Some Go to Canada … Some Go to War

The Ethical Will of Donald Armstrong, Part 13

For an explanation of what an ‘Ethical Will’ is, please see my previous post, ‘I Leave to You … Whatever Wisdom I May Have Gained.’

The 1960s were a time of incredible change and ferment in America. As the decade began, the United States was a still a segregated society, but on the cusp of dramatic change. In 1954, the Supreme Court had ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Black Americans, relegated to a second class status and ruled by terror in many southern states, sensed that their time had finally come.

In 1955, a woman named Rosa Parks had refused to stand and yield her seat on a city bus to a white man — as required by law. Parks was arrested, but the Black community rallied around her, launching a year-long bus strike under the leadership of a charismatic young preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr. In the fall of 1960, another charismatic young man was elected president of the United States. A Catholic of Irish descent, John F. Kennedy would frame the civil rights movement as a moral issue, as much as it was a legal matter. He proposed a sweeping federal law, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of skin color.

Kennedy’s efforts provoked a violent reaction in the southern states, where…