Remembering proto-history

Sam Smith – I got my first full time job in journalism in 1961, serving as a radio news reporter in DC.  Now 85, I find myself sometimes reflecting on how unimportant the stories I covered since then are to so many people, including historians and the press. It’s like history ended about 60-70 years ago and what matters happened either much earlier or just the other day.

For example, I read more about slavery these days than I do about the civil rights movement of the 1960s. And not much about the power in my lifetime of youth and community organizing. We seem to have forgotten that the labor, women’s, civil rights and environmental movements all got much of their strength from the young with local action.

The recent past is full of good stories. For example a review of Gail Collins’s When Everything Changed noted:

We, too, may have forgotten the enormous strides made by women since 1960 - and the rare setbacks. "Hell yes, we have a quota [7%]" said a medical school dean in 1961. "We do keep women out, when we can." At a pre-graduation party at Barnard College, "they handed corsages to the girls who were engaged and lemons to those who weren't." In 1960, two-thirds of women 18-60 surveyed by Gallup didn't approve of the idea of a female president. Until 1972, no woman ran in the Boston Marathon, the year when Title IX passed, requiring parity for boys and girls in school athletic programs (and also the year after Nixon vetoed the childcare legislation passed by Congress). What happened during the past fifty years - a period that led to the first woman's winning a Presidential Primary - and why? The cataclysmic change in the lives of American women is a story Gail Collins seems to have been born to tell.

I could tell some similar stories. For example, I got involved in the civil rights movement not by logical choice but because of an article I wrote about a bi-ethnic boycott of DC’s transit system because of a fare increase. Based on the my article, the leader of the protest asked me to help him in his civil rights efforts. Which is how I became a friend of Marion Barry and a member of SNCC.

One reason this worked was because black leaders in DC had figured out that a good way to bring ethnicities together was to find causes, like fare increases or local home rule, that both whites and blacks supported. It wasn’t so much a moral solution – like so frequently proposed these days – but a practical one and it worked.

As I cover the news these days, I’m struck by the absence of some of the strategies and approaches of the recent past, or what I’ve come to call proto-history. It’s not enough to just recount the evils found in long ago but we need to learn from our parents and grandparents who lived in a culture much more like ours today. Sure they did some things wrong, but what did they do right?

Universities teach us about the ancient past and news outfits tell us what happened today. What if colleges offered a course on what we’ve been up to in the past 50-75 years?