Ideas - The Hinge Years: 1963 | Social Revolutions

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Our series, looking at pivotal years in recent history, continues as we focus on the year 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr. leads a march on Washington, the Pan-African movement ushers in a new era for Africa, President Kennedy is assassinated, and the war in Vietnam heats up. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 24, 2024.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. It's the year 1963, a moment when the word freedom is on everyone's lips. We will be able to work together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

Martin Luther King Jr. leads a march on Washington. And the Pan-African movement ushers in a new era for Africa. But it's also a year of shocking assassinations. The word we have is that President Kennedy is dead. And an escalating Cold War. Whether Canada uses nuclear weapons or not, we accept the nuclear deterrent in the hands of the United States for our defense. This is the third installment in a series we recorded at the Stratford Festival

about hinge moments in the 20th century. We recorded this series in July 2023, and since then, questions about the history of violence, extremism, human rights, and imperialism have only become more urgent as we grapple with our own era of profound change. Our panelists for today's program are Candice Sobers, Associate Professor of Global and International Studies at Carleton University, Paul Laurie, a historian of Afro-America at York University, and Andrew Cohen, a professor of journalism at Carleton University and the author of Two Days in June, John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours that Made History.

This is the year 1963, social revolutions. Thank you. Today, we're looking at a year that has been described as the year where everything happened, 1963. It's just one of five hinge years that we're exploring through this entire week and as I've said every day one of the two questions that were that underlie this entire discussion that we're hoping to answer at least partially are how does change

happen over time and are we now living in a hinge moment of our own so again acknowledging that we will never be able to answer those two questions such such a short period, but we want to try. So let us get started. When you think about, all three of you, the year 1963 and the period around it, can you paint a picture, a small vignette that kind of encapsulates the moment for you that can take us there? And I'd like to start with you, Candice, and then Paul, and then Andrew. When I think of 1963, I think of a meeting. It is a meeting of political elites in a grandiose, high modernist building. They're all in suits, fairly typical. But what I think makes this meeting fascinating is that from this meeting, we get the Organization of African Unity. The Organization of African Unity is in some ways a multilateral, multinational organization like any other.

Transformed into the African Union in 2002, it does what you expect, like the OAS and like the UN. But in May of 1963, when it's created, it has to do something else. It has to organize a continent where most of the states are only three years old. Not only does it have to do all of the defense and security and sanitation and communication and transportation and all of that sort of political busywork, but it has another task. It has to figure out how it's going to decide what the future of the continent looks like. Will it be socialist? Will it be Pan-African? Will it be allied to the West? Will it be violent? And so when I think about 1963, I think about how all of these questions about what does the future look like? We know it has to change, but how will it change

and what are the tactics we'll use to affect it? Thank you very much, Paul. I'm going to cheat a little bit in terms of 1963 and take you a couple months after the end of 1963, February 1964 in Miami. It's a boxing gym, a young fighter, Cassius Clay, is training for his title fight against Sonny Liston, which will take place just a couple of days later. And in an effort to try and drum up some publicity for this, young Fab Four from Liverpool make a visit to the gym. They are going to be making their second appearance on the Ed Sullivan show a few days later. Cassius Clay at that point, as he is known,

is late. The Beatles are enraged. The Beatles are already feeling their oats, right? Who are we to be kept waiting? Finally, Clay arrives, beautiful, six foot three, 220 pounds, zero body fat. Hello, Beatles. We can make a lot of money together. They have their stilted conversations as usually happens in these publicity things. Clay, at that point, says, you Beatles aren't as stupid as you look. John Lennon, John Lennon in perhaps a very ill-advised move,

says, no, but you are. And for a split second, the whole gym turns to Clay, and he laughs, thankfully, for John Lennon, and perhaps for music history. Going forward. But what is really telling about this meeting is that here we have two of the leading

countercultural totems of the 1960s, and what they talk about in their brief 15 minutes is money. How big the swimming pools they're going to buy are, what kind of cars the Beatles drive, and what they are going to do going forward. And so I bring this up very briefly just to show that this is the hinge moment of when the 60s, as we often think of them, of the counter-cultural, anti-capitalist, revolutionary minded 60s, breaks from the 60s, perhaps an extension of the 50s in the early 60s, into the later 60s, but with these two

icons, right, of popular culture. And they don't discuss revolution. They discuss how much money can we make. How vivid. Thank you so much. That's a great scene you painted. Andrew. I will take you back to 1963, June the 10th and June the 11th, Washington. The President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, has been in office for two and a half years. It's an eventful, beleaguered, fitful, heroic, and abbreviated presidency, which will end in five and a half months. He will make two seismic eloquent speeches, which will throw flares into the future. One on the campus of American University, he will give what will be called the peace speech in which he will humanize the Russians, make an appeal to Nikita Khrushchev, which will produce the limited test ban treaty of 1963,

the first of the disarmament treaties of the Cold War, which in 1963 is at its height. Second day, June the 11th, 1963, what some historians call the most important day in the history of the civil rights movement, having integrated the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, he will seize the moment, ask for television time that night, and will give an extraordinary speech about civil rights. As he has asked Americans to think differently about the Soviets, the Russians, he will ask them to think differently about black Americans. It will not just be about rhetoric. It will be the speech which unveils what will be the Civil Rights Act of 1963. It will become later the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In these two speeches I'd like to

say that he talks in ways that we think of the the magic of language becoming the marble of law because they're not just rhetoric. Something happens in these two speeches which ultimately are about peace and freedom, and both will have echoes and resonate throughout the 1960s and beyond. Thank you. We've just touched the surface of that era, and we've talked about individuals who were important in that time. I wonder if we could each also take a turn at talking about what some of the most important forces were around the world that kind of shaped that period leading up to 1963. Paul? Well, I think I would just jump off saying about the civil rights movement. So obviously the March on Washington and Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech

is sort of the seminal moment, but I think people often forget that the full name of the march is the March on Washington for Jobs and Equity, effectively. And so I think in terms of forces, I would point to shifting trends in labor processes and a breakdown of Fordism, right? The undergirding political economy of the West for the past 30, 40 years, which is best or easily explained by workers being able to buy what they make. I think the beginning of that breakdown, the push for automation, the push for mass production, and the changing nature of work, and the beginning of precarious work that we now see now. And people often opine, we don't make things in this country anymore. This is sort of a line that people have.

And so foregrounding the civil rights aspect of it, but not forgetting the socioeconomic basis of that. And of course, African-Americans, people of color, these are workers who are disproportionately affected by these shifts, right? They are the last hired and first fired, as the saying goes. And so that's one of the shifts, shifting labor processes that I think about. Absolutely. And Candace, when you look at the bigger picture of the whole world, I mean, in the lead up to 1963, what are some of the political forces that are reshaping the world that people are living in at the time? So in the lead up, I think the number one has to be self-determination. When the UN is founded, there are about 50 states, and by 1963, there are 113.

So states are an imperfect metric of self-determination and liberation. States are often problematic in and of themselves. But they are a useful indicator that something is going on. And what we see right from the end of World War II, and especially ratcheting up in the 1960s, is a drive for the end of colonization and for self-determination. Particularly in the African continent, 1960 is the year of Africa, 17 different states gained their independence. Some of these processes are extremely violent. Some of them are negotiated, and it goes quite calmly. But throughout the world, you really see a drive for people to articulate their own vision of what their liberation should

look like. And I think probably reflecting that, then the second trend would be towards revolution. We're a little bit early. I think we're not quite at the counterculture moment that Paul mentioned earlier, but it's coming. The word revolution is starting to circulate. You can read it in documents, and you can see how these documents find their ways into classrooms, into discussion groups, into struggle groups in Toronto,

probably even in Stratford. How widely? Very widely, actually. This is something I really surprised, I found very surprising in the archives. If you go and you see a reference to the wretched of the earth or a reference to Ho Chi Minh. And so these are conversations that are really happening

and people are taking very seriously. If I had one more, think about the transition from empire to nation state. So we tend to think that this is a linear transition. First year in empire, and think about the transition from empire to nation-state. So we tend to think that this is a linear transition. First you're an empire, and of course after 1919, several empires collapsed, and then you become a nation-state. But what we realize is that these actually coexist for quite a long time. Sometimes they coexist in one unit, like Great Britain, but they coexist. The Portuguese empire does not collapse until 1974. So these struggles are ongoing.

And of course, they're all happening at the height of the Cold War. Yeah. Great segue. So revolution. If we want to bring it back to Canada, there's something happening in Quebec called the Révolution Tranquille. And by 1963, it has been led by people like René Lévesque, who will take revolution and change to a higher level when he leaves the Liberal Party and founds the Parti Québécois and takes power in 1976, which is a lot later. But revolution is in the air. It's a frothy time.

But going back to the United States and the forces that lead to what is happening in 1963, well, the civil rights movement has been percolating for over a generation. in 1963. Well, the civil rights movement has been percolating for over a generation, but slowly. Having abolished slavery in 1865, it's replaced by a century of segregation, which lasts right up to the middle of the 1960s. And so Brown versus Board of Education in 1954, and Little Rock, the integration of the school there by Eisenhower in 1957, and a very modest civil rights bill around the same time. and a very modest civil rights bill around the same time. Freedom Riders in 1960, 1961. But things really begin to gain purchase in 1963, particularly with the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama.

And one cannot underestimate the power of the images out of Birmingham, Alabama. There will be people here who will remember them. High-pressure hoses turned on kids, mini tanks that are prowling the streets of Birmingham. When President Kennedy, who was late to the civil rights movement, sees this, he's absolutely revolted. When he reads Dr. King's letter from a Birmingham jail, he understands for the first time the moral question that is faced in the United States here. And that speech I referred to earlier uses the word morality three times or four times in a 12-minute address. So that's what is happening there. And as America somersaults into the 1960s, I think it does begin in 63. I think the 60s begin in 1963. That is one front. The other,

of course, is nuclear arms. That has been percolating. Well, the Cold War is 18 years old. It had begun in 1945. The Americans, for several years, have a monopoly on nuclear arms. That ends, I mean, they drop two bombs on Japan. That ends the Second World War. It takes the Soviets about eight years. But by the late 1960s, both of them are testing bombs all the time. In one period in 61, the Soviets will test 50 bombs in 60 days. On October 29th, they'll explode a bomb that is 2,500 times the power of Hiroshima. The Zara bomb, which is so shocking in Washington that they have to think about what will happen thereafter. So the Cold War and all of that produces this tilt, this pivot in 1963.

Yeah. What I'd love to hear from all three of you, even briefly, is how you see or understand kind of this interplay between the three histories that have sort of been percolating in this last bit of the conversation, the civil rights movement, the struggle for decolonization, and the Cold War. Candice, maybe starting with you, how do you, what does that look like to you when we look back to that era? They are completely intertwined. And the first thing about the Cold War is that in some ways it wasn't cold, right? The Cold War was extremely hot as long as you were not in the United States, the Soviet Union, and quite possibly Berlin.

Most of the battles that were fought were fought in the so-called third world. So for most people around the world, this is a very violent period of time. The links between the African-American civil rights movement and decolonization are also extremely large. I don't want to overstate them too much, because I think there is a tendency to sort of read the civil rights movement into everything. But I would argue that there is a lot of interplay between the two. So for example, there is an activist, Methodist minister named George Hauser. He was one of the founders of the Congress on Racial Equality. So a very prominent civil rights organization. He's white, very prominent organization in the United States. He's also one of the founders of the American Committee on Africa,

which was a very prominent organization that actually went to the occupied territories, particularly in Portuguese colonies, and took interviews and wrote missives and came back to Washington, D.C. and lobbied. And they continued to do this well into the 1970s. So there are these material connections, but of course there are also affective and solidarist connections too, right? Pan-black identity, pan-Africanism, and things like that. Andrew, how would you answer that? Well, the immediate antecedents to 63, we've heard of the long game, but shorter is the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. This is the most harrowing confrontation of the Cold War. It scars Kennedy and his antagonist in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev.

They both understand how close it came, and today we know how it came closer than we thought. We archival research and we learn things later on that suggested that there easily could have been a rogue battlefield commander or a submarine skipper could have started this. So that shakes them, and they realize by the winter and the spring of 1963 when they establish a diplomatic back channel, they bring in the Pope, they realize they have to change the channel and both parties are willing to do it and they do. After this, after the peace speech and the signing of the limited nuclear test span treaty,

Kennedy particularly with Khrushchev envisions a whole protocol of peace that would see the two countries cooperating in space, doing things together at the UN. That all ends with the death of Kennedy and the deposing of Nikita Khrushchev. Before he's killed, how is that received by the American public, the idea that, you know, peace with Russia? Interestingly enough, when you look at the reaction of the peace speech, it's not overwhelming. More mail was coming to the White House on a railroad freight strike. and the full impact of what was going on did not sink in immediately. But Congress embraces the treaty

because it has to be ratified by the Senate, or the Senate embraces it. The Joint Chiefs of Staff aren't happy, but they're never happy when you talk too much about peace. And Kennedy heroically faces them down in the Cuban Missile Crisis. General LeMay, who was scary, was Dr. Strangeclough. The other thing, if I just may say, antecedent, and it happens just within three weeks of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it's washed off the front pages by the Cuban Missile Crisis, is the integration of the University of Mississippi at Oxford. It doesn't go well. It ignites a 35-hour riot, and three people

are killed, including a French journalist. And there are hundreds injured, and the Kennedys realize how hard integrating these institutions is going to be, which is why when it comes to facing down George Wallace in the schoolhouse door, which is an extraordinary story, and allowing the two young black students to enter that institution, that goes far differently because the Kennedys are prepared for it. And if it means mobilizing the National Guard and bringing the full weight of the federal government down upon the pugilistic, very narrow-minded and difficult George Wallace, they'll do it. And so those are the two antecedents that precede

what will happen in June. Paul, the idea of freedom was central to many of these political shifts and social revolutions that were going on at the time. What do you think freedom meant in 1963 itself? Well, obviously it depends on who you're asking, but if we stick with the context of the civil rights, there's different conceptions of freedom. So very briefly, on the eve of the March on Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois dies in Ghana. People not familiar with him, he's a leading, probably the leading African-American intellectual of the 20th century. He's the first African-American to receive a PhD from Harvard, co-founder of the NAACP. And he lives quite a long life, so I'm not going to detail all of it, but he dies at quite a senior age in Ghana where he had been living in exile for his allegedly communist viewpoints.

But that, if you'll forgive me, that hinge moment of the death of the leading, you know, African-American intellectual and the rise on the national scale of Dr. King to a state that he had not experienced before, that's a real pivot because Du Bois had advocated an integrationist form of civil rights that was based on the politics of respectability, which very briefly defined is if we prove ourselves to white people and to the white power structure, then we will achieve freedom in that way. Dr. King parlayed some of that politics of respectability, even to the way in which civil rights leaders, as you are all familiar with the images, are quite dapper in their appearance and in the non-violent mindset that they take. But then we also see the rise, to bring

it back to now Muhammad Ali, we also see the rise of a new form of freedom, right? That freedom is not to be asked for, freedom is to be taken through agencies such as the Nation of Islam, which Ali allies himself, Malcolm X, of course, who is a pivotal figure in this pan-Africanist anti-colonial struggle. So freedom in the civil rights context is changing. It's not something that is going to be gained through respectability. It's not something that's necessarily going to be gained through asking or for civil rights. It's going to be taken by any means necessary.

Candace, can you pick up from that and your conception of what freedom meant in 1963? Sure. Again, it's the same. It depends on who you talk to. And it's actually in some ways analytically problematic to talk about Africa because you have an enormous continent with 50-odd states, more than 80 ethnicities. So I am generalizing. But I think you're actually seeing a similar type of dynamic where there are questions about what freedom is going to mean. So what is non-negotiable is political independence and self-determination. The people who are leading

these states at the time, they don't think that this is the end of the road. You know, you don't become an independent state and then all your problems are over. But if you are in a context where it's filled with independent nation states, it makes sense to want to be one too. Having said that though, there is an issue about how you get there. And one of the things that is happening, Du Bois is in Ghana because Ghana is the site of a particular type of Pan-African vision, right? It was one of the first black countries to become independent in 1957. Martin Luther King gave a speech about it, calling it a new world coming. It was very exciting.

Kwame Nkrumah was on the cover of Time magazine. So it makes sense to have those kinds of connections. We physically have people traveling from one place to the other. So does freedom mean simply having a state or does it mean being able to participate in the neoliberal economy, which is emerging at that time? And what do we do with all our brothers and sister states that are still under colonial oppression? Can we be free by ourselves if there's still South Africa, if there's still Portuguese West Africa? And that's a serious debate that goes on, and it actually remains unresolved. I want to linger a little bit more on,

did you want to add something, Andrew? Yes. Can I just talk about freedom? Yes, sure. Perhaps we can move freedom beyond a race. If you're Betty Friedan and you live in an 11 room, a house on the Hudson, but you feel male tyranny, you want freedom from that. So she publishes The Feminine Mystique, which changes the discussion. If you're Michael Harrington, a sociologist and who talks about hunger, you'll write The Other American. You want to be free of hunger. If you're Rachel Carson and you want freedom from insecticides and pesticides, which are filling the atmosphere, you write Silent Spring, which she does. And they're all around this time. If you're James Baldwin, to bring it back to race, you write The Fire Next Time. And it's a frothy intellectual environment, but freedom is at the core of all the things we're

talking about. Yeah. But maybe since you raised Betty Friedan, maybe Candice, you could talk about how that revolution, the beginning of a revolution in women's rights, kind of intersects with what's happening, with what we've been talking about, the other social revolutions that are taking place. Betty Friedan actually gets a lot of stick now from younger feminist scholars because of her privilege. But I always say to my students, you know, this is who she was and these are the people she knew. And by trying to articulate the problem with no name, she gave women all across the West the opportunity to actually say, you know what, I'm actually, I'm not happy. The notion that I'm not happy, and therefore there might be a systemic reason for this, is actually the thing that is really important.

And I think that is something that is resonant in all the things we're talking about, right? There are problems with the state system. There are problems with racial hierarchy. There are problems with patriarchy. There are problems with hunger. There are problems with rising income inequality. I think what we're really seeing in 1963 in some ways is the beginning of a commitment to challenging

the underlying structures of society. On Ideas, you're listening to the year 1963, Social Revolutions. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts, and on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio, and on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas.

I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Shortsighted from CBC's Personally, available now. A new era dawns for Africa. The war heats up in Vietnam, and there's a world-shaking political assassination.

Vice President Johnson took the oath of office as 36th President of the United States in the forward compartment of the plane which bore Mr. Kennedy's body back to Washington. And on August 28, 1963, more than a quarter million people joined the march on Washington for jobs and freedom. million people join the March on Washington for jobs and freedom. I have a dream that one day, one day right now in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. This is the year 1963, social revolutions.

This is the year 1963, social revolutions. Candace Sobers, Paul Laurie, and Andrew Cohen in conversation at the Stratford Festival about a hinge moment in history, a year whose aftershocks still shape our world today. Back now to the March on Washington. I really feel like, I mean, no matter how much we talk about that today, we will not be able to give that event its due. I want to talk just about the enormity of that day,

Paul, in 1963. And also, as you said, maybe if you could build on the idea of how, you know, labor and workers' rights played into that gathering. Could you just expand on that a bit? Yeah, well, I mean, as I mentioned, the civil rights movement is at a transitional phase where it's moving out of its southern context. It's less about lobbying to have rights instituted, and it's more now as it moves to a more northern urban context about political economy and about labor. So I think what's really important is that this also represents a change in King and his leadership's attitude. We haven't talked, obviously, about the Vietnam War, of which the leadership around King is starting to take a much more pointed interest in, in terms of broader systemic notions of inequality in this way. When Dr. King is assassinated a number of years later,

he's in Memphis to support sanitation workers on their strike against unjust wages paid by the city. So while 1963 and the March on Washington sort of is put as this sort of high watermark of the civil rights movement, it is, but it is also, I think, signaling a change from the more rights-based legislation and towards one that's more based on political economy. As Malcolm X says, I'm paraphrasing, of course, but what is the point of being admitted to a restaurant if you don't have money to buy a sandwich, right? And this is something I think that people like Malcolm are ahead of Dr. King on in many ways.

But as his life draws to a close, he is much more interested in issues of labor, of class, of imperialism. Candace. If I could add something in. If I'm remembering this correctly, to go back to gender, there are no women originally enlisted to speak at the March on Washington.

Never. And only after they sort of realize that they've made the mistake. I believe Mahalia Jackson is asked to sing and speak. So I think that also that is something important to think about gender is that when we talk about these revolutionary movements, often gender is secondary to the wider cause, right? So that's, I think, something to keep in mind

is that we talk about the movement, the movements are almost always male-led, right? And the women's issue will be dealt with later on. And what the third wave feminist movement is saying is well actually this issue is systemic and it's part of every other issue and you simply can't subjugate one to the other of course though if you want anything done you have to ask a woman it is a woman it is mahalia jackson i believe who famously as dr king is working through his prepared remarks screams out from from the crowd, tell him about your dream, Martin.

Yes, it's true. And he switches, and the speech that we all now know as being so iconic is essentially improvised. There's a version of a speech he had given a few weeks before in Detroit, but of course it's a woman who is at the forefront of getting a man back on track,

and he throws away his script and history is made and take us to church martin yes take us to church there was a woman on the um there was a woman who was supposed to speak she was there for the wrong reasons her name was merley ever she's alive today she is the widow of medgar wiley Evers, who was assassinated. The third epical event of June 11th and 12th, 1963, is the assassination of Medgar Evers. She is on. Actually, I talked to her about it, and she was on the program, but she, believe it or not, missed her plane in Boston

and couldn't get to Washington. It would have been enormous pressure on a very young woman shattered by the death of her husband, the violent death of her husband, on the steps of their house in Jackson, Mississippi, only then two months earlier. But she was supposed to speak. But even in the absence of that voice, that day took the country into a whole new realm. Can you talk a little bit more, Andrew, about how the rest of society responded to this

incredible gathering on Washington. Well, black America is moved and sees finally voices. And, of course, Dr. King's luminous rhetoric is immediately recognized. In fact, JFK is watching in the White House and said, oh, my God, I didn't know what a wonderful speaker he is. And he invites all of them back to the White House, the leadership. And he then, and he and Dr. King, having had a strained relationship, then have a very good relationship until JFK's death. But while we talk in very nostalgic and evocative terms about Dr. King,

white America isn't entirely there. The Democratic Party is worried about a white backlash. They don't know how this is going to go. Kennedy feels he has to do this. He asks, what is the presidency for if it isn't to do something like this? But it isn't an America immediately grasping Dr. King and saying, what a wonderful thing. Yes, the liberal, the intelligentsia, and everybody's there, but it takes time. And it will take Lyndon Johnson's extraordinary legislative capacity to push this through Congress, and the bill will pass and be signed in July of 64. On the other hand, I'm interested in hearing from either of you two about how much stock did

people of African descent in the United States put in Kennedy's intentions and the government's ability to actually improve their lot in life? Paul? Well, you know, there's reasons for skepticism, let me put it that way. There's a history there, to put it bluntly, about the motives of the government, but it must be said that, and one obviously can't, as Candace was saying, can't generalize Afro-America as a radically diverse entity. But I do think that it is very key that you have in the Kennedy administration an activist state as it relates to civil rights. And for better or for worse, it is the state since emancipation, which has served as the primary guarantor of

African-American rights, limited as they might be as we progress through. So I think, again, not to generalize, but I think for the average African-American, there's going to be skepticism, obviously, about intentions. But I think there is a sense that an activist state, or at least a ostensibly activist state, is a positive thing for securing more freedom. But again, as we say, the 60s, as Andrew mentioned, the 60s, 60s, you know, post-1964, 1965, there we see not just among, obviously, African Americans, but among many Americans, a real distrust and a real skepticism and a real pessimism about the state. Dr. Strangelove was cited here before too, but this is also the demise of the cult of expertise,

right? Because it is the experts who have led to many of the problems the United States is facing, primarily the quagmire in Vietnam. So I think there's a general skepticism about- But that's not evident in 63. No, no, no. That outlines later in 63. Yes, absolutely. Just to finish off this little bit about the U.S. before moving on to other areas is, of course, in November,

there's the assassination of Kennedy. And I want to just talk very broadly about what you think, Andrew, maybe to begin with, are the most important consequences socially in that era of that day. The assassination of JFK is cataclysmic in America for reasons more so now in a sense that we knew then. It wasn't just the end of Camelot, which was never a term applied to the Kennedy presidency during the Kennedy presidency. It was concocted by Jackie after. Brilliantly, by the way, as a piece of social reengineering. But it was an extraordinary time.

It was, JFK was, in a sense, the captain of cool. There had been nobody in the White House like them since Teddy Roosevelt. They're changing everything from Air Force One, the White House pool, to the look of Pennsylvania Avenue, hiring a young sociologist named Daniel Patrick Moynihan to reimagine later Senator Moynihan. So that in itself would be jarring for a nation. It's the fourth assassination of American president. But two things happen. It is, in a sense, the beginning of the opening. It really is Medgar in June. But the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November of 63 is the opening of what I call a grim, long season of assassination in America, which will continue

for almost a decade and will take the lives of people we've discussed here today, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, and others. And on both sides of the spectrum, George Lincoln Rockwell, who was a Nancy, George Wallace, who was not killed but was wounded, the last of this arc of assassination. So it will do that. The second is it will deepen and accentuate the proclivity America for conspiracy theory. Now, this didn't begin in November. There were lots of discussions about from going back to Lincoln's assassination. Was Booth the assassin? Was there somebody else involved? of Pearl Harbor in 1941. There I know a historian today who insists to me that Roosevelt knew about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But it is given new life and new energy in 1963. And you could look almost in a direct line from the conspiracy theory that arises from them, the level of

disinformation. And sadly, a product named Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of John F. Kennedy, who's now gone all in on this, so much so that his siblings have just about disowned him. But you could begin and draw a line from then to now. Some awkward family dinners at Heinz. My understanding is there aren't many dinners in the middle. Of course, I want to hear from all of you about how that spate of assassinations that follows affects not just the civil rights movement, but just the entire atmosphere in the United States, but just lingering on the Kennedy assassination itself. What else can you say, Candace, about the ramifications, the immediate ramifications politically in the country

well the immediate ramifications of course at Lyndon Johnson who nobody expected to ever become president becomes president this you know Johnson was shut out of the Kennedy administration he was not one of the best and the brightest he was basically there to win the south and for his congressional skills and all of a sudden this person is thrust into this position. I think that is really challenging. I know, for example, that when Kennedy was assassinated, someone who was very upset was Fidel Castro. Castro was horrified.

It's not that they got on, but they sort of understood each other. They had come to a peace. And it's interesting, when you were talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis earlier, I was remembering that the one person who's not involved in any of the negotiations at the end is Castro. Completely shut out. Nobody asks his opinion, and he's bitter about that till the day he dies. So Castro's very upset. Obviously, this is a terrible thing, but also he doesn't know what's going to come next. Who is this Johnson character? What is the Cold War going to be like? So there was a moment where people seemed to think they understood how the Cold War was going to come next. Who is this Johnson character? What is the Cold War going to be like? So there was a moment where people seemed to think they understood how the Cold War was going to

develop, and then that is shattered. But in terms of assassinations, I actually take it back a bit further, and I think about Patrice Lumumba. Patrice Lumumba was the first president of the, it's gone through so many names, what became Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. This was a very big deal. They received their independence in 1960. And by January 1961, Lumumba is dead. He is killed by a combination of secessionist mercenaries, the CIA, and the Belgian colonial authorities. And that really signaled to the world that if you try to upset the order, there will be violence, right? The state will be comfortable using violence against you. And that's part of the reason why people like Fanon

would later on say, well, I guess we have to use violence as well, right? This is the state of the terrain that we're operating on. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up the international context, because I do want to hear also what happens to Soviet Union. You know, Kennedy's just humanized Russians, and now he's gone. How does that affect that situation? It's the end of Khrushchev. He no longer has, the party loses confidence in him, the Politburo loses confidence, and he is ousted in 1964. Nella, we haven't talked about Vietnam at all.

We're just about to. Oh, okay. But that's a critical consequence of Kennedy's assassination. And it may not be what, my sense is it may not be what people think it is. People think that it just would have continued the way it was. I would offer another point of view that, in fact, Kennedy's death really gave life to the Vietnam War, that he would have withdrawn from Vietnam, life to the Vietnam War, that he would have withdrawn from Vietnam, that he, while he was surrounded by McNamara and Rusk and the Bundy brothers and others who were all in, Hawks and

Vietnam, he himself showed in the Cuban Missile Crisis no compunction, no hesitation about challenging all his advisors, a confidence that Lyndon Johnson, who always said, I didn't go to Harvard, which he didn't, never had and was in thrall to them. So Vietnam, which is then 16,000 American advisors, they weren't advisors, they were combatants, and they were dying by the fall of 1963. But Kennedy had told people, after the 64 election, which he expected to win, he would leave Vietnam. He would not, I believe he would not have gotten involved in a land war, a grinding land war in Southeast Asia, into China, which he knew he had visited in the 50s, and which would kill 58,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. Yeah, I mean, we're trying to cover the enormity of the Vietnam War in... Yes. Ten seconds. Four minutes.

But just to follow up on what Andrew said, I mean, it's seismic in terms of its cultural and social. Coming back to the... It ties into all of much of what we've been talking about. As I mentioned briefly before, the collapse of expertise. And that is called into question across the political spectrum. Misinformation, the government's attempt to manage the stories coming out of Vietnam, turning defeats into victories, and in the context of things such as the Tet Offensive, just in terms of, you know, how these things are played and how these things are relayed. The role of the media in terms of, you know,

attempting to show what is happening in Vietnam and the ban on being able to show war dead on TV and everything. So I think all of what we're living in now in terms of our societal questions and skepticisms of expertise and authority, misinformation, a polarization of political debate, all of this is crystallized in Vietnam. The war itself, obviously, but obviously it's persecution on the domestic front as well. So I think it's, you can't, as Anderson said, you can't downplay its significance in that way. And what, I mean, as historians, we want to be somewhat aware of what ifs, but if Kennedy had not been assassinated, how that would have gone.

Paul, staying with you for just a moment, back to sort of the later years in the 60s, what happens in light of all those assassinations? Malcolm X, 65, Martin Luther in 68, you know, and then whatever comes afterwards. 1968, you know, and then whatever comes afterwards. Just can you make a general statement as to what, how that changes the civil rights movement in the later 60s? Well, there's a perverse notion of possibility that is born out of these succession of assassinations. As Candace had mentioned, on the one side, there is the notion that the state and the state actors will act violently to suppress what they see as potentially disabling revolutionary activities. But even on the part of those who are revolutionaries, I think, and again, this is maybe a morbid point to make, but it opens up a sense of possibilities, right? I'll just digress quickly in my favorite film, Godfather Part II.

I won't go through the plot for all of you, but you're probably aware of it. The film comes out in 1972, 1973. In one of the plot points when Michael Corleone is attempting to try and kill Hyman Roth, the Las Vegas- Stand-in for Meyer Lansky. Stand-in for Meyer Lansky. He says famously, you can kill anybody, even a president. And this is made in the wake of this. But that line always jumps out to me. It's not that presidents weren't assassinated beforehand. It's not that political figures weren't killed beforehand. But there's particularly something seminal about this, that if you can kill a president, anything is possible.

Two more notes, again, too quick, but on the international scene. If I could, Andrew, ask you about Canada at the time, just for a moment. 1963 is when Pearson, Lester B. Pearson is elected. He's not, you know, he's had influence on the international stage where peacekeeping is concerned. Can you just talk about how all of this, does it kind of intersect with what is happening in this country? Well, we used the word revolution earlier, and I mentioned the quiet revolution in Quebec, but there's another revolution will happen in Ottawa. 63 will bring to power Lester Pearson. It will be the beginning of what I call a long parliament. It'll be a minority government, two elections, 63 and 65, but it will be an extraordinarily, perhaps the most productive parliament in our history. Much of the social

welfare state that we see today in Canada, what we then called Medicare, but universal health care, pensions, student loans, liberal immigration, the flag in 1965, other emblems of civic nationalism, all will come out of that parliament. So it is revolutionary. Pearson will never be seen. He's to 19th century. He's born in 1897. He's to 19th century and not made for television. So he'll be never, he won't be a revolutionary and they won't call it the Great Society, which is what Lyndon Johnson is doing, and Canada moves, often historically moves in lockstep with the United States. Something else is happening.

We mentioned, again, going back to Quebec. 1963 is the year the Front de Libération de Québec, the FLQ, begins to become active. It is putting bombs in mailboxes. In my case, 100 yards from the school that I attended in Montreal. And this will, there'll be another arc of violence in Canada, which will go until 1970, culminating in the kidnapping of James Cross and the assassination of Pierre Laporte. And the, what was then called the October crisis will be crushed by Pierre Leotrudeau, who will bring in the War Measures Act. But we have our revolutionary age in Canada in that period of the 1960s. The other international point that we've been touching on is, of course, what's going on in

Africa. And the next year in our series is 1973. And it's a time when dictators are, you know, having a moment. There's Idi Amin in Uganda, Augusto Pinochet in Chile. So in many countries, freedom from colonial rule doesn't actually necessarily mean freedom from repression. So again, in a nutshell, what would you say went wrong, Candice? Oh, boy. In a nutshell? Got a minute? Okay. Diagnose the thing. A couple of things. One is the intervention of the superpowers, right? They pump money and arms into different countries.

There is an argument made that certain types of revolutionary programs lend themselves to more authoritarian rule. So they sort of just go hand in hand. I'm not entirely sure that I buy that. There is another argument made, particularly in the African case, that if you can Africanize something, you can make it legitimate. So here I'm thinking in particular of Mobutu Sese Seku, right? Joseph Desiree Mobutu going back to the Congo, takes over the Congo in a coup, helped, backed by the United States and CIA, and then proceeds to Africanize it. Well, what he really does is he introduces a few sort of notional changes. He insists that women wear traditional gear.

And then he says that that is justification for anything he wants to do, right? This is a traditional African way of governing. This is not a traditional way of doing anything, right? But it works in a context where black power, revolution, Africanization, Vietnamization, where all of these sort of indigenous identity movements are in the ascendance, that works. But he's only in power because of the intervention of the superpowers. I think that's part of it. Is it possible to make a general statement as we move into the 70s about the fact that, you know, all this promise about freedom and notions, new notions of freedom is pretty much dissipated by

the 70s. Is that a fair statement, do you think, Paul? Again, I don't, I think there is still, you know, a revolutionary impulse that is alive in the 70s, but I do think that it is not coincidental that, youidental that what we see is the height of the civil rights movement or of second-wave feminism or other. We haven't talked about gay liberation, which also comes of age in the late 1960s. But I think all of that takes place at a time of great economic prosperity. And so one doesn't want to be entirely cynical, but I think when the hard realities of, as I briefly mentioned at the beginning, of a collapsing political economy of Fordism and the outsourcing of jobs and automation and all of these things, I think the revolutionary impulse is somewhat dulled when people are faced

with these, and if we go into the 70s, of course, you know, rising inflation, the gas crisis, all of these issues, I think, you know, revolutionary spirit sort of founders on the rocks of cold hard political economy in that way. Again, as we've said, one doesn't want to generalize, there are still revolutionary impulses at work, but the 70s presents a different economic context. Each of you has brought up some really important threads that we can follow from 1963 until today. But I wonder if you could highlight one,

something that really resonates today and that is an inheritance from that year, what would that be? I think we've inherited a commitment to self-determination. We started at that point, but I still think it's really important is that there are more states than ever. And despite globalization and transnationalism and all of the other identities that we can have, people still keep wanting states and they keep fighting for them. And I think it's sort of, it would behoove us now to sort of stop and think about our past and our relationship to self-determination because I think we're very comfortable thinking,

you know, we're always on the side of people, you know, living their lives and having the freedom to sort themselves out. And if we look carefully, that's not really true, right? It's always been very contested. Sort of people in the West get to decide, well, who deserves self-determination? Who deserves to have a state? And these are important issues that are still playing out, sadly, right now. But I think I also agree with the notion of revolution, right? Revolution is still a thing in the 1970s. There's the Rotarmefaction, there's the Palestine Liberation Organization. There are still these revolutionary moments, but I think what changes, like what Andrew was saying, is that people don't look at them as fondly.

All of the hijackings and things like that, those are problems. They are not sort of acts of revolutionary solidarity. Those are problems that need to be fixed with more security and more police. So there is that shift. And they're violent. And they're violent. And people are still fighting, but I think the general public is less amenable. Paul, if I can ask you a specific question, is it fair to say that there's a line to be drawn

from those uprisings in the 1960s to Black Lives Matter protests that have been with us for the last few years? Yes. No. I would just, to answer that question directly and also just to build on what has been said, I think, I mean, I would just close by saying I think of my own students just as an example. And what they have inherited, perhaps, or what is inherited from the 1960s is an idealism, but a healthy skepticism as well. an idealism, but a healthy skepticism as well. I think it's that ever, and this is, again, not this is an ongoing generational context since the dawn of time, but particularly in this context, I think there is a clear-eyed nature that relates to movements such as Black Lives Matter that they see or they learn about the 60s

and the idealism that was at root there. But then, of course, they see the baby boomers, whether it's their parents or grandparents, who become yuppies, who become, you know, part of the establishment, who, you know, create many of the issues, you know, that we are dealing with today. So when I'm teaching them or I'm talking with them or dealing with them, I never want to encourage cynicism because I think that is monstrous for an educator to do. But I think they do have that sort of unique blend of an idealistic mindset to change things, but also a healthy dose of skepticism in that they know the histories of that and they know the limits of that. And I think that is something that we're all going to need as we move forward.

Paul, Candice, and Andrew, thank you so much for all your insights. Really appreciate it. Thanks for taking our questions. On Ideas, you've been listening to the year 1963, Social Revolutions. It's the third in our series about hinge years in the 20th century, a collaboration with the Stratford Festival in Ontario. On today's program, our panelists were Candice Sobers, Paul Lorry, and Andrew Cohen. Coming up next, part four of our series, The Year 1973, The Dictators. This series was produced by Philip Coulter and Pauline Holdsworth with production assistance from Annie Bender.

We recorded this series in July 2023. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our acting senior producer is Lisa Goduso. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our acting senior producer is Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.