For all of the attention that 1968 has justifiably garnered this year let us also remember the acrimony and upheaval that existed in1963.   It was 45 years ago that the door officially closed on any notions that we lived in an Ozzie and Harriet society.  It was the first time we acknowledged that hope and hostility openly lived side by side. 

The wheels of change were turning and there was little that the status quo could do to stop it.  Moreover, 1963 has as much to do, if not more so, with where we are today, as did 1968.

The year began with Alabama Governor, George Wallace standing in the same place where Jefferson Davis once stood proclaiming in his inaugural address: “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

In February, travel, financial and commercial transactions by United States citizens to Cuba were made illegal by the Kennedy Administration, but not before the president dispatched Pierre Salinger to secure 1,200 Cuban cigars.

In April, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference kicked off its “Project C” campaign against segregation in Birmingham.  The “C” stood for the confrontation that their nonviolent direct action approach anticipated from Birmingham Police Commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor.

Connor, with his fire hoses and police dogs, became a household name as he symbolized racial hostility in the South.  It was Connor who had Martin Luther King arrested, prompting King to write his famous 6,000-word epistle, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

On June 11, Gov. Wallace stood in front of the doors at the University of Alabama in a symbolic gesture prohibiting two black students from attempting to enroll, escorted by assistant U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach along with federal troops.

Later that evening, President Kennedy addressed the nation, proposing a Civil Rights bill, stating: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue.”

The next day, actually hours after the president’s address, Byron De La Beckwith assassinated NAACP Field Secretary, Medgar Evers, in front of his house in Jackson, Mississippi—making Evers an early martyr of the Civil Rights Movement.

In August, King delivered his, “I Have a Dream Speech,” but 19 days later, the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, killing four young girls. 

Sandwiched between these two seminal events, Kennedy gave an interview to Walter Cronkite.  Speaking about America’s involvement in Vietnam, the president stated: “In the final analysis it’s their war (South Vietnam), they are the one’s who have to win it or lose it.” 

Two months later, South Vietnam President, Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown and executed. Shortly after Diem’s death, U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge informed the president, “The prospects now are for a shorter war.”

Exactly 20 days after Diem was assassinated, the same fate befell Kennedy in Dallas.  Approximately, one month later, Time Magazine named Martin Luther King as its “1963 Man of the Year.”

Many of the pivotal moments that occurred 45 years ago, we continue, in some form, to grapple with today. 

Racism may not come in the form of Bull Connor, but it is still an issue.  Few lessons were learned from our experience in Vietnam as Iraq bears witness.  The country continues to be hamstrung by its policy toward Cuba.

We’ve replaced the miscalculations of the Cold War’s “Domino Theory” with the indefinable war on terror and the neo-con dream of spreading democracy by force to places that don’t desire it.  But it remains the hope and not the hostility that defines 1963.

As much as 1963 shattered much of the nation’s innocence, it was also a year that tested the elasticity of the Constitution in ways never imagined by the Founders.

Given our current state, it is understandable that we would remember 1968 and Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, along with the tumultuous Democratic Convention.  But it was 1963 when we came to the realization that hope and hostility lived, and continues to live, in close proximity.