| | | WETA documentary explores Washington of '60s | | October 30, 2009 |  | | | Staff Writer | | It all begins back when the Washington Senators were great, and kids spent their Saturdays sipping malteds at the Hot Shoppe.
To some, Washington in the early '60s was a sleepy Southern town. To others, D.C. without a vote, a mayor or a city council was more like a plantation.
Either way, it was a radically different place from the city that closed out the decade.
And it's that journey — from burying a president to mourning a martyr for civil rights — that makes up "Washington in the '60s," a new WETA documentary scheduled to premiere on Monday at 9 p.m.
In many ways, "Washington in the '60s" is a national portrait painted on a local canvas. The scenes that gripped the country -- John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's casket, war protesters swarming the Pentagon, the riots that rocked the city after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. — were memories made in Washington, D.C.
At the same time, the documentary uses the lens of the '60s to zero in on the cultural, political, artistic and economic changes unique to Washington.
John F. Kennedy and Camelot, for example, did more than capture the imagination of a nation. They brought real changes to the local landscape. Gourmet restaurants started cropping up, and the social compass of the country turned its needle, for the first time, to Georgetown. D.C. was finally, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee says in the documentary, big time.
The fight for integration also took on a particularly local patina, when a group of Howard University students clashed with segregationists at Glen Echo Park. For a moment, says Washington Post columnist Colbert King, D.C. was the center of the civil rights movement.
Think The Beatles belong to Ed Sullivan and New York? WETA argues that the Beatles invasion actually began in D.C., where the local radio station WWRC was the first in the United States to carry a Beatles song — "I Want To Hold Your Hand."
When the group first performed on American soil, they did so among the screaming multitudes at the Washington Coliseum (formerly known as the Uline Arena) on Capitol Hill. "The party began in Washington," says a local concert promoter.
WETA uses personal stories to illustrate the decade's epic events — like when the Rev. Walter Fauntroy discovered the speakers for the 1963 March on Washington suddenly were not working. He made an emergency call to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who arranged for replacements.
Then there was the time, in 1967, when Pat Buchanan watched anti-war protesters as they attempted to levitate the Pentagon. "I don't think they will," he remembers saying. "But if they do, I want to be there to see it."
And yet, throughout the journey, a distinctly D.C. story emerges:
In 1964, residents voted in their first presidential election.
In 1967, Lyndon Johnson set D.C. on a path toward home rule with his appointment of Walter E. Washington mayor-commissioner.
In 1967, Marion Barry catapulted into the public consciousness with a dashiki and a jobs program called Pride.
And after an assassin's bullet struck down Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, flames erupted across the city.
"It was like we had been transported suddenly to the end of World War II Berlin," writer Sam Smith says in the documentary. | | | | | Log in to comment on this article |
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