I didn't realize this all happened at once! Did all these things really change the world? Is it just a coincidence they all happened at the same time? https://www.wsj.com/articles/three-days-that-changed-the-world-not-that-the-world-noticed-1497037365 OPINION COMMENTARY COMMENTARY (U.S.) Three Days That Changed the World, Not That the World Noticed From Saigon to Mississippi to Washington, the events of June 10-12, 1963, were unusually consequential. President John F. Kennedy during an Oval Office press conference, June 11, 1963. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES By Joel Engel June 9, 2017 3:42 p.m. ET 54 COMMENTS History is in part the observation of consequential days, tragic and joyous. Americans celebrate July 4 and commemorate Sept. 11. We remember Dec. 7 and honor June 6. On those four days, major events bore consequences that changed the world. But at no time in American history have there been three days like June 10-12, 1963, during which several unrelated events altered the nation’s course as surely as had the attack on Pearl Harbor. June 10, 1963, began with President John F. Kennedy’s signing the Equal Pay Act, which required that women who perform the same jobs as men earn the same as men. The following day, three Buddhist monks waded into a busy Saigon intersection. One of them, Thich Quang Duc, assumed the lotus position. The other two doused him with gasoline. He then lit himself on fire and allowed the flames to consume him. Hours later—still June 11 in the U.S.—Gov. George Wallace stood at a University of Alabama entrance and delivered his “Schoolhouse Door” speech in an attempt to prevent two black students from integrating the school. Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and a contingent of federal marshals compelled Wallace to stand aside, and the students were escorted in—seven years after a court order had prohibited the public university from denying admission based on color. That night, Kennedy addressed the nation to explain the moral imperative behind the civil-rights bill he planned to send to Congress. “Today we are committed to a world-wide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free,” he said, citing Berlin and Vietnam. “But are we to say to the world and, much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes?” The elation African-Americans and all Americans of good will felt was short-lived. Early the next morning, June 12, Medgar Evers, a 37-year-old civil-rights activist, stepped onto his Jackson, Miss., driveway and was assassinated. A white supremacist, Byron De La Beckwith, fired the fatal shot from across the street with a deer rifle. As legislation, the origin of the Equal Pay Act could be traced to a 1944 bill introduced by Rep. Winifred C. Stanley, a Republican from upstate New York. That legislation was defeated, and versions of it were introduced in every subsequent Congress until 1963, when a compromise version—a clause inserted into the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938—passed 362-9 (with Democrats casting all nine nays), and by voice vote in the Senate. The bill’s overwhelming passage gave women their greatest victory since suffrage in 1920. In countless ways it boosted the movement that would be called “women’s lib” before becoming known as “feminism.” The Evers assassination would become a catalytic moment for civil rights in ways similar to the 1955 torture lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till while he was visiting relatives in Mississippi. Till’s mother, in Chicago, had opened her son’s casket for all to see. She wanted mourners to be repelled by what her son had suffered at the hands of men who never paid the price legally. It was no coincidence that a year later came the successful Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott and the emergence of Martin Luther King as the leader of a movement that needed one. Now King speculated that Evers’s martyrdom would “cause all persons of goodwill to be aroused,” and awaken blacks “to rise up with righteous indignation.” Thich Quang Duc’s protest suicide in Vietnam landed on American front pages and led the three network evening newscasts, thanks to the photo of the immolation shot by New York Times photographer Malcolm Browne. As JFK noted, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.” In the U.S., that emotion was primarily disgust. Americans wondered what could provoke a man to end his life in the most excruciating way possible. The answer was South Vietnam’s longtime repression of Buddhists. Just a few weeks earlier, the brother of President Ngo Dinh Diem had ordered state security forces to fire into a parade celebrating Buddha’s birthday. The celebrants’ crime? Flying Buddhist flags. That South Vietnam was essentially an American client, and Diem presumably a puppet whom the Kennedy administration had been propping up for two years, made the sudden attention both domestically and geopolitically problematic. No longer was Vietnam out of sight and mind. Journalists had already begun claiming, and Kennedy had already begun denying, that the U.S. was stuck in a quagmire. Diem claimed that Communists were behind the protests and refused to comply with the Americans’ reform demands. Violence escalated through the summer. Four more monks self-immolated, as did a nun. And when Diem declared martial law in August, Kennedy’s men began plotting his overthrow. The Nov. 1 coup, with a select group of Vietnamese officers replacing Diem, was not supposed to result in his death. But the next day soldiers shot and killed him and his brother. Political chaos ensued, making it much more difficult for the U.S. to accomplish its military goals cleanly or exit Vietnam gracefully—especially after JFK’s assassination three weeks later made Lyndon B. Johnson the new commander in chief. Beloved by no one, LBJ was determined to avoid losing Vietnam to the Communists the way Truman had been blamed for losing China. June 10-12, 1963: otherwise ordinary days that deserve to live in glory and infamy. Mr. Engel is author, most recently, of “L.A. ’56: A Devil in the City of Angels.”
