During a television interview broadcast in March 1964, Malcolm X famously said “If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even begun to pull the knife out, much less heal the wound. …They won’t even admit the knife is there.” [Read more…] about Civil Rights Leaders and RFK Meet in NYC, 1963
John F. Kennedy
Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed American Civil Rights
The year 1963 opened with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and ended with America in a state of mourning. The months that followed brought waves of racial terror, assassinations, mass protest, and police repression that shocked the world, inspired radicals and reformers, and forced the hands of moderate legislators.
The nation was determined to imagine a new way forward. In a new book Peniel Joseph shows how the upheavals of 1963 planted the seeds for watershed civil rights legislation and renewed hope in the still unfulfilled promise and possibility of freedom. [Read more…] about Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed American Civil Rights
A Deadly Smog Sparked A Movement for Clean Air
In 1948, a major industrial pollution event in Donora, Pennsylvania, a mill town on the Monongahela River about 25 miles from Pittsburgh, brought international attention to the harmful effects of air pollution.
Emissions from two companies, the American Steel & Wire Company and U.S. Steel’s Donora Zinc Works, became trapped in the surrounding valley due to unregulated emissions sickening several thousand residents and killing at least 26 people almost immediately. [Read more…] about A Deadly Smog Sparked A Movement for Clean Air
1963 Christmas In Saratoga
The front page of the December 12, 1963 edition of the Skidmore News published by the students of Skidmore College then located along Union Avenue in Saratoga Springs, NY offered stories fit for the upcoming Christmas holiday season.
In the headline article “College Observes Annual Tradition: Choirs Present Christmas Service” Christmas Vespers was to be presented twice that season on December 15 in College Hall. The article noted that the program had been “Under preparation for weeks and begins with a candlelight procession by the College Chorus and the Freshman Chorus, 130 voices in all.” [Read more…] about 1963 Christmas In Saratoga
Anna Rosenberg: A Key Aide to FDR and Truman
This week on the Historians Podcast, author Christopher C. Gorham discusses his biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman aide Anna Rosenberg, The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WW II and Shape Modern America (Citadel Press, 2023).
Anna Rosenberg was dubbed by Life magazine as “far and away the most important woman in the American government.” From New York City, Rosenberg devised a plan that helped diversify the ranks of factory workers during the Second World War. She also served as deputy defense secretary during the Korean War. [Read more…] about Anna Rosenberg: A Key Aide to FDR and Truman
Henry Cabot Lodge’s Bronze Hot Dog
In the mid-20th century, Americans had a great enthusiasm for all manner of keepsakes and mementos cast in bronze. On October 17, 1960, the National Hot Dog Council presented a life-size hot dog cast in bronze on a marble base to Republican vice-presidential candidate Henry Cabot Lodge Jr (1902-1985).
In the blur of events during the hard-fought presidential campaign, Lodge came to mistakenly believe that he had received the unusual gift during a visit to Nathan’s, the famous hot dog emporium in New York City. [Read more…] about Henry Cabot Lodge’s Bronze Hot Dog
Franklin Williams: An Unsung Civil Rights Hero
Larger-than-life figures such as Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King and, going back further, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, functioned as the “celebrities” of the equal rights movement, the public face of the crusade for racial justice.
But outside the spotlight, “bridge figures” such as New Yorker Franklin H. Williams — men and woman unencumbered by the sometimes blinding “star quality” of the Kings and Marshalls while also shunning the divisive tactics of militants such as Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and Malcolm X — made enormous but often underappreciated contributions. [Read more…] about Franklin Williams: An Unsung Civil Rights Hero
The 60th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis
At the height of the Cold War, for two weeks in October 1962, the world teetered on the edge of thermonuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Earlier that fall, the Soviet Union, under orders from Premier Nikita Khrushchev, began to secretly deploy a nuclear strike force in Cuba, just 90 miles from the United States.
President John F. Kennedy said the missiles would not be tolerated and insisted on their removal. Khrushchev refused. [Read more…] about The 60th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis