R. Gary Patterson

I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season. I was thinking that with the election of Barrack Obama that now we can look our sons and daughters in the eye and say, "Yes. Every boy and girl in America can be President." Though the darkness of repression and prejudice is still with us, perhaps we are in a dawning of a new age.

I've always felt that music had a much more powerful role in Civil Rights than any political position. The Motown Revues, Stax Revues, and the Muscle Shoals sound demonstrated that music was for all the people regardless of color and economic background. White and black musicians worked together, traveled together and took on many of the cruel aspects of bigotry together. How long would the Civil Rights Act have taken if it were not for the Alan Freed Moon Dog concerts, the Supremes and Temptations traveling into the deep South being denied the use of White bathrooms? At the concert halls both white and black teenagers gathered together for only the music. They danced together and simply had a good time.

"America's Greatest Generation" returned home from saving the world in World War II, but this generation was perfectly content in forcing black Americans to continue to sit in the back of the bus and to eat in the back of restaurants. Ironically, the combined blood shed on the battlefields of Europe and the islands of the Pacific was simply a unifying red. Each drop of blood was impossible to discern its racial makeup.

The next generation growing up in the 1950s and 1960s became the Freedom Riders to help solve and create a new order by taking part in freedom marches throughout the country. During the Cold war, rock and roll was considered a threat to America's morals and values. Isn't it incredible that Elvis' swiling hips, the pounding rhythm of Little Richard's piano, and Chuck Berry's guitar riffs and duck walk did more to bring down the Berlin Wall that the thousands of missles pointed at Moscow? Radik, a Russian film director, once told me how he and other Russian teenagers treasured and hid their rock and roll albums within their homes knowing very well their government's view of subversive music. Radik's reply was "Everyone loves the music. It is the politicians that screw everything up."

Maybe that is why the real threat to America's post war values was a skinny kid with curly hair from Minnesota who simply decided that America's problem in addressing the civil rights movement was that no one had asked the right questions. He put his pen to paper and asked those questions in "Blowing in the Wind." Bob Dylan then determined that America's soul had no color barriers.