1863, 1963, 2013

I've been reading Stephen Oates biography of Martin Luther King. Going over events again, it is amazing how much was encompassed in that one year of 1963. There was the Birmingham campaign, Letter from Birmingham Jail, the March on Washington, the murder of Medgar Evans, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I don't remember much being done to commemorate these events in 2003, which would have been the 40th anniversary. Will there be a 50th anniversary to any of these events? Will memorials be scattered, like say a celebration of the March on Washington, or a commemorative magazine issue on Kennedy? Or will the year be taken as a whole? Because it seems like a major aspect to the events of '63 is their compactness with everything else that was going on at that time, a sense of portentous events being wedged in tightly on on top of the other in a short calendar space. There is a fevered atmosphere in that jumble that a commemoration of only one episode wouldn't capture. The 50th anniversary of 1963 will be 2013. Having just finished the first term of the first African American president, will we be inclined to look back 50 years for our comparisons and contrasts of the milestone? 1963 was momentous in part because Kennedy and King were both looking over their shoulders to 1863 and Emancipation Proclamation, whose centennial was that year. History is like a backward glance sweepstakes; the present is always looking back somewhere and it is simply a question of in what direction the nostalgia tends.