Neither he nor any of those of us alive at that moment could have realized the old world order was rapidly giving way (even if not always as rapidly as many wanted it to) nor could we know or guess what was to come.
But before "I Like Ike" carried the day that November election, in September of 1950, Oliver Brown was denied a place for his daughter, Linda, in the third-grade of a Topeka, Kansas, public school, and in 1954 the US Supreme Court ended the lie of 'separate but equal' educational opportunities for all children.
Meanwhile, in December of 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a municipal bus in Montgomery, Alabama. On the 1st of February 1960, the lunch counter at the Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, became famous for something other than its egg-salad sandwiches cherry cola sodas and in October 1962, Air Force veteran James Meredith became the first black student to enroll in the University of Mississippi.
These incidents and events and tens of thousands (and more) just like them, both great and small make up the pages of our collective and shared history of the struggle for Civil Rights, with lessons we, for reasons surpassing both my understanding and comprehension, seem to be fated to relive, but never learn.
I grew up and then old in the Sixties when there were moments that many of us disagreed, violently and otherwise, with one another on just about any and every aspect of what being 'an American' meant or should mean. We went to the moon, we got lost in the jungles of southeast Asia and we took to the streets of major cities across the country trying to repair and redeem the soul of our nation.
Fast forward half a century (yeah, I still have trouble processing that so much time has flowed to the sea), and when I look at this past weekend, I wonder what's gone on, but more importantly what's gone wrong. As you may have watched on Saturday, we returned to manned space flight and while Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken slipped the surly bonds of earth, many of the rest of us were trying and failing to maintain a consequential conversation about something as basic and fundamental as what's right and what's wrong.
Whether you were watching on television, reading about it in local newspapers, or witnessing and/or participating in protests Saturday at the Chelsea Parade War Memorials or elsewhere in the wake of yet another murder of a person of color, you cannot help but fear we are no longer as united a country as our name might suggest and that perhaps this time we have lost our way.
And so that we're very clear, there aren't two sides to that 'discussion of race' that we keep postponing. There is only what is right. If the protests and anger upset you, you're looking in the wrong place and need to ask about cause rather than effect. The space between us is too great for me to offer you a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and hope somehow we'll all feel better in the morning especially when I recall his warning that "lightning makes no sound until it strikes."
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