Fw: from Peter Salter -- JFK

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Peter Salter 
To: Hunter Gray 
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2013 8:54 AM
Subject: Re: JFK


This was great. I spent a day last week helping edit about 200 column inches of reader submissions that appeared in the paper yesterday. This would have made a good addition.

Hope you don't mind that I posted your story on Facebook this morning.

Later




On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 5:22 AM, Hunter Gray <[email protected]> wrote:

  I mentioned this on RBB some years ago -- but it's worth another, given our discussional context.

  For a vast number of people, the day of JFK's murder was genuinely surreal.  It was for me as well, partly because of the signal tragedy, although I was not a great Kennedy admirer, but also because of a strange personal coincidence.

  Ella Baker and I had been traveling across parts of the Illinois and Iowa area, speaking on behalf of the Civil Rights Bill -- later, of course, the'64 Act. Then Ella had to return to Atlanta for a few days -- she was Advisor to SNCC -- and I carried on solo for awhile.  I left Lincoln, Nebraska, after a couple of talks, on that fateful morning.  At Denver, we learned that JFK had been shot; at Albuquerque, the word was that he was dead. 

  I left Albuquerque on a Frontier flight for Flagstaff and a quick visit with my parents.  In our plane, there was only myself and another passenger, far in the back.  Suddenly, he was at my side.  It was Jack Langguth, of the NYT Los Angeles office. He had been in Jackson in the wild heat of mass brutality and Medgar Evers' murder -- a good guy who, in that hellish situation, quickly became a good friend. I had not seen him since then. (Most the outside reporters were good, ran many risks themselves.)

  Jack had just that very late afternoon come from Dallas, where he had witnessed much -- and was now on his way back to L.A. since more Times people were flowing fast into Dallas. We talked of the parallels between Medgar's murder and that of JFK.

  We both agreed that nothing anymore could happen in this country that would be surprising to us. As we swung into Flagstaff, he allowed that things did seem simpler in our high mountain setting.  He met my parents and we all had a good visit before he took the next leg of his journey.

  H
   


  HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq / 
  St. Francis Abenaki / St. Regis Mohawk 
  Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO

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