I recently read the new book “Unfinished Love Story — a Personal History of the 1960’s” by presidential scholar Doris Kearns Goodwin. Reading it was very emotional, and spurred my own memories. Especially about why I became a lawyer.
I was in 10th grade when John F. Kennedy was elected President, and absolutely one who felt summoned by his call to “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country!” I was a freshman at Michigan State University when he was assassinated in 1963.
After that trauma , somehow there was still hope that we could do better, but it was uneven. The rest of the 1960’s was filled with turmoil, tragedies and conflict, mixed with positive change. The movement for civil rights, particularly voting rights in the South, greatly expanded and was increasingly covered by the national media.
In 1963 marches were on TV, and we saw the police attacking protesters — including school kids — with dogs, firehoses and batons. The 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, killing four young Black girls. It was unbelievable that this was happening. During Freedom Summer of 1964, white volunteers went to Mississippi to help register Black voters. I wanted to do something, be part of it. But I was too timid. Three of those volunteers with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney were murdered.
The Selma to Montgomery, Alabama marches took place in March, 1965. John Lewis, later a Member of Congress, was violently beaten by police on “Bloody Sunday” while trying to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. then publicly called for people to come to Alabama to join the protests. Violet Liuzzo, a white mother of five in Detroit showed up, and was shot to death while transporting protesters.
My husband and I visited Alabama this past February, following the Civil Rights Trail in Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma. We remembered the worst of what happened there, and learned much more detail at the 16th Street Baptist Church and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the outstanding Legacy Museum in Montgomery, and the Lowndes Interpretive Center between Montgomery and Selma.
As I read the exhibits, I kept thinking about the violence, about what so many Black people endured for so long, about how hard people fought for decades to be able to vote, many being murdered. Then I thought about how much has been lost since the 1960’s, about how the fight continues. and about how important the vote is to those who seek to deny it, and unappreciated by many who have that right.
I graduated from Michigan State University in 1967 and got a job in Philadelphia. In April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. The week before, I’d passed by a recruiter for VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), known as the “domestic Peace Corps.” Now, it seemed that VISTA was a way I could help people, help make things more equal in this country, so I signed up.
It got worse. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated only two months later in Los Angeles, the night he won the California Democratic presidential primary. There were riots in many cities across the country, the Vietnam War was intensifying and dividing us, and it seemed like everything was out of control.
In VISTA, I was assigned to a Legal Aid Clinic in Chicago, one of the first-ever paralegals. The projects I worked on with the legal services attorneys related to exposing how the legal system was misused to take advantage of poor people.
I soon realized that just wanting to help people was not enough, I really needed a skill. To me, the law seemed to be the answer. I went to law school in Detroit 1970-73, and have tried to use the law to make a difference in people’s lives ever since. My impact has been very small, though, one person — or case — at a time.
I haven’t thought about all of this in decades. It is jarring to recall the terrible upheaval our country was going through then, and what could have been.
— Penny Clute has been an attorney since 1973. She was Clinton County district attorney from 1989 through 2001, then Plattsburgh City Court judge until her retirement in January 2012.
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RESOURCES
The Civil Rights Trail — https://civilrightstrail.com/
Freedom Summer 1964 — https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/freedom-summer
Andrew Goodman — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Goodman_(activist) — a mountain near Tupper Lake was named for him in 2002
Selma to Montgomery Marches 1965 — https://tinyurl.com/h4vs4fv3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_to_Montgomery_marches
https://tinyurl.com/4fysbr8c
Violet Liuzzo —
https://tinyurl.com/bd4zs8f5