As noted earlier, appearing in the media has a way of causing people to be regarded as more significant in other people’s estimation.
In the middle of the 20th century, America’s airwaves and the front pages of our newspapers began to be filled with images of freedom riders, sit-ins, marches, and other actions aimed at giving people of all races and colors a fair shake.
When the nation’s readers and viewers looked at the white people taking part, they saw that these participants were largely young, and they weren’t exactly the types who captained the football team or got themselves voted most popular. They were the brainiac nerds and dweebs who the cool kids shunned or played cruel jokes on, if they paid them any attention at all.
Yet there they were in the spotlight now. For doing something brave. While pursuing an idealistic purpose.
These qualities were not widely found in the daily lives of most people in the materialist, conformist Eisenhower era.
A significant number of other young people began to prick up their ears and consider, often for the first time, an alternative to typical middle-class suburban life. They developed a taste for folk music and coffee houses—along with a growing ache for something more earthy and grounded and meaningful in their lives.
Young people’s tastes in forms of music other than folk began to shift, too.
Early rock & roll had a distinctly thuggish quality about it. It was what the hoods and greasers in black leather jackets with cigarettes dangling from their lips danced to, and it was made by people who came across as either hoods themselves, wild-man hillbillies, or denizens of the dangerous netherworld of the ghetto.
In the 1960s, the surly tough guys were superseded by the likes of Simon & Garfunkel and The Beatles. These were slender young men with soft, high voices and hair so long it was often called girlish. Their songs were prized for their creativity, sensitivity and depth.
To be able to achieve not only acceptance, but outright adulation, and for qualities such as subtle artistry and intellectual sophistication, represented a more abrupt change in American values than anyone who had lived through the 1950s could have dared imagine.
