Professor witnessed history
Instead of teaching history with only a textbook, Utah State University professor Jay Allen Anderson can teach from personal experience as well.
Forty years ago, on Aug. 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech at the March on Washington for civil rights, and Anderson was there. Anderson was 23 years old and had just graduated from college.
“The March on Washington was the culmination of two years of working in the civil rights movement,” Anderson said.
Anderson remembers the city of Washington, D.C. was silent on the day of the march.
“No traffic, no radios, no horns. The whole city was shut down, President John F. Kennedy had shut government offices down, and this great city, the capitol of the free world, was absolutely silent, except for a half a million people singing the battle cries of the civil rights movement,” Anderson said.
Anderson said as he got closer to the Lincoln Memorial, the silence was filled with the sound of hundreds of thousands of people marching.
“Old women, old men, college boys, lawyers, doctors, all dressed in their Sunday best,” Anderson said. “The crowds were 40 to 50 people across, some carrying signs. Many people were crying.”
Martin Luther King Jr. was the last speaker scheduled to speak that day and Anderson said a lot of people had drifted away from the front of the stage by that time. Anderson said he was able to get within about 20 feet of King. King was scheduled to speak only four minutes, but as the speech went on, Anderson was moved.
“The thing I compare it to is going over Niagara Falls in a barrel,” Anderson said.
Anderson said that while there were soldiers in Washington, D.C. because of a fear the march would get out of hand, it was a completely peaceful march.
Anderson said this was not just a march for African-Americans, it was a march for equal rights for all Americans, and he knew at the time that history was being made.
“This was a march to start the ’60s,” Anderson said. “We knew we were marching for something.”
Anderson said he first became involved in the civil rights movement when he was a student at Hamilton College, a Presbyterian college in New York. He had a fraternity brother named Bob Moses who was African-American. Moses later ran the “Freedom Summer” program in Mississippi, registering African-Americans to vote.
Anderson said he wanted to go to Mississippi and help Moses, but Moses was afraid Anderson would be killed because of the civil unrest in the South at the time. Anderson asked Moses what he could do to help, and Moses said “go to Africa.”
Anderson went to Africa in September of 1963 and worked for an organization called “Teachers for East Africa” teaching African literature and history as well as American literature and history. Anderson taught in Africa for three years.
“The march gave me a great sense of pride, proud to be going to Africa,” Anderson said.
Anderson teaches a folklore class on the history of the 1960s and the legacy of the ’60s today, as well as a class on American cultures in film, at USU. “Dr. Jay,” as Anderson is called by his students, said these two courses are “extremely idealistic and very relevant to Cache Valley right now.”
Anderson uses “Sixties Sites” in his classes as extra credit, which is where students visit sites where Anderson said “the positive values of the ’60s are still helping to change the world for the better.”
Some of the sites include Planned Parenthood of Utah, USU women’s sports, Stokes Nature Center and Anderson’s own car, the “Silver Subaru” which is covered with bumper stickers. Anderson said he is also planning to have a ’60s fashion show, with his students wearing clothes from the ’60s purchased at Somebody’s Attic, another ’60s site students can visit.
“I am trying to show students that right here in Cache Valley there is diversity,” Anderson said. “If you can experience something the way I experienced the march, you remember.”
-tracylund@cc.usu.edu