15 May 2009
Another Day in Virginia
(The Econowash Today)
I have two recollections of the wide world from the 1950s. There is a jumble of personal stuff, of course, but the two things that filled my little brain with dread were the news of Ike’s heart attack in 1955.
Why that stayed with me all these years may have been a function of how my folks reacted to it- what was a heart attack, anyway? Of perhaps it was the first brush with the notion that things out there beyond the front yard were a little scarier than the grown-ups let on.
I was in the hospital- tonsils, the bane of 1950s childhood- when Soviet tanks rolled across Hungary. It would have been newsreel coverage on the little black and white television in the day-room, and I would not have known that it started as a student march through central Budapest to the Parliament. The Soviets reacted strongly, and the image of their tanks and Molotov cocktails stayed with me.
So when people say the 1950s were normal and the world went mad in the 1960s are just reflecting a lack of perspective, just as we are today. But I will grant you that the 1960s had their moments.
The hallmark of a decade usually is represented in the first years of the next one- for example, my pals and I think of the ‘60s sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll as actually happening in the early 1970s. So, in my mind the 1950s did not die until John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas in November of 1963, nearly a third of the way through the decade.
A friend who is a position to have known some things once told me that it was pretty clear that LBJ was responsible, and that might have been the exact instant that nothing made sense any more.
It took a while, though. College kids were still wearing sport-coats and dresses then, in a gender appropriate manner, and the full flower of lunacy had yet to manifest itself. But it was building. Here in Buckingham the big new Intelligence Agency was filling up the old wooden block buildings at Arlington Hall, and the Buckingham neighborhood looked nothing like it would in just a few short years.
The Civil Rights struggle was pretty much already decided here; Arlington rejected the concept of massive resistance to integration, and if the schools were not fully integrated until the middle part of the decade, the issue was still settled in theory, if not fact, and there were no riots.
The underpinnings of segregation were still profound, and the challenge of doing anything meaningful about it was daunting. Hence the ACCESS protestors at the Buckingham Rental Office, and the fight to beat down the racial covenants that hindered open housing.
Naturally, the barriers still had to be assaulted, one by one, and there were always those who were willing to stand on the barricades against change.
Nor did the participants in the struggle have anything like a unified approach.
One of our heroes of the time was Malcolm X, once known as Detroit Red, who began his real education in a prison library while serving time for robbery. His spiritual journey was an inspiration, and his former comrades in the Nation of Islam shot him down on February 22, 1965, as he gave a speech in the Harlem Ballroom.
The gunshots echoed through the next ten years. Think of them all. It is quite remarkable, or better said, surreal.
In sequence, it was then the turn of the white extremists.
The first attempt to kill George Lincoln Rockwell came in June of 1967, the year that Buckingham gave up and began to integrate. Returning from shopping, he drove into the farm lane off Wilson Boulevard and found it blocked by a tree. When the Fuhrer attempted to clear a path, two shots were taken at him from behind the swastika-bedecked pillars that marked the drive.
Rockwell was nearly hit by a ricochet, and pursued the gunman on foot but he got away.
Chastened by the experience, he applied to the Arlington County police for a pistol permit to carry a weapon, but no action was taken.
A friend of mine- now a distinguished Judge- was at the Arlington County courthouse on August 25, 1967. He was still in law school at the time, doing a summer internship. He was doing a title search when there was a commotion in the building, and someone pointed out police snipers deployed on the roof as they brought in a prisoner. Word spread it was the man who had just shot Rockwell outside the Econowash Laundromat at the Dominion Hills strip mall across from Upton Hill.
The American Nazi leader has just finished washing his skivvies at the coin machines inside when two bullets crashed through the windshield of his 1958 Chevrolet. He emerged from the passenger side door, pointing toward the roof where the shots had come from, and collapsed.
He died there on the pavement within a couple minutes.
My pal recalls thinking it was just another day in Virginia...which sums up how we all were beginning to feel as the decade went on. He had a reason to be familiar with the legal code, and on that day in this state it was still a misdemeanor to fail to segregate the races in public places, and a felony to intermarry between the races.
Rockwell is a footnote to the larger story, though fan mail still arrives at the coffee shop where Nazi headquarters moved after this death. For years afterward, followers painted swastikas in parking space where he had died, but that appears to have stopped in the 1980s when the Nazis left Arlington for New Berlin, Wisconsin.
The current owner of the Java Shack had the place exorcized after he set up shop, and aside from the occasional letter to Commander Rockwell, hasn’t reported any problems since.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com