ABSTRACT
I t is important to recall this convergence toward a new majority in America. Movements and Machiavellians had fought their way to common ground. No one could stop us. I was almost twenty-three years old. But the same crescendo of progress set off a furious backlash. On September
15, two weeks after the Washington march, bombers blew up a Birmingham church, killing four African American children: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. On November 22, John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, and the plates beneath us began to shift. Who killed him and why? The evidence may remain blurred forever-even today, mountains of documents remain classified-but there is a street wisdom that continues to shadow my empirical and objective sorting of the evidence. Street or folk wisdom is a way of telling “stories” that define the orientation of social movements. The stories of Moses and the slaves is one such story, the crucifixion of Jesus another. The stories can mislead people into unprovable theorizing, but the stories also describe something authentic. The stories contain characters who become larger than life, leaders of slave insurrections, martyrs for justice, figures like pharaohs and gods on Olympus.
