Over the last few days, we've shared the thoughts of people who experienced the 1960s. How do they think that era's turbulence compares to today’s? In our final installment, we meet a retired professor of history, who watched developments unfold.
Glen Jeansonne is a professor emeritus at UW-Milwaukee. He grew up in a small Louisiana town and was a child in the early 1960s. Jeansonne says he recalls witnessing the struggle for civil rights at the town's pool.
"One day, the black community leaders and I would say about five or six young black teenagers, decided they were going to integrate the swimming pool. There was a big fight, and all the white people who worked at the pool came out, and they really beat up those black guys," Jeansonne says.
Jeansonne says he saw a similar scene when African Americans attempted to integrate a local church during the Sunday service.
"The man who taught the Sunday school class, the deacons, these were the real pillars of the church and supposed to be men of peace and all of that, but they beat the hell out of those black people who wanted to come into the First Baptist Church, and they never tried again," Jeansonne says.
In the late `60s, Jeansonne was a college student at Florida State University. There he remembers watching another major conflict of the era: the fight against the Vietnam War.
"We had just scores and scores of students who were opposed to the Vietnam War and who marched every day. Scuffles broke out and a lot of students boycotted classes," Jeansonne says.
Jeansonne wasn't a war protester. But out of curiosity, he attended a class that one of them taught.
"There was one guy, they called him 'Radical Jack.' He taught a course on how to foment a revolution in America. It wasn’t part of a curriculum, but he was allowed to teach it on the basis of free speech," Jeansonne says.
Jeansonne says "Radical Jack" drew a good crowd the first day, but students weren't impressed. "Once most people realized that he didn't have anything important to say, they quit coming."
Jeansonne says the decade was stressful for many who lived through it. Yet he believes there's more discord today, such as the chasm between Democrats and Republicans. He says although lawmakers often didn’t see eye-to-eye in the `60s, the political rift wasn't as wide.
"Lyndon Johnson still got a lot of very significant domestic legislation passed. He got three civil rights bills passed, he got the Great Society bills passed. We weren't in gridlock like we are today," Jeansonne says,
Jeansonne blames social media, in part, for today’s acrimony in politics and society. He says the technology can spread hostility and knee-jerk reactions like wildfire, sometimes, at the expense of common sense.
"Somebody tweets something angry and then the other people join in. In the hate-mongers' case, ISIS radicalizes people by tweeting, and so forth," Jeansonne says. He adds that some social media messages contain a "depth of hatred" that most people would not have readily shared in the 1960s.
