A day that changed America
(CBS News) I was still a newspaper reporter in Fort Worth when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke that day. I watched it all on television with wonder and relief.
Wonder at the power of his words . . . relief that it had all gone so peacefully.
By then, I considered myself an enlightened person on race. But I had grown up in Jim Crow Texas, where whites and blacks lived in worlds separate in ways large and small.
I never shook hands with a black person until I was in the Air Force -- not that I didn't want to, I just never had the occasion. They lived on one side of town, I lived on the other.
Schools were still mostly segregated, and the newspaper where I worked generally ignored news about black people.
Special section: MLK's dream: 50 years later
White people were not accustomed to seeing so many black people in one place as converged in Washington that day. So it made them nervous -- they worried it could turn into a race riot, a concern we later learned was shared by President Kennedy.
It did not turn into a race riot. Instead, it was a turning point in American history, a day that changed America, not just for African Americans, but for all of us.
I know. I was there back in the olden days.
