Alabama Gov. George Wallace stands in front of schoolhouse doors

The day started with Gov. George Wallace blocking the schoolhouse doors, the author writes.

A day that shook the world

Some days stand out from almost all others in their significance. Most of the dates we remember, such as Dec. 7, 1941, Nov. 22, 1963, and Sept. 11, 2001, are notorious for a single event. On rare occasions, there is a concurrence of two major events on a single day. One thinks, for example, of Darwin and Lincoln being born on the same day in 1809.

But 50 years ago this week, June 11, 1963, is historically unique in having four major events that shaped the tumultuous decade of the ’60s happen on a single date.

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On that eventful day, the bouncing ball of national media attention to civil rights shifted in rapid succession from Tuscaloosa, Ala., to Washington, and then to Jackson, Miss.

( PHOTOS: June 11, 1963)

In the morning, Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace “stood in the schoolhouse door” in Tuscaloosa to block the integration of the University of Alabama. Once he had milked all the publicity he could from the photo-op and President John F. Kennedy had federalized the Alabama National Guard in the afternoon, Wallace stood aside.

As Wallace backed down, Kennedy turned to his assistant Ted Sorensen and said, “I think we’d better give that speech tonight.” The speechwriter was flabbergasted because the president was referring to a call for a civil rights bill, but there was as yet no specific plan for such a bill and certainly not for a presidential speech on the subject.

Fresh off his widely hailed address at American University on easing Cold War tensions and the nuclear threat the night before, Kennedy made an impulsive decision in the late afternoon to go on national television that evening to talk to the American people about race and to call for the passage of a civil rights bill. Twenty-four hours after he had called for making “the world safe for diversity,” he would now call for making the United States a place where its diverse citizens could enjoy safety and equality. Apart from the Cuban missile crisis, these two inspiring speeches on June 10 and 11, 1963, were the finest moments in JFK’s presidency.

The civil rights address was a stirring speech in which Kennedy went much further to identify with the cause of freedom for all Americans than he ever had before. He spoke of a “moral crisis” facing the nation. “We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other, that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes?”

Among those impressed with Kennedy’s words that night was Martin Luther King Jr., who turned to the Rev. Walter Fauntroy when the president finished and said, “Walter, can you believe that white man not only stepped up to the plate, he hit it over the fence!”

Within hours of the end of the speech, a white American who was not prepared to accept black Americans as part of “us” shot Medgar Evers in the back as the Mississippi NAACP leader got out of his car at his home in Jackson. Evers was dead within an hour.

Robert S. McElvaine