Night Call – The WASP In Trouble – November 26, 1968 – Eastern Educational Radio Network – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
Of everything that came to define the 1960s, nothing came as close to tearing up the fabric of America as the issue of race. The Civil Rights movement in America, although it got its start in the 1950s, came to the boiling point in the 1960s. It came to signify what was wrong in our society and it meant, in no uncertain terms, that America was undergoing a change – a huge one – one that continues to this day.
Lest most people think the Race issue in America changed on that day in 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his pivotal “I Have A Dream” address – the problem simply didn’t go away – the light of brotherhood and love spread over the nation like a blanket of warmth – no. It was a signal that the fight for America was on – it was just beginning and it set the stage for decades of bloodshed and resistance – resistance to the inevitable – resistance to maintaining a status quo that was doomed from the start.
The WASP in America was rapidly becoming an endangered species (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), one whose time of reckoning long since past it’s sell-by date. A frame of mind and a lifestyle that was outmoded, outdated and just plain wrong.
The bigotry and racism that became such an integral part of America from roughly the late 1700’s on no long applied to America in the 1960s. But Racism in America clung on, grasping at straws, tearing at the fabric of our society – desperately trying to hold on to power – power that was assumed – power that was never meant to be the sole property of one race over another.
This episode of the Telephone call-in program Night Call tackles the issue, and answering questions is Julius Horwitz, a social reform activist and author of several books on the subject of White Racism.
Even in 1968, the notion is very clear that Racism was a subject and state of mind deeply rooted in American culture – that it was, and continues to be no easy fix.
Here is that episode of Night Call from November 26, 1968 as heard over the Eastern Educational Radio Network (pre-cursor to NPR).
