Will Bunch: Children of the 1960s watch in pain as the story of our lifetime is erased

[Nevilledog]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/trump-presidency-1960s-civil-rights-20250126.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/HAPSG

My almost pathological obsession with what historians now call “the Long Sixties” — especially the years between JFK’s assassination in 1963 and Richard Nixon’s Watergate downfall in 1974 — includes way too much time still listening to the jangly pop anthems that blared in mono from WABC on an AM car radio back when I was in middle school.

More than a half-century later, now coming from something called Pandora and a magical device in my jeans pocket, I so often hear the hidden messages of hope and, yes, naivety buried behind layers of power chords and a Farfisa organ like some archeological dig.

One song that’s become a soulmate to my personal AI algorithm is Three Dog Night’s 1972 No. 1 remake of “Black and White” — a 3-minute-and-24-second window into what it felt like to be a 13-year-old in a moment that was supposed to last forever until it didn’t. The song was actually written in the 1950s (lyrics by actor Alan Arkin’s father, David, sung first by Pete Seeger) to celebrate a nation that was finally overcoming its grim history of racial segregation in the classroom.

“A child is Black/A child is white/Together they learn to read and write,” is how the Three Dog Night version begins, but the line that really gets me when I hear it nearly 53 years later is when they sing, “And now a child can understand/That this is the law of all the land.”

*snip*