Elijah Baley wrote:
The Freedom Rides may not have quite the notoriety as Little Rock, Selma, Montgomery, etc. but it's pretty close. I highly recommend the PBS show on it - plus Eyes on the Prize, if you've never seen that series.
I'm thinking that American history classes may need to work backwards in time; I don't know if it's changed from my day, but we spent so much time on everything up to WWII, the last 60-70 years aren't getting their due. And they're arguably a lot more relevant than colonial life.
I'd vaguely heard the term Freedom Riders, and now it just clicked in for me as to where I'd heard it: The theme song to the TV show
Maude.
Didn't find out exactly what/who they were, or even that they were an actual thing until recently.
That brings up another theory I've often thought. It seems that stuff that occurred
just before you start to become aware of stuff is often the last stuff you find out about. 1961 was one of the years
just before I began to notice anything beyond my little-kid toys and games, so I didn't really experience it and the only way I would have found out would be either by study or by the pure chance of seeing or reading the right thing at the right time.
In other words, when I was little I learned more about Babe Ruth's 1927 home run record than I did about Mantle's 1961 record.
A more astonishing example of this little theory of mine is about my ex-wife and her 6-years-younger cousin. The ex was born in 1957 and was wayyyy into pop culture by the time the Beatles came onto the scene, and she remebers them well. She has told me that she mentioned the Beatles to that younger cousin (born in 1963), and she was amazed to find that her cousin had never even
heard of them!