Description
1963 was one hell of a year. President Kennedy was assassinated, after signing a landmark civil rights bill, and asking white America during an address for "the kind of equality of treatment that we would want for ourselves," by none other than Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas. Also, in 1963 Medgar Evers, civil rights activist, and Field Marshal for the Mississippi branch of the NAACP was assassinated outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, by Byron De La Beckwith. George Wallace, governor of Alabama, defiantly proclaimed in his inaugural address, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." In September of that same year, the 16th Street Baptist Church of Birmingham, Alabama was bombed, killing four little girls and injuring 22 other people. However, not everything in 1963 was marked by tragedy. In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of Lincoln Memorial to an audience of 250,000 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and James Meredith became the first black person to graduate from the University of Mississippi. Despite all of the tragedy, in 1963 there were true moments of triumph, and in the end, we landed somewhere in between. Somewhere, that will forever be called Freedom Summer.