I have enjoyed listening to 4 great orators: first, when I was about 13, I walked across the Airline Bridge to Pelican (baseball stadium) to attend a Billy Graham rally in New Orleans.(1951?) Seating was segregated, so as not to violate the race laws in the state. The then young Graham used his knowledge of the Bible with current analogies, at times interrupted by the choir or the powerful voice of George Beverly Shay. His magnet of salvation caused many to abandon their seats to join the growing mass on the grass who wanted to join up for the Kingdom. I came near to joining them.
On Sunday nights on tv I watched another such speaker, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Because New Orleans was the largest city with only one tv channel, I do not know on which network he appeared. He was a Roman Catholic bishop, but mixed into his message of religion was politics, especially, oppression of the people in Eastern Europe under Communism. He was most effective with the use of the pause, which made you think more than him shouting.
3rd was Ronald Reagan. In 1960 I had cast my first ballot for President, JFK. In 1964 I favored LBJ, but not as enthusiastically. Sen. Goldwater, the Republican candidate, was scheduled to speak at Tulane stadium, and as a TU student, I planned to go, to boo if nothing else. The crowd was for Goldwater, and Louisiana was one of the few states he would carry in November. The stadium was enthusiastic for Goldwater. He spoke. What a bore! He might have been giving a report to a Senate committee over trivia. The crowd waited to erupt; but he never gave them a chance. Only later in the campaign when I heard the radio address on why vote for Goldwater, delivered by Ronald Reagan, did I appreciate the rhetorric of Reagan. He did not convince me to vote for Goldwater, but he did get me questioning some of my political assumptions. Reagan was a great orator.
4th was unexpected. I was working in China, and provided a computer, expanding my knowledge of how to use it, etc. In my exploration, I began to listen to some old speeches of Malcolm X. I do not mean that I agreed with him. Malcolm did include some of the bitter contempt for opponents, heard in Elijah Muhammad's or later, Minister Farrakhan's sermons. But Malcolm's political analyses made one think. Pause, even without a visual cue to do so. I am white, and I did not agree, but I could see how others could be readily moved by his speeches. See Anthony Flood's depiction of the 1961 Black Muslim mass gathering at Uline Arena in Washington. DC, at which the honored guests were George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party, he and several members sitting in the audience wearing their uniforms with the red armbands and black swastikas. From the platform Malcolm spoke friendly words to Rockwell, and Rockwell made a pledge of $20, (perhaps about 7 cartons of cigarettes in those days values). Malcolm was basically telling the congregants that the good whites were the Nazis. What could that possibly have to do with Black-Jewish relations???
Yet, in the 4-hour program on PBS by Henry Louis Gates, I do not recall seeing Malcolm at all. What might he have had to do with the topic? In the early 1960s the Black Muslims held a number of huge gatherings of the faithful for their Founders Day. A small number of whites were invited guests to these gatherings, and they were not Jews.
MORE TO COME
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