The Maryland Suburbs of Washington, DC in the 1960's

In the 1960's, we lived in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC. It was hard to differentiate the local news from national events. When Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated in Memphis, my parents had a two-hour commute home as parts of the District burned. The first thing my dad did was come to pick me up from Boy Scouts.



After Robert Kennedy was killed and his funeral was scheduled for DC, a number of us went down to the railroad tracks to watch the funeral train pass by. I remember watching as the widow stood on a platform at the end of the train and waved to us as we paid our respects.



And there was the campaign stop of Governor George Wallace at the nearby Capital Plaza shopping center. There was a guy selling ice creams, including ices called bomb pops, which some of the kids tossed at Wallace, who was perceived as a racist to many of us even in Maryland. There was a Nazi Party van passing back and forth in the shopping center parking lot probably didn't help with his perception management. It would only be a few campaign stops later that Wallace was shot and seriously wounded in Maryland.

My father took me to a public assembly at the cafeteria of Cooper Lane Elementary School in Landover, Maryland, to sign me up for Cub Scouts when I was about eight years old. Since we lived in a new housing development, there hadn't been a Cub Scout troop there before, so the meeting was organizational in nature. Somehow my dad ended up becoming the cubmaster. During the 1960's, My Cub Scout den mother was the first wife of then Congressman Larry Hogan. Mr Hogan would end up being the first Republican on the House Judiciary Committee to back the impeachment of President Richard Nixon in 1974. My sister came home from the University of Maryland with teargas in her eyes because of ongoing campus protests against the Viet Nam War.

My dad worked as a composite artist at FBI Headquarters. While he worked some of the dicier cases of the 1960's, including the Black Panthers in Chicago, he was always preaching civil rights at home. He attended MLK's March on Washington in 1963. He battled the segregationist policies of his local church. He told me that the elders took a visiting African American couple out to the front porch of the church and gave them a brief lesson in how birds of a feather flock together and sent them away. He was outraged and immediately moved our family to another congregation. One of my father's favorite Christmas songs, one that he carefully explained to me, was "Some Children See Him" as sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford.



In this time of Christmastide, we should remember that peace on Earth begins with the observance of equal rights, racial equality, civil liberties, and human dignity. Bring compassion to your efforts in all you do, including your research into genealogy and local history.