GRADUATING TO THE VAST UNKNOWN

 Graduation 1960

We were the very first class to graduate from Riverview High and I took this honor very seriously.  We had been together since elementary school and our bonds were strong.  What do I recall about that important night in our young lives?  Almost nothing.  I wanted to remember every small detail, but the evening passed quickly in a blur of music and color and speeches and tears.  And then it was all over and when autumn came most of us would be gone.  Somewhere.

We were all innocents, smiling into an almost unrecognizable future.  There were no black students in our graduating class.  Not a single one.  Most women didn't have careers; they worked until they got married.  Some of the boys would go to college; others would work in the family business.  We looked forward to peaceful lives, probably in the same pretty town in which we had grown up.  But change was about to explode.

Schools were integrated, often forcibly, and the Civil Rights movement was born into conflict and resistance.  President Kennedy was shot as he and Jackie rode in an open car in Texas.  There were marches and Freedom Fighters and Blacks being beaten when they sat at lunch counters For Whites Only.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to prominence only to be assassinated at a motel.  Women began to question their role in society.  There was nothing wrong with being a nurse or a teacher or a secretary, but they wanted more.  There was more, wasn't there?  Feminism became a movement too--more conflict and resistance.  And in a distant country few in the United States knew much about--Viet Nam--there was conflict and for reasons many of us still don't understand, American men were being drafted and sent into war.  Many came home wounded and maimed; many didn't come home at all.  And the survivors still don't want to talk about it.  Change was everywhere.

But on Graduation Night in June, 1960, we knew nothing of what was to come.  We laughed and cried and hugged one another.
Little did we know......