ABSTRACT
SOMETIMES PARTICULAR EVENTS seem to contain a swirl of the conflictual social forces that surround them. Sometimes a crisis prompts one group to remind another that history has moved on. Sometimes an individual subject seems to embody a period. As America awoke after dozing in its postwar complacency, the 1960s exploded with demands for basic human rights. With those demands met, at least in a legal sense, the country approached the final two decades of the millennium in need of an idol who transcended the color divisions. The idol was able to do this, being an African American who was scarcely black and, ultimately, scarcely human.
