A Time for Courage

Words of 60 years ago ring true today

The Kennedys arriving at Houston International Airport November 21, 1963. Photo: Cecil Stoughton. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum 

  “In all our lives, there is a fall from innocence. A time after which, we are never the same.” – Stand By Me

     It was Friday, November 22, 1963. I dressed carefully that morning, feeling in my bones that it would be a memorable day.

     They all were, really, ever since we’d moved to Texas a few months earlier. Everything was new, frightening, and exhilarating, all at once. I had just turned twelve.

     The soft sweater that I pulled over my head was, in my mind, an anomaly: high necked and short sleeved, which seemed to me rather bizarre, but was apparently the fashion in Austin, in the sixties, in the fall. The color was a muted shade of wine, not ruby, not maroon, but a pleasing blend of red and blue, just right to my already particular and discerning eye.

     A teacher would later tell me, when I had difficulty solving problems, that I was a visual person. I had to see a thing to understand and appreciate it. Which didn't exactly make sense to me at the time, because I loved music, and you couldn't see music…or could you? Certain melodies sometimes created waves of color in my head as I listened to them.

     My slacks were black, as were the flats on my feet. I brushed my long brown hair and walked down the hall to the kitchen, where my mother was flipping flapjacks. I held the hairbrush and two elastic bands out to my mother in a silent daily offering.

     “Not in here, honey, you know that.”

     My mother finished stacking the fragrant pancakes on a plate and covered them with another plate to keep them warm.

     “Boys!” my mother called to my brothers, “Breakfast is ready!”

      I followed my mother into the living room, where my hair was quickly and expertly divided into two sections and tightly plaited into a pair of long braids resting on my shoulders.

     Too excited to eat, I was excused from breakfast.

     “You didn't sleep much, did you?” my mother asked.

     I hadn't, actually. The events of the previous evening replayed in my mind far into the night.

A group of my new friends from Y-Teens, a youth organization sponsored by the YWCA, had helped decorate the Municipal Auditorium in downtown Austin for a fundraiser to be held the following night.  We hung crepe paper streamers on the stage. We spread white linen tablecloths on dozens of  tables, and set up hundreds of folding chairs. The tables were not yet set, but I imagined the china rimmed in gold - I’d heard the dinner was $100 a plate.

     When we ran, giggling, up the stairs to the balcony to survey our work, I caught my breath in pride and amazement at the sight. It looked so fine, so elegant! Like something from another world. And the next night our handsome young president would be taking the stage, walking the floorboards we had just finished sweeping.

     We lived in a neighborhood close to campus, in a rental house with neighbors from all over the world, mostly graduate students like my dad.  Walking across the university campus to the school I attended that morning, I was lost in thought. I felt I was a part of something big and important. I’d felt that way from the minute I entered my school back in September.

     Racially mixed, with students from all over the city, it was one of the first desegregated schools in Texas. Built on the U.T. campus, University Junior High boasted teachers who were qualified to teach at a college level, and students who were there because their parents wanted them there; they were not bussed in. The school received accolades all across the country. My first introduction to art, music, poetry, and creative writing, as well as mathematics and the sciences, which were not my forté, was at U.J.H.

     As I climbed the flight of wide stone steps leading up to the school’s entrance, my head was still swimming with the memories and dreams of the past few weeks and the hopes and expectations for the coming days. Greeting my friends in Spanish and English, I made my way down the cool, dim hallway to my first class of the day.

     When the lunch bell rang a few hours later, I skipped to my locker and retrieved the brown bag I’d brought from home. My stomach had been rumbling all morning, making me wish I’d eaten one of those flapjacks earlier.

      Instead of going downstairs to the noisy, smelly cafeteria, I went outside and sat cross-legged in the shade of a sprawling Chinaberry tree.  Although I had made some friends, I preferred to eat alone. Pulling a waxed paper package from the bag, I unwrapped a cheese and mayonnaise sandwich and began to devour it. A boat tailed grackle swooped down from the branches overhead and begged for scraps of food, and I obliged, tossing bread crusts and tiny bits of apple to the bird as I munched.

     After depositing my bag in the trash can inside the building, and picking up books from my locker, I took a seat in my next class - math. It was my least favorite class, apart from biology, in which I had passed out during the dissection of a frog last month, the combination of early autumn heat and formaldehyde being too much for  me.

     The saving grace of math class was the presence of a student teacher I had a crush on. But even he failed to hold my interest this afternoon. I gazed out the window at the azure sky, dreamily envisioning the parade downtown later on, the festivities in store for so many tonight, and the boundless possibilities of the future.

     My reverie was abruptly interrupted by the crackling of the P.A. system. The principal’s voice was oddly strangled as he issued the news bulletin. The president had been shot in Dallas. School was hastily dismissed.

     The walk home was a blur. Groups of college students huddled together, quietly weeping. Normally the fountain at the center of campus was a magnet for me, where I'd stop to admire it, run my fingers in the water, feel the cool spray on my face as I passed. But today I hurried by sightlessly, as if in a trance.

    When I reached the sidewalk in front of my house, the front door opened, and my mother held her arms out in a comforting embrace. Together we entered the cool, dark living room, where my father sat on the couch, his head in his hands.  It was then that I knew it was true. There would be no parade this evening, no dinner in Austin tonight.

      JFK was dead.

“For this country is moving and it must not stop. It cannot stop. For this is a time for courage and a time for challenge. Neither conformity nor complacency will do. Neither the fanatics nor the faint-hearted are needed. And our duty as a party is not to our party alone, but to the Nation, and, indeed, to all mankind. Our duty is not merely the preservation of political power but the preservation of peace and freedom.

So let us not be petty when our cause is so great. Let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when our Nation's future is at stake. Let us stand together with renewed confidence in our cause--united in our heritage of the past and our hopes for the future--and determined that this land we love shall lead all mankind into new frontiers of peace and abundance.”

John F. Kennedy

Taken from the speech he was scheduled to make in Austin on November 22, 1963