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Learning Democratic Values: Sixties Youth Culture Revisited The View from Middle America
Editorial Note: In the following essay, the author relates his experiences in the Wilmington Youth Council, a group which made a significant contribution to the Wilmington, N.C. area in the 1960s. It is a story only partially told here. The WYC was abolished sometime in the early 1980s by an act of the Wilmington City Council, an event of some importance, since the youth council movement has persisted to this day in other parts of the state. Perhaps this essay will inspire other youth council participants of the Sixties to tell their stories.
Some forty-four years have passed since John F. Kennedy proclaimed, "We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world—or to make it the last." In 1998, NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw published his memorable volume on a similar though different theme, The Greatest Generation, a book written in tribute to the men and women who came of age during the Great Depression, suffered the anguish of the Second World War and went on to shape the history of postwar America. Like so many others who enjoyed Brokaw’s book, I was glad to discover that so visible a figure had taken the time to walk on the beach with WWII combat veterans, hear their stories and relate them to us. But Brokaw’s critics, those such as Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, and Leonard Steinhorn of the Washington Post, have also had something to say to us. They have noted some of the failures of this generation, point to the not insignificant work of the founding generation who created the American Republic, and also attribute great significance to the postwar cohort—our generation, the one identified with the social revolution of the 1960s. I suppose I should not feel slighted when so much credit is assigned to “the greatest” by Brokaw. As a child of the early Sixties, I have no war stories, have little recollection of the Fifties to be nostalgic about, and my part in the later Sixties was that of a juvenile ant in a vast rainforest. Nevertheless, it seems a bit of puzzle that so much of what I dimly recollect of the Sixties seems alternately so inspiring and uplifting, or by contrast, so unforgettably horrifying. For example, I can recall the excitement of the Democratic National Convention of 1960 and the night of the election itself as the returns were reported on national television. Images of the stirring JFK inaugural address remain with me, and that Saturday matinee when I sat with my ten-year-old neighborhood pal just a few rows back from the front as we watched The PT-109. JFK was easily the hero most any perceptive child. And like so many others, I recall exactly where I was at the moment when I first heard that Kennedy had been gunned down in Dallas, Texas. The civil rights protests, burning crosses, urban riots, the protest music, the sexual revolution, TV dance romps, the Vietnam War and the campus unrest—all of it became the world of our experience, as palpably as that which belonged to the world of our parents. But it seems nevertheless quite odd and somehow inappropriate that the contributions of our generation should be so little appreciated in our own time. Even worse that the experience of our youth should be now rendered in terms of the crude stereotypes, the mopheaded visages of TV hipsters and fanatics so often referenced by the punditry of today. Those of us who participated in the youth culture of the 1960s know or should know well enough that beyond the hype against the sins of the Sixties there was another reality. The lessons we learned and the contributions we rendered have an important meaning that is yet essential to our nation’s future. Since Middle America has chosen to look with condescension and even scorn at the culture of activism and idealism that was once so prevalent, it would seem that a few recollections might be appropriate. In the fall of 1968 I was fifteen years of age, with a sense of history shaped by the postwar world about me, and anxious to begin my first year in high school. In that first year of Court ordered school integration in Wilmington, North Carolina, I read stimulating books, watched TV, and warmed to the music of the Beatles and the Doors. Through my high school years there was something that my education especially needed—something intrinsically linked to the task of citizenship in a free society. Although I grew up in a small, conservative Southern city, I was still a lot like the millions of American youth who shared the generational experience. As much the result of our age as of the time in which we lived, we harkened toward the future more than fixated on the past. True, most of us were already programmed to be Cold War kamikazes waiting to storm the beach at Iwo Jima. For the Fifties and the Sixties, the media saturated our minds with images of war, and most of us played war continually as children. This of course was the cleaned up, glory-dog war of motion picture heroes, like John Wayne and Eddie Murphy. And, like a young Ron Kovic, I believed that communism must be stopped. If we failed to subdue it in Vietnam, the Communists would soon be on our doorsteps. Wasn’t it obvious? The truth was that if the Vietnam War had been held up to public scrutiny, it would never have passed muster at an honest session of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. But for “the greatest generation” honest sessions of the HUAC were few and far between. For most Southernern whites—and though Wilmington, like most Middle American cities felt the influence of the Chamber of Commerce and the Fourth of July with as much religiosity as people could tolerate, it remained intensely Southern—there was yet another twist to the story. Hard working, God-fearing people of the South knew that the perversions of communism included the seduction of innocent Negroes, who otherwise would have most certainly remained faithful, loyal and lovingly devoted to the pieties, civilities and gracious ways of Southern living. In the devastating year of 1968 most of us had to be re-educated out of this old world fantasy. Under such circumstances, democracy might well have been in trouble. It was fortunate for me that there was another influence, which by the time of my sophomore year had already begun to reorder my priorities and reconstruct my social awareness. The Wilmington Youth Council, established by the city of Wilmington under a council elected with the support of Black voters, became one of the better expressions of the Sixties youth culture in our area. Certainly the Cape Fear had its hippies and its rock and rollers. The Wilmington Youth Council, however, or WYC as we called it, grew out of a commitment of the city government to the betterment of young people in our area. It was really all about education, one that was deeply rooted in the cultural watershed of the decade. Created through the efforts of young activists of the Greensboro Youth Council who came to Wilmington to urge the formation of a group in the port city, the WYC was established in 1967. The GYC served as the prototype for all groups and the state level YCNC organization. Still in existence to this day, the GYC asserts that it was founded in 1962, and was the first organization of its kind in the U.S.A.. Those were the days when student protest seemed to energize all of society, when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee {SNCC), founded in Raleigh, moved to the forefront of Black protest, and when North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford who openly supported JFK inspired the state with visions of progressive government. A fully integrated group from the beginning, WYC enjoyed broad participation from among Black students and was formally created by an act of the Wilmington City Council, functioning as an agency under the Parks and Recreation Department. Derrick Davis, the first Black man to hold a leadership position under the city government since the 1890s, served as the director of the Wilmington Parks and Recreation division. Our WYC office was located in the basement of the Von Glann House on Fifth Street, directly below the Mayor's office, and across the corridor from the Wilmington Director of Human Relations, a Black man named Robert Nichols. The WYC also had a full-time executive director, Diane Meadows, from Statesville, N.C., who was an employee of the city. In the fall of that year at New Hanover High I was urged by a senior and teammate from the tennis squad—one of the best young men in the school—who told me where and when to make my first WYC meeting. At that gathering, the intelligence and intensity of the young people involved and the talk of democracy, which was the subject of those early youth council discussions, stirred my fascination. The WYC was founded on the principle of extending democracy to the youth of all races and genders. It set out to serve as the democratic voice of the young people of our area and drew representation from the formerly all-Black Williston Senior High in the last year of its existence. In those early years of Sixties integration it was assumed that the destiny of our society was to bring the free association of the races. For Wilmington, WYC and public school integration were major steps in that direction. In the early years of its existence the WYC created much excitement, becoming known for its public events involving Black participation at a time when social mixing of the races was still uncommon. And the WYC occasionally drew the indignation of area conservatives, who rejected its founding premises. Because its membership derived through popular elections within the public schools, WYC drew participation from a broad spectrum of Wilmington youth. Due to the overall economic prosperity of the times, most were of middle class origins, and some were from families migrating into Wilmington from diverse parts of the nation. The port city was already becoming a new city of the South's postwar industrializing economy, with major corporations developing plant sites and bringing new people into the area. These in-migrants wanted and expected to participate in a culturally enriched, progressive social environment, and so the youth culture to which we belonged tended to reflect the trends and events occurring elsewhere across the United States. Black students involved in WYC also were from diverse origins, but tended to derive from the lingering Jim Crow economy. More often they were the sons and daughters of the city’s Black middle class—the school teachers, barbers, or businessmen, but also in some cases from the maids and laborers who might reside within the projects. In the first year of its creation, the WYC held a Be-In at Greenfield Park beside the lake with its spillway. Modeled after the San Francisco Be-In at Golden Gate Park, one of the key happenings of the counterculture nationwide, the Wilmington version was a playful, innocent imitation of a West Coast event that few people here or elsewhere well enough understood. Perhaps it derived from the fact that city manager, E.C. Brandon, was a California native; but also from the military influence that brought a substantial group of Californians to the area. Like its counterpart on the West Coast, the Wilmington Be-In included rock music, art on display, body painting, Frisbee tossing along with fun and frolic in the park. But in 1967, few young men in Wilmington ventured to grow long hair, psychedelic drugs were still mostly a rumor, and though as always, young people could be wild and wanton, themes of "make love, not war" in defiance of America's involvement in Vietnam thus far had currency for a minority among high schoolers. Concerned with maintaining the council in good standing with the city government, WYC representatives kept a cautious compromise with the more radical vision of Sixties youth and the conservatism that was typically more prevalent in the Cape Fear region. But as a voice of democracy and student activism, what the WYC did accomplish was worthy of notice. Merely to bring the city's Black and white youth together under one roof in the cause of democracy was a triumph. Although WYC representatives were chosen by election from three high school grade levels at every school, the council sought broad participation from area teens at all events and meetings. Although at meetings everyone was encouraged to speak out, the council was conceived on the more formal style of representative democracy. WYC's first years were much involved with the drafting of its own set of by-laws and standing committees, a task that was completed by the summer of 1970. For me, there was nothing that could hold a candle to youth council. Beside it, Middle America’s nostrums of regularity, consumption, race and religion became an over wrought formula. I recall the many young people who stood at meetings to hold forth on any number of issues. Their words summoned hope for a society still caught up in the spirit of the Sixties, invoking visions of a world beyond prejudice, fear, or the raging hucksterism so prevalent in Southern politics. Our debates were stimulating all the more because of the outspoken Black students and the expressive, strong-willed young women who were willing to participate. WYC also held wonderful parties, sponsored fashion shows and art shows, distributed mountains of free toys at Christmas for less fortunate children, and through one summer, even sponsored a free drop-in day care center at a downtown civic facility. The state organization at that time, called YCNC, held occasional meetings, workshops and other events that drew participation from youth council groups across North Carolina. Over the years, I made trips to Raleigh, Fayetteville, High Point, Winston-Salem and of course to Greensboro, and was fortunate to meet youth council leaders who were among the most outstanding young people from our state. I learned also the fantastic undertakings of these groups, their wonderful parties and excellent debates. On one trip we stopped at a shadowy underground Chapel Hill restaurant where our group sat, chattering and exuberant, a chilled mug of apple cider enough to land us in Bohemia. In Greensboro I stayed at the home of a soft-spoken young woman who, while staring dreamily into my eyes, tied a leather thong around my wrist with all sorts of bangles and attachments. And at one Raleigh meeting our parliamentary maneuvers were so intense and so ultimately well done that at once we paused to look at one another, as if to exclaim—Now, aren't we the best and brightest? I believe it was a tall, energetic, intellectually crisp young Black woman—a high school senior—or it may it may have been a youth council president, who first shoved a copy of Robert's Rules of Order under my nose and informed me that this book was absolutely necessary for all WYC meetings. I must study and absorb the contents of this book if I expected to do anything in youth council. I managed to acquire Robert’s Rules and gave it a thorough reading. I was still shy and tending to retreat at dances or social events, though I soon discovered that, armed with Robert's rules, I could assert myself at council meetings. Through my junior year at New Hanover I served on the speaker’s bureau, providing talks mostly at area churches for appreciative elderly ladies who would smile politely and nod with approval as I explicated on the youth council concept. Later, I chaired the WYC law committee, which put the finishing touches on our by-laws; and in my senior year it became my privilege to serve as president of our group. Those youth council days, for me, were filled with such energy and excitement. Each year through the first few weeks at school each representative had to stand for re-election to the council. For days leading up to the election I practiced the usual flimflam that we sometimes call politics. I worked the polls, shook hands with hundreds of fellow students, passed out leaflets produced from a stencil, asking everyone to vote for me. Through these months my thoughts ran toward what could be accomplished for the benefit of young people in our area. I learned that democracy requires both vision and an ability to communicate with others. Youth council for a time brought joy above all else. The excitement of meetings and events sustained my interest, but through the year of 1970-71, I discovered that WYC, the public schools, and the city itself had been thrust into the dizzy realm of urban politics, with its quandaries of race and social unrest—the real frontier of American experience. Early on, the participation of Black students in WYC was substantial. This is partly due to the existence of Williston Senior High, which elected an all-Black slate of representatives. This group included some of the most outstanding Black students, who in the 1960s, were conscious not only of the need to challenge racial stereotypes by cultivating a positive self image, but also to serve as the representative spokesmen for their race in a era of social advancement. These outspoken young people gained leadership skills in WYC that served them in later life. One of these outstanding individuals later became president of the student body at UNC Chapel Hill, class of '74. Another, who served as our Wilmington delegate to YCNC, became outstanding in ROTC and received the Cape Fear Sword—the highest honor for Army ROTC in our area. Others from this group went off to college where it is likely they distinguished themselves much as they had in our group. In the fall of 1970, the WYC planned and carried off a rock concert that was held at Thalian Hall, featuring the Eddie Miller Band, complete with a psychedelic light show that projected throbbing paisley on the ceiling and walls. At WYC events, we typically did not drink alcohol and to my knowledge no one from our group smoked marijuana at any of our gatherings, though the situation was changing fast. As the drug culture began to descend upon us about that time, some WYC members may have been more adventurous, though it was considered unacceptable to use drugs, and WYC even sponsored a drug awareness program designed to discourage drug usage among teens. I had never seen a marijuana cigarette, did not smoke tobacco, still had short hair and typically wore a three-piece suit whenever I represented WYC at a public event. But our Monday night meetings in the city council chambers were always more informal. I nevertheless carried Roberts Rules of Order to every meeting and encouraged our members to read and practice accordingly.
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Carolina Civic Voice Winter 2006-07 Vol. 6, No 4 |