Memories: Where I Was on 11/22/63

One day during my junior year at Evanston Township High School, my Honors English teacher entered the class, told us to take out paper and pen, and then said: "Write about what you were doing two years ago today." Now this skinny guy was not a favorite teacher; he was more interested in drama than literature or writing. He also seemed a bit strange to me, maybe a little nuts. So I wasn't surprised that he came up with such a seemingly ridiculous topic. What surprised me was that several of my classmates immediately started writing. The rest of us stared at the teacher, the writers, and each other in disbelief. I started thinking about what was going on in my life two years earlier. I was a freshman, living with my maternal grandmother in Henderson, Kentucky. Then I focused on the month, November, and like several of my initially befuddled classmates, I said, "Oh," and started writing a response to what became my favorite topic.

I wrote about being in my freshman biology class when someone came to the door, and my teacher, a woman whom I really liked, left briefly. She came back into the room, looking upset, and told us that the President had been shot. Some students gasped; I just stared in disbelief, probably the way I stared at my English teacher two years later. We then listened to the radio through the school's p.a. system and soon learned that the President had died. I also wrote about seeing the special edition of the Henderson paper with a black border and the screaming headline: "THE PRESIDENT IS DEAD!"

I'm not sure what else I said in my essay about the assassination, but I might have explained that my grandmother didn't have a television, so I missed most of the scenes that everyone else my age and older remembered all too well--Jackie coming off the plane in her bloody pink suit, Oswald being shot by Ruby. I'm sure I wrote about going to a family friend's house that Monday to watch the funeral on her color television and being haunted by the sounds of the drums and the music for months. I doubt that I mentioned my maternal aunt's calling my grandmother from St. Louis and telling her that we blacks were in trouble now. Since I was the only black person in that English class, I didn't discuss race with them even when we read Huckleberry Finn. My aunt was probably worried because she saw Texan Lyndon Johnson as less sympathetic to our cause. But, of course, it was Johnson who oversaw the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Since I was only sixteen when I wrote that essay, I probably did not offer any wise commentary about the significance of the President's death. I know for sure that I didn't say it represented my loss of innocence. At fourteen, I had already experienced an alcoholic father, a couple of murders of local blacks, and several racist junior high school teachers. And like all children of my generation, I had learned to duck and cover in preparation for the inevitable atomic bomb, so I was hardly innocent. I already knew the world was dangerous and evil. As I look back at my fourteen-year-old self after fifty years of living, I think that period represented a rare time back then and for years after when I really felt part of the United States of America. We were all in it together during those dark days. Blacks, whites (and at fourteen, living in Kentucky, I was concerned with only those races ), rich, poor, old, and young were all amazed, horrified, and saddened by what had happened.

In 1984, I was discussing why and how we remember certain events with a lower-division general education literature class when I started to talk about the Kennedy assassination. As I looked at my young students, I suddenly realized that some of them might not have been born when Kennedy was killed. I was shocked, even a little annoyed, that there could be adults who weren't born when the most important historical event in my life happened. When I confirmed my suspicion by asking how many students were not yet born in November, 1963, and watched half the class raise their hands, I lost my innocence as a teacher. At thirty-five, I realized for the first time that a generation gap had developed between at least some of my students and me. I said in my memoir that I was shaken and didn't know if I could talk to people that young.

I managed to talk to people much younger than I for another twenty-five years, but I never again assumed that my students and I had the same experiences. If they couldn't write about where they were when the President died, they were "you X's," "you Y's," "you millennials," "you young folks." They weren't "us."