Remembering the '60s

Dick Cooper said "without a doubt" events of the 1960s, especially his firsthand view of the Birmingham race riots, helped form who he is today.

The 1960s were a turbulent time for America.

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963, and his brother, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, was shot June 5, 1968. He died a day later.

The country was involved in the Vietnam War, which prompted protests on college campuses. The civil rights movement was gaining momentum and turned tragic with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

Richard Milhous Nixon was elected president of the United States and The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix continued to make their mark in rock 'n' roll history.

Now, another presidential election is approaching, and with the mantra of "change" from one presidential contender, those who came of age in the 1960s remember their experiences with "change" and how those experiences shaped them as adults.

Cooper, a local music historian and employee of FAME Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, grew up in Birmingham, the scene of numerous civil rights protests.

He worked as a reporter for the Birmingham Post Herald, which gave him a firsthand view of the civil rights movement in Alabama.

"I was there when they were blowing people down the street with firehoses," Cooper said. "I was around for the riots."

After King's assassination April 4, 1968, Cooper covered the slain civil rights leader's memorial service at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the same church that was the scene of a racially motivated bombing that killed four young girls in September 1963.

Cooper admitted that during the 1960s, he developed a dislike for the way the military was being used during protests.

This happened after a stint in the U.S. Air Force, and later the Air National Guard, where he was trained how to control people during riots.

"I didn't really care for that too much," Cooper said. "I came to realize that the military was being used to bully other people. I felt that activity was totally un-American."

The '60s were not just a time of upheaval and tragedy. Cooper, who had left Birmingham for north Alabama, also was involved in the coverage of one of the country's greatest scientific triumphs.

"I worked at the Decatur Daily as a science and education writer in late 1968," Cooper said. "I started covering NASA and the initial moon landing."

When Cooper came to the Shoals in 1972 to work at the Florence Times/Tri-Cities Daily, he began covering local music and saw a different side of race relations.

"In the Shoals, there wasn't much racial prejudice," Cooper said, referring to the area itself and especially the music industry.

He marveled at the fact that while racial tensions were high in Birmingham and Decatur, in the Shoals, Rick Hall was using white musicians to cut songs for black artists.

"It was the antithesis of what you'd find in Birmingham," he said.

At a time when anti-war protests permeated many college campuses, Ron Hudson spent the summer of 1968 in the Reserve Officers Training Corps at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

Hudson, a 61-year-old retired Colbert County assistant district attorney, was an undergraduate student at the University of Alabama during the 1960s.

"I was at the opposite end of the hippie movement," Hudson said. "Vietnam was raging at that time. A lot of people did what I did; they got into ROTC or the guard."

Hudson said he went into ROTC on the advice of his father, "an old World War II enlisted man." Students in ROTC could enter the military as officers upon

graduation.

Hudson said the University of Alabama, like many college campuses, was the scene of protests, sit-ins and other acts of civil disobedience to protest a variety of issues, such as racial segregation and the Vietnam War.

Even before Hudson arrived on campus, the university saw Gov. George Wallace "stand in the schoolhouse door" in 1963 to prevent two black students from enrolling at the university. Alabama National Guard troops were called in to protect the students.

There also were demonstrations against the Vietnam War while Hudson was attending law school at the university. While he steered clear of them, Hudson said an acquaintance who went to watch the protest was arrested.

While he was aware of the protests that were occurring on the UA campus at the time, Hudson said he stayed focused on why he was in college.

"My main focus was getting an education," he said.

For Hudson, the '60s were a time when young people began to be exposed to different ideas, such as recreational drugs, "free love" and questioning and standing up against the status quo.

"We were exposed to a lot of crazy stuff," Hudson said.

One thing Hudson has noticed about the 1960s is how history appears to be repeating itself in the form of many college students' support of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

He said young people of the 1960s saw Kennedy as an alternative to older politicians such as Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, who received the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968. Humphrey lost the 1968 presidential race to Nixon.

"Everyone was sick of Vietnam," Hudson said. "People my age were pretty fed up with the war situation. People began to be favorable to Bobby Kennedy."

During the late 1960s, war protests, particularly on college campuses, were becoming more and more common, and at times, violent.

Hudson said Kennedy's popularity with young people during an unpopular war is similar to what Obama is experiencing today with the support he's receiving from young people who oppose the war in Iraq.

Hudson said Kennedy spoke at a campaign rally at the university in April 1968. Kennedy would be assassinated two months later.

While he is a few years older, musician Harvey Thompson's life parallels Hudson's in that he was also in college during the late 1960s and was also a military man.

"I grew up in Tuscaloosa and went to school in Nashville," said Thompson, a famed saxophone player known for his association with "The Fame Gang" and "The Muscle Shoals Horns."

Thompson, 67, said he was attending Tennessee State University with the idea of becoming a music teacher. He frequently drove to Muscle Shoals to work as a session musician at Hall's FAME Recording Studio with the likes of Harrison Calloway and Aaron Varnell.

As in Tuscaloosa, Nashville college campuses were seeing their share of anti-war protests and sit-ins, but most of it occurred in 1960 and was associated with the segregation issue.

In 1960, students in Nashville began testing segregation policies by sitting down at segregated lunch counters in the city.

In May 1968, on his birthday actually, Thompson was sworn in as a U.S. soldier.

As racial issues reached a boiling point in the late '60s, punctuated by the assassination of King, Thompson found acceptance as a musician.

"In art, there were never any problems," Thompson said.

In fact, Thompson even found a way to perform with the Vietnamese members of a jazz band while in Saigon.

"They couldn't understand what I was saying, I couldn't understand what they were saying, but the music was the same," Thompson said. "Music is the universal

language."

After his tour of duty ended, again on his birthday, Thompson resumed his studies and his relationship with FAME Recording Studios.

For Thompson, the '60s were a time when he was able to make contacts in the music industry that helped him continue to make a living as a performing musician, which he does to this day.

The only problem associated with his tour of duty in Vietnam was an inability to fall asleep quickly.

"I'd lie awake a long time before I go to sleep," he said. "It's from pulling guard duty. You had to listen."

Unlike Thompson and Hudson, Florence resident Tom Foster didn't see the type of campus unrest in Louisiana and Mississippi.

"What most impressed me was the civil rights movement," said Foster, 68, a former teacher and agricultural economist who spent 20 years at the Tennessee Valley Authority's International Fertilizer Development Center in Muscle Shoals.

"I was in Baton Rouge at the time, and in south central Louisiana it was pretty active," Foster said.

He remembers where he was when President John F. Kennedy was shot, and when King was assassinated five years later in Memphis, Foster said he remembers that he was in his car at the intersection of Government Street and Highland Road in Baton Rouge.

"There wasn't much war protest," Foster said. "I moved to Starkville (Miss.) and the war protesters - there were about five of them."

Foster said the '60s forced him to be more conservative, not so much in the realm of social issues, but in the fiscal sense.

Foster said his fiscal conservatism formed out of what he saw as the excesses created by President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society.

The Great Society was a set of domestic programs established by Johnson with the goal of ending racial injustice and eliminating poverty.

In addition to the assassinations of Kennedy and King and the civil rights movement, Foster said he was affected by the loss of students in the Vietnam War.

"The tragedy of both events is what stuck with me, realizing how much things were changing," Foster said.

Russ Corey can be reached at 740-5738 or russ.corey@TimesDaily.com.