented a small home.  By 1963 music had already begun to weave a soundtrack to my life but it was all home grown, The Beatles and the British Invasion was not to happen until 1964.  Cultures mixed, daring black boys taught white girls to dance, and Mexican and Puerto Rican girls taught us to speak Spanish and put on makeup. Their brothers took us for rides in their fantastic 1950s cars which had cost them a lot of labour and few months wages.

 

The Supremes circa 1963

 

We all tried to imitate our big sisters who wore tight shift dresses, stiletto heels and beehive hairdos. We coveted our older siblings clothes and record collections. My little mind struggled to keep up with history as it was being made. The tension in the air was constant, everything was changing. We were full of promise and Hope. We could dance to our emotions, but we did not know how to put it into words.

Bob Dylan and  Joan Baez
during the  'March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom' August 28, 1963

But some people did. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.



From ‘This Is the Day: The March on Washington’ by Photographer Leonard Freed



Today is the 50^th anniversary of  Aug. 28, 1963, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led the Jobs and Freedom March on Washington, at which he delivered his “I Have a Dream” civil rights speech at the base of the Lincoln Memorial.

 

Real signs of the 60s

I am certain that those who did not live in those times can never really understand what segregation was like and how just being seen with a black friend caused you to be an outcast from both black and white people. Even if you were a child. My best friend Cynthia was half black, her Mother a single white woman, her Father a black jazz musician. They had trouble finding a house to rent, landlords showed their disapproval by refusing to let to them. Cynthia and I had a lot of interests in common. I never fitted in either and always felt as if I were just passing through. I knew I was going somewhere but had no idea where, or when.

 

 

 

Her Mother encouraged us to read, learn about politics, attend concerts and poetry readings. She was exotic, she had long blonde flowing hair, wore lots of jewellery and African printed kaftans and sandals. Their life was very different to mine and I felt I belonged with them, that they were free of all the expectations and shackles most people faced. She was the one who first read Jack Kerouac to me, played Dylan, (and Woody Guthrie) and took us to folk festivals in that long hot summer.

She marched in protest marches and attended political rallies. We held hands and wept when we listened to Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. None of us could know what the future held or how prophetic his words were, and yet we knew that we were watching history unfold which would shape the world for decades to come. It was exciting and a little scary.

 

photo by Brant Ward 'Summer of Love'

We had a few summers together. Although the death of JFK was shocking it also spurred us on. We were interested in politics and we vowed to study law. We believed that we could make a difference - that our generation would change the world. Her Mother drove us to the airport to meet Jim Morrison when the Doors came to town. We were barely in our teens and yet felt terribly grown up wearing our Nehru collared pantsuits with Indian braid on them. The summer of 1967 is forever remembered as The Summer of Love but this was a day, a week, an idea. It was a swansong, riots had erupted as early as 65 and unrest continued.

 

 

 

 

In April 1968 we lost Martin and by June Bobby Kennedy was gone too. I think my family moved again late that June. My last memory of Cynthia is the day news broke about Bobby Kennedy.  We sat huddled together half the night with the lights off and a hundred candles burning while we played Dylan. They were wrapped in grief, but I was already looking for leaving.

 

 

My family moved far away to a more affluent neighbourhood so that I could attend a better school and we lost touch. No mobiles, emails or facebook in those days. No internet. A decade later when I left San Francisco for Europe and had to sort my belongings I found the Dylan album they had given me all those years ago. By then my life had for sometime been more influenced by European events than local and my soundtrack was British bands, The Animals, Yardbirds, Who, Stones, Led Zeppelin, moving on to the so called 'new wave' including The Clash and The Jam. I knew I was leaving never to return and I had one last romance with California in the summer that The Eagles brought out Hotel California which seemed for me to capture that indescribable loss of innocence that occurs as if summer has forever ended.

I was no longer the innocent wide eyed child who looked and listened in wonder. I knew that Summer had gone.

And yet a fire had been lit that will burn forever.

 

 

Thank you to the Rev Martin Luther King and to Cynthia and her Mother, wherever they are today. I hope their lives were filled with Joy and Freedom.

LINKS:

 

Read More about 1963 HERE:

 

And HERE:

 

And HERE: