MMMM # 258 Wallace's Best Known Speech, RIP Patterson

     Today is the 50th Anniversary of the former Governor's Segregation Now, Segregation, Tomorrow, Segregation Forever speech, a speech that got widespread coverage by the TV networks that evening. and the next day's papers. It would have been a "trending topic" had Wallace existed in the ear of The Internet.
     1963 was a watershed year for the Civil Rights movement, and today's anniversary is just the first in a series to be commemorated.

     If you stand at the top of the Alabama Capitol Building steps, you will see a marker where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of The Confederacy.
     There is no such marker for the Wallace speech, which was made from atop a platform built over the steps of the capitol building facing Dexter Avenue.
     If you walk down Dexter Avenue half a block, you'll come to the Dexter-King Memorial Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King launched his mission as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement.
     Quite a convergence of history in such a small area.
     This Thursday, Historian Dan Carter will speak at the Department of Archives and History about the Wallace segregation speech.

[Also, we note the passing of the former progressive editor of The Atlanta Constitution, Eugene Patterson. Among his columns was one about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, the 50th anniversary of which will come in September. It was titled One Little Shoe, and he said he wrote it weeping. The 89 year old Patterson died Saturday.

 "I was regarded as a Southern turncoat by many of my critics. But I didn't think I was. I thought I was leading us in the direction the South had to go, which was toward justice."

RIP, Mr. Patterson, RIP]

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of www.TimLennox.com]