♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ male: Just a few minutes ago, the president of the United States turned from Huston Street onto Elm Street on his way to a scheduled lunch and appearance.

And as he went by the Texas Schoolbook Depository, headed for the triple underpass, there were three loud, reverberating explosions.

We do not and cannot confirm the report at this time, but the president has been shot.

♪♪♪ male: The mayor of a midwestern town said, "How does it feel to be mayor of the city that killed the president?"

female: A dark cloud descended on this city.

Everybody was sad.

male: I was horrified.

I sort of felt like we had a cross to bear from then on.

male: We felt ashamed of our city.

male: Tonight, Dallas is shocked and stricken with grief because of the assassination of our president, John F. Kennedy.

♪♪♪ Quin Mathews: 50 years after the Kennedy assassination, a lot of people still remember the Kennedy assassination, but 60 years after the assassination, the people who were alive and cognizant of what was going on, people like me, and I was a child, most of them are gone or don't remember.

Even if they're my age, they may be too young to remember.

People don't remember this as a national tragedy and people in Dallas, because Dallas has grown so much, have no idea what it was like.

Most people have no idea what the city was like, and what it did to us, or what we did to us.

Even as a child, I was aware that we were on edge.

I don't remember the specifics, but I knew something had happened to Adlai Stevenson, the UN ambassador.

Adlai Stevenson: Ladies and gentlemen.

Wes Wise: It was almost unruly at the start.

People were out in the foyer, loudly, and carrying placards, most of which said get the US out of the UN.

Adlai: Surely, my dear friend, I don't have to come here from Illinois to teach Texas manners, do I?

[crowd cheering] Wes: The gentlemen who was supposed to have been the head of the indignation committee, which I don't think there was any such real committee but was ushered out of the theater at that time by the security guards.

As Stevenson came out, he went over to the rope line and this woman took a placard and appeared to hit Stevenson over the ear and the side of the face.

I remember he exclaimed, "Lady, what's the matter what can I do for you?"

And she said something nonsensical, like well if you don't know I don't know why I should try to tell you.

It was almost exactly one month before the scheduled arrival of President Kennedy, and I thought it was--did not look good, it did not do well for the city of Dallas.

Quin: It's not just that it was an attack on the UN ambassador, it was, oh my gosh, it's reflecting on us, or is that what we are?

male: I am completely opposed to this liberal leadership, which is a minority control of the party.

Quin: And then you had Major General Edwin Walker, who had been relieved of his command for trying to indoctrinate soldiers.

Moved to Dallas, lived on Turtle Creek, flew an upside-down American flag in front of his house.

He spoke at Memorial Auditorium, for example, and look at the crowd that he drew.

Because Kennedy was soft on Communism, they thought.

[crowd cheering] Edwin Walker: I would betray the confidence reposed in me by the American people if I had not warned you of the menace of Communism, and the peril facing this nation today.

I therefore warn you now, to beware of the enemy, foreign and domestic.

[applause] Wes: Well, it bothered me.

There were so many things that happened at the HL Hutt daily radio program was on KRLD radio and was pretty far out, pretty far out.

The John Birch Society, the regional headquarters had been established in Dallas.

Larry Waters: The John Birch Society is an educational organization that leads, our slogan is, "Less government, more responsibility, and with God, shape a better world."

We believe that it's imperative that America's come to understand the Constitution, the fact that what made our country so great was its servants of the Constitutions and what our founders gave us.

So, our whole purpose is to inform people, to help them understand the blessings we have, and also to help them understand that our nation was probably the first one ever to be established on the premise that our rights come from God, not from government or from men.

Quin: How active was the Birch Society back then?

Larry: Very active, very active, as it was around the country.

I remember helping to raise money, enough money to put up several billboards with a slogan, "Get us, get the United States out of the United Nations, and get the United Nations out of the United States."

One time we had about ten billboards, in fact I can't believe they were that cheap in those times.

Quin: Oh, in Dallas.

Larry: Yeah, in Dallas.

Michael Phillips: Dallas, it was a magnet for the John Birch Society, you had an SMU chair of the English department, Southern Methodist University, the chair of the English department there wrote what might have been the first and bestselling Holocaust denial book.

Dallas really, in many ways foreshadowed this giant political realignment that was gonna take place and define the last third of the 20th century.

1954, you have a right-wing congressman, Bruce Alger.

Voted against like school lunch programs and voted against federal spending even in his home district in Dallas.

And he's a Republican.

He learns something that Republicans are gonna learn later.

He's really subtle in how he does it.

He learns--in some ways, I think if the Republican party had listened to him, they would have been adopting southern strategy, that they talk about with Nixon.

You know, Nixon pursued this idea of appealing to southern whites on racial issues.

Alger found a subtle way to do that.

And to take away the sting that the Republican party had in the south as the party of Lincoln.

male: He led a protest against Lydon Johnson in downtown Dallas, in which his supporters were said to have spat on Ladybird Johnson.

Jess Hay: What Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, made a big deal of and it probably a bigger deal than it was entitled to, but Ladybird, he asserts, and this was accepted, had been insulted by a group as he was crossing the streets between the Baker hotel and the Adolphus.

And he said, you know, they insulted my lady, Ladybird, so he used it politically, but it also was another case, an indication that there were extremists at play in Dallas, that were somewhat disturbing.

Bruce Alger: Well, now look, that was made up by a present man, no.

People on your side of the camera, I'm looking at you, can take credit for that.

Nobody spit on anybody.

Dallas people, well they could be ferocious competitors, they don't spit on women.

This is what people were saying on the streets of Dallas, as they always said.

Oh, that Johnson, he's filth, but he's our filth.

Quin: When Bruce Alger was running for reelection to Congress, I had some friends who were in a TV special with him, it was like a local political commercial.

And I told my parents, I want you to vote for Bruce Alger, everybody seemed to have Alger bumper stickers.

I want you to vote for Alger, and my parents said, no we don't believe in what he believes in, we're not voting for Alger.

And I pleaded with them, please vote for Alger.

I was probably nine years old, no, no, sorry we don't agree with him, we don't like him, is what they told me.

And you're not telling anyone who we're voting for, my parents believed very strongly in keeping their opinions to themselves.

My parents came from the generation of surviving the depression and World War II, and then with the GI bill, my father could continue his graduate education.

My father was a civil servant, he worked for the federal government.

He couldn't express himself politically.

He took his oath, as a civil servant and as a military reservist seriously.

He lived by the rules, he didn't wanna endanger his career, or his family.

My mother was a housewife, she was active in the PTA.

They took me on trips because they were usually work trips for my father.

We would go to Washington, for example.

Visit the capital.

I grew up with a sense of respect for our system of government, our leaders.

We visited presidential homes and even presidential tombs.

My father crafted a flagpole out of wood that didn't work very well, it was bent, and we flew this very heavy flag that was on my uncle's casket, he was in World War II.

Later, my father somehow rigged up a proper flagpole, and on holidays, we flew the flag.

It wasn't a political statement; it was our country.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States, and certainly Dallas was a representative of this, were places of progress, prosperity, and optimism.

And the face of that optimism for many of us was President Kennedy.

He was the youngest elected president, who had succeeded the oldest.

And we were moving forward, we were competing with the Russians in the race for space.

John F. Kennedy: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things.

Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Quin: And we were facing the most serious danger, which was nuclear annihilation.

The world was divided between the Communist east and the free west, and to us, Kennedy was the leader of the free world.

Kennedy: There are some who say, there are some who say that communism is the wave of the future.

Let them come to Berlin.

[crowd cheering] Quin: The communist leader, Khrushchev, said, we will bury you.

And Khrushchev had put missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from Miami, pointed at the United States, or to be pointed at the United States.

Kennedy faced Khrushchev down.

male: The US threw up a steel fence, prepared to stop any vessel carrying materials of war.

Kennedy: It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the Unites States.

Quin: And Russia removed the missiles.

We did duck and cover drills.

♪ Duck and cover, duck and cover ♪ Quin: I don't know that anybody knows about that now, we would get an alarm, we didn't even know if it was an alarm or not, or a test.

male: Always remember: the flash of an atomic bomb can come at anytime.

That means duck and cover fast, tight against the wall, this way.

Quin: I think we were in the auditorium and the principal said, "I've just gotten word from downtown."

Downtown meant the Dallas Independent School District office on -- she said, "I just got a word from downtown, that we have to duck and cover."

She said, "I don't know if this is real or not."

And we were in shock, and we went into the halls and put our hands over our necks.

I assumed we were under attack.

That was the only time that I felt that way, but I felt that way, I felt that we were possibly under attack at that moment.

That's the fear we all lived with.

On Hillcrest Road, right in front of Hillcrest High School, and early in my life we lived down the street from that school, someone had a bomb shelter.

And you could see it from Hillcrest, this bulbous thing in their side yard, they were right on the corner of some street and Hillcrest Road, and I thought, you know, this is gonna happen.

We don't have a shelter.

So that is the fear we lived with in the early 1960s.

♪♪♪ Quin: Before Kennedy was killed it was inconceivable that a public figure could be assassinated.

That--I mean, it's not even something we feared.

It was inconceivable, he had protection, he had secret service.

But you could not be in Dallas and be aware, as I said, even as a child, that there wasn't a fear about Kennedy coming to Dallas.

I remember watching the police chief, Jessie Curry, make an appeal on television, first to mind our manners.

Jessie Curry: Nothing must occur that is disrespectful or degrading to the president of the United States.

And the law enforcement agents in this area are going to do everything within their power-- Quin: He was telling Dallas, "Watch it, cool it, we can't let anything bad happen to the president when he visits here."

No one was thinking about an assassination, I don't think.

This was the Dallas morning news; the day Kennedy came to town.

There was a full-page ad, black bordered which was-- turned out to be a bad coincidence.

"Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas," but then it asks question after question why he was soft on Communism and why the head of the US Communist party supported his actions.

It was signed the American Fact-Finding Committee, Bernard Weissman, Chairman.

The committee didn't exist.

The message in this ad, why was it placed there, why did it happen in this city?

Why didn't it happen in another city Kennedy visited?

Why didn't it happen in Philadelphia?

Why didn't it happen in San Antonio, for example, Kennedy had just visited San Antonio.

This was the message from a lot of people, this reflects an attitude that the morning news felt was valid enough to where they took money and printed this ad, they made money from this ad.

Why did they do that?

It was raining that morning, November 22, I went to school, sat in the auditorium.

You have to remember, the kids of Arthur Kramer school, this was our seventh-grade picture, had-- for the most part we'd gone to school together since first grade, we were like a family.

There I was, and then going into the auditorium that day, I sat next to my friend from first grade, Chuck Ball.

And Chuck said, "We're going to see the president," and I said, "No we're not.

I don't have permission" "No, you're getting permission."

And it turns out my mother had sent a note-- Chuck's mother had told my mother we were going to see Kennedy, and my mother wrote a note, which I have lost, that said to the principal or to the teacher, "Please excuse Quin Mathews this morning, he is going to see the president."

Signed, Billie Mathews.

That was my mother, and his father picked us up in his 1954 Ford, I think, and we went to Love Field.

We got there, I thought, too late.

male: There are not many good vantage points left for people to catch a glimpse.

Quin: Mr. Ball asked a policeman, and I remember as he said, "Is the president gonna be in an open car?"

Because we had, I don't know why, but we had heard about a bubble top.

And he said, yeah there's gonna be a bubble top.

Because it was still cloudy.

male: Out here earlier this morning, that it was raining off and on and now we have a lot of blue sky showing and a bright sun, sunshine.

Quin: And we said, the crowd's too big, where can we go.

And the police officer pointed, go down there, go way down there by that fence.

So, we were way away from the crowd.

I remember on one side of us were black soldiers, or they may have been ROTC cadets, I don't know, and on the other side were nuns.

And in the middle was, it was really tall, we climbed up on it, so we're really high, but we were right up against the fence, and the skies cleared, and I remember seeing a glistening plane come in to Love Field, and it was so exciting.

The first plane came in, the second one, which was Air Force One.

I thought, I'm too far away, I won't see Kennedy get off the plane.

And he and Jackie popped out of that door and walked, and I immediately--you couldn't miss him, you couldn't miss him a mile away.

male: There's Mrs. Kennedy, and the crowd yells, and the president of the United States.

And I can see his suntan all the way from here.

Quin: That's the president, that's Kennedy, right-- oh my gosh.

male: Shaking hands now with the Dallas people, governor and Mrs. Connelly.

Governor Connelly on your left.

Quin: The crowd was overwhelmingly positive, overwhelmingly.

It's like Dallas turned out, it's not like, Dallas turned out to say we're glad you're here and we're gonna show you what a welcoming city we were.

Evadeane Peters: I had not voted for him, and even though I didn't really want him elected, I was very disturbed over the, what I considered unbelievable rudeness of Dallas-ites toward Democrats.

So, I wanted to go to the airport, to say visually, I didn't vote for you, but you're my president and I'm thrilled that you're come to visit Dallas.

But I know it concerned me a lot when I saw signs that were derogatory.

It bothered me deeply.

And so, those around me were disturbed by it as well, so they pulled it down just before the plane landed and we all stood on it.

male: Well, I, too, was anxious about whether the president would receive an appropriate welcome.

Quin: I had another classmate, we're very close, we're like brothers: Howard Weiner.

He also was very excited that Dallas gave Kennedy a warm welcome.

Howard Weiner: The crowd was extremely enthusiastic at this point.

Evadeane: They rushed him right to the car, there was a waiting limo there for him.

And he saw all of us, lined up along the fence, expecting, hoping, praying and he just broke from the routine that they had pretty well established and came over to the fence.

male: The president is up to the fence now.

Howard: And the president moved towards me and shook my hand.

At which point I was probably in some sort of, I don't know what to say here.

I was just really excited.

Quin: And then, all of a sudden, I saw this mass of people moving toward us, and I thought, oh my gosh, he's coming this way.

And here came the car.

And he's right, I don't know, maybe eight feet from me, right in front of me, and I was--that day at Love Field-- I was so afraid that people were going to be rude to him.

I was afraid that the Dallas that I had feared that I had heard about from my parents, from TV, was gonna give him a hard time.

And remember, I'm an elementary school kid, and so I started waving, and I mean I was going like this, I was a total geek, waving like this.

So much that my friend Chuck looked at me and went something like, "You look stupid."

And I didn't care, I just wanted him to know-- I wanted Kennedy to know that we loved him, that Dallas was welcoming him.

And at that moment, he looked up at me, I mean he--it was our distance, and he laughed at me, and said--you know, I don't know what he said, and he sort of gestured, and somehow like, yeah, yeah, I see you, I see you.

I was trying to get his attention and he said, yeah, I see you.

And I'm going, my God, president Kennedy acknowledged me.

And 20 years after the assassination, I watched a playback of this footage from Love Field, and I saw, for the first time, there we are.

That's me.

Mr. Ball took a picture.

It's the best image I've seen of Kennedy in that car that day.

There is the president, the man who is standing up to the rest of the world and he's acknowledging me, and I know there were probably tens of thousands of other people he personally acknowledged the same way.

Other people have said this, this is not an original thought.

Kennedy was the most charismatic person I have ever seen in my life.

I never met Cary Grant, you know, never met Clark Gable, whatever.

But I've met, I've seen other stars, and I've met several people who were president; no one, no one was like Kennedy.

Evadeane: He looked wonderful; he was so handsome.

And he nodded his head.

I said, I see now why he got elected, because once people have direct contact with him, I don't think they can resist him.

female: We cut class because we just thought it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to see the president.

Quin: Lisa Henry was photographed skipping school.

Her school, across town from mine, a different experience.

September 1963, what two months--2 1/2 months before the assassination.

Nine years after the Supreme Court outlawed segregated education.

The Dallas school district opened a brand new, what it called, pardon my language, but this is what the Dallas school district called it.

A new Dallas Negro high school, Roosevelt High School.

Why was it important to you to see the Kennedys?

Lisa Hembry: You know, I really don't know, I was just one of those kids that was always very interested in doing my own thing, and president Kennedy, especially in the African American community at the time, was right up there with Jesus, you know.

And then, it seemed like seconds later we started running, everybody started running in the middle of the street.

♪♪♪ Lisa: We didn't know what had happened.

And later I thought, wow, we were among the last people on the face of the earth to see President Kennedy alive.

Michael Granberry: The morning of November 22, 1963, my mom had promised us that we would be going downtown to see the motorcade parade.

I was extremely excited about this, I was the oldest of four children, but my father, who had this kind of eerie sense about him, you might say, he's reading the newspaper, that morning at breakfast, and there is this very hostile full-page ad in the morning newspaper.

And he says to her, I don't want you to do this, I don't want you to go down there.

And she said why, and he said, well I just don't have a good feeling about it.

Quin: There were apprehensions at the trade mart, where Kennedy was scheduled to speak.

Wes: As a result of the film that I made one month earlier, of Adlai Stevenson, the FBI and the Secret Service went to Eddie Barker, the news director, and said, would you have Wes go over that film that he took in order to help us to identify people in the background, who might have a bad influence at the trade mart, when John F. Kennedy goes there to make his speech.

I sensed something was wrong because I saw one of the FBI men I had been working with on that film, walking fast, but not running, by the--kind of in the in-between the tables and I got up out of my seat and I said, hey, what's going on?

And he said, Wes, the worst has happened.

Quin: We were in a traffic jam.

Took forever to get out of the airport, and I don't know-- Mr. Ball turned on the radio, and I don't know where we were, I don't know if we were in traffic, this is where my memory fails me.

I don't know if we were on our way to the school, I think we were near the school and he turned on the radio and we heard something about shots were fired, the president was shot, and you know, as a kid, of course, I went, you know, I felt like oh no.

But I didn't think the president could be assassinated.

We went back to the school, and it wasn't until the next period the principal came on the loudspeaker and said-- she didn't say Kennedy was killed, she said, "I don't know why this had to happen," or "I don't know why this had to happen in our city," I'm not sure exactly what she said.

She didn't say anything about his being shot or killed, just, "I don't know why this had to happen here."

And urged us to pray or think about the new president.

And that's when we knew that moment when she talked about the new president.

And I remember looking right across from me and girls immediately put-- several girls put their heads down, they were crying.

There was one boy, and I mean I was in shock, we were all in shock, there was one boy who was smiling.

And he said, he was saying something like, "I didn't do it, I didn't do it."

Howard: One of the kids in front of me said something to the effect that, the president probably deserved to die, but he sort of wished it hadn't happened here.

Michael: I believe gym, gym class, was fifth period, and some kid starts dancing around rather gaily, sort of saying, oh Kennedy's been shot, Kennedy's been shot-- totally inappropriate reaction on this kid's part.

This causes the gym teacher to absolutely explode, he explodes, and he says, "Yes, the president, today, was shot and killed in your hometown," and he points his finger right at us, "In your hometown."

And it's those three words that have stayed with me since.

I'm now in my early seventies and those three words have never left me, "In your hometown."

Quin: And we walked home, and we-- I don't even think we said much, my mother and my sister and I were there.

And my father came home from work, and I said to him, "We can't live here anymore, I can't live here anymore, we have to move."

And my father being as wise as someone in his 40s would be said--calmed me down.

I couldn't stand Dallas at that moment, and I know I wasn't alone.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Quin: Life changed completely for me.

I've experienced the death of parents, I've experienced the death of an ex-spouse, and of course, many other people in my family, and nothing grieved me more or shocked me more than Kennedy dying that day because he was our president.

Michael: I remember writing a story for the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination for my newspaper, The Dallas Morning News.

And my lead was, "At Annie Webb Blanton Elementary School, Childhood Ended Right After Lunch."

And that's literally what happened, our childhood ended right after lunch.

Quin: The next week was Thanksgiving, at the school I was summoned to the auditorium, and told that the younger kids were gonna put on a Thanksgiving program as they did every year and that I needed to be the narrator, the MC, or Master of Ceremonies, or leader, whatever for that program, because they were gonna turn it into a memorial service for president Kennedy, and I remember it was a Thanksgiving script, but I remember, to this day, the words that were added.

And the words were simply, "And our late president, John F.

Kennedy."

And I remember reading those words in two assemblies in the auditorium, and when I got to, "And our late president, John F. Kennedy," just a pall settled over the auditorium, and of course on me.

Thanksgiving was, obviously, a down occasion for everyone.

And so was Christmas.

For several days, there was snow in Dallas, and it was a dark snow, befitting a dark time.

♪♪♪ male: Mayor, we've had some bad light shed on this city of ours in the past few weeks, what with the incident here, not too long ago when Adlai Stevenson was hit with a sign and spat upon, and now the president of the country is assassinated here.

What is Dallas going to do?

Earle Cabell: Well, I cannot ascribe that to being the feeling of the true Dallas citizen, or the preponderance of Dallas citizens.

Those people represent only a handful of the radical right, and I don't ascribe criminal tendencies to them.

Possibly, they might have been cited a lower grade brain to have committed an act like this, but I can't point my finger, this is no time to point fingers, this is a time of prayer and sober reflection.

We all have to search our souls, with reference to what we might have said or done to have brought about a calamity of this sort.

male: Mayor, I would think that the feeling is, in the broad moral sense at least, that all of us share in what has happened here today, but this city, as you say, is not a city where things like this are done.

The minority, it's a loud one, and today, this tragic thing that happens really once in a lifetime.

Earle: This is a guilt that doesn't belong to a few, this is a guilt of the nation, we're all responsible for this.

Quin: Sunday, two days after the assassination, the pastor of a small, north Dallas, Methodist church took on the question of responsibility head on.

Tom Timmons: I think Bill Holmes got a call from several pastors and friends of his, saying, you know, something needs to be said from the pulpit about the assassination, and Bill felt very strongly about it.

And he gave this sermon called One Thing Worse than This, and it was a powerful sermon, it was broadcast on the radio here, in fact it was broadcast internationally, I understand.

Bill Holmes: In the name of God, what kind of city have we become?

Further we begin, we have our children, they were not born hating the president of the United States, they soon learned to imitate their parents.

It is time both liberals and conservatives took responsibility for the reactionaries and extremists in their own parties.

male: Bill and his family were threatened, and the Dallas police came to his house and said, we think you need to move away from your house.

So, he and his wife and his two sons moved to the home of another Northaven member and stayed there for a week.

Quin: But also, there were suspicions that communists had infiltrated not just his church, but the Methodist church.

Tom: An attempt was made, this was before the assassination, to try to correct this perception that the Methodist church was infiltrated with communists.

And Bill Holmes brought in an FBI senior official to dispute this, saying that the Methodist church was not infiltrated with communists, that we were not communist inspired, and so forth.

But it was not a message that was very well received or accepted, it didn't meet the conformation bias.

Jim Schutze: I think the history of Dallas is legitimately unique.

I think there was this era that sort of gets skipped over when people talk about national history-- everybody knows about when cotton was king in Dixie.

But there isn't a lot of attention paid to the fact that cotton was king in Texas, after the Civil War, and Dallas was the point of brokerage for all of that, for shipping the commodities up to the mills in New England, the money coming back here from New York, finished goods coming here and being wholesaled out into the region, and out of that came a growing insurance industry and a banking industry and there's just something about insurance and banking and stuff like that that's inherently conservative and cautious.

Dallas always sort of had one foot, psychologically, in New York and one foot here.

And so, it just has a culture of caution that becomes self-conscious, there's a self-consciousness about the city, there's always this great concern for what people elsewhere think of us.

So, Dallas has that kind of cautious, self-conscious culture that I think is legitimately a product of its history.

Michael: Dallas was, I think, deservedly seen as an epicenter of the far right-wing.

That Dallas had a very violent past.

It's deeply ingrained into its DNA.

1860, Dallas was the epicenter, the starting point of this very violent series of events that spread across the state of Texas in the months leading to when the state of Texas would vote whether to leave the union or not.

There was a fire during a drought.

So, Dallas, just like it would in the days right before Kennedy was murdered, got gripped by conspiracy theories.

They began to whip slaves, and one account says they whipped every single slave in Dallas County.

They settled on three people to execute, and there are actually written accounts about who are we gonna execute, who are we gonna blame this for.

They hang them in front of the enslaved community, so everyone can watch this execution take place to terrorize that community.

And then, of course, in the 1920s, Dallas was the epicenter, possibly nationally, of the Klu Klux Klan.

Many estimates suggest that per capita, per person, there were more Klan members in Dallas than any other place in the country.

One in three, perhaps, and a Dallas dentist who had an office right across the street from Neiman Marcus in downtown Dallas, Hiram Wesly Evans, became the national leader of the group.

John Wiley Price: At the end of the day, it's still the hate, primarily, evolves from race.

Frame it, until there's some resolution on the economic side, then we'll always be a tale of two or three cities, and it'll always be hate because hate is basically the floor for racism.

There's no reason for me to hate you because of the color of your skin.

Hate, prejudice and hate, are two different deals, people can be prejudiced, hate is the power to enforce your prejudice.

That's the difference.

Quin: Dallas was a segregated city, and in many ways, it still is, but it didn't want people to see it.

It didn't want the violence to break out.

Hints in, I think it was 1961, the Dallas Citizens Council sort of secretly commissioned an adman, Sam Bloom, to create a film to say, "Hey, we're gonna have to integrate certain public facilities, let's cool it, let's be peaceful, let's not be like Little Rock or New Orleans.

Let's just let it happen and we'll be quiet about it."

Walter Cronkite: Other cities have faced, and faced recently, the same problems of change which Dallas now faces.

Michael: And so, they hired Walter Cronkite, who was a major CBS news anchor, highly respected, to narrate this movie, to show to various Dallas civic groups.

And what they're trying to be, they saw that mess that happened in New Orleans over school desegregation, and they concluded that this would be bad for business if Dallas was seen as a place like New Orleans.

And they were trying to convince the people of Dallas to not do that.

That everyone would pay a terrible price if that took place.

Walter: There have always been a few individuals in any city, whose cure-all for any problem is to meet it with violence.

In Dallas, these few individuals will stand alone.

If they do so act, they will do so in the face of a community of hundreds and thousands of law-abiding citizens, who know that the problem of growth, of customs, change by law.

However else matters solved, must be met and solved peacefully.

male: Violence, civil disorder, riots are crimes equally punishable under the law.

A law enforcement officer is obligated regardless of personal opinion, to uphold the law and see that it is enforced.

This will be done in Dallas.

Quin: The city was run by a small group of businessmen who made political decisions, privately, and then through another organization, created a slate of candidates for the city council and the school board.

Percy Leucke Jr.: The committee for good schools, which was a unit of the citizen's council, selected the school board.

The school system was run very well.

But also, very conservatively.

W. Chief Wyatt did not want any federal money or federal activities or federal impingement.

So, they had no federal programs at that time.

So, it was smooth, but it was predetermined pretty well about how things were going to be done.

Quin: My school--you can look at the images from that time.

And we lived a very isolated existence in a lot of ways.

14 years after the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation, 1968, I went to school and got a publication from the Dallas school district that listed at the bottom, Dallas high schools, and it listed 24 or whatever schools, and then right below that it said Dallas Negro High Schools and it listed those schools.

In 1963, when Roosevelt High School opened as a segregated, Dallas Negro High School, as they called it, they did not have their own graduations like the white schools, but were combined in one ceremony, that's the illustration of the separation that existed in Dallas in the 60s.

And it continued well after the Kennedy assassination.

Tom: I mean Dallas, you know, Dallas was never released from court supervision until, what was it, two thousand and-- into the 2000s.

Dallas was still dragging its heels.

I don't think integration had worked out the way everybody hoped it would, but it's-- we're also, still, amazingly segregated.

Percy: I see the evolution coming forth again today, and I don't care whether you call it teaching African American history, which is an integral part of American history, whether you talk about, you know, banning books.

Yeah, there's a lot of them, but if you look at those authors, disproportionately it's either African American or those that would be in some alliance, but at the end of the day, it always winds up being part and parcel of hate.

Michael: Anytime there's a period of gigantic economic transformation, there's a tendency for the society to fragment, because it's uncertain where any group is gonna fit during the, yeah, the economic transformations.

And people are fearful of sinking to the bottom, that's one of the fear of falling.

And so, we have some really terrible instances because of that.

Collin County contributed, and the Dallas/Fort Worth area as a whole, and I would emphasize the suburbs, contributed a disproportionate number of the insurrectionists who stormed the capital on January 6th.

A very visible presence of terror groups, like the Proud Boys, Three Percenters.

A child of this suburban atmosphere, native of Allen, got in a car with a high-powered rifle, drove across the entire state of Texas, and blew away 23 defenseless, beautiful human beings, specifically because they had brown skin.

And he grew up in this atmosphere, that was very similar to what we had in Dallas in the early 60s.

Man from Dallas--a member of the Latino community, which is wondering, you know, the most extreme and fragile members of that community are wondering where they're gonna fit in this multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious world.

Got a swastika tattoo, got a high-powered rifle, drove to Collin County, the suburbs, and hunted Asian people.

♪♪♪ Tom: The irony, though, is when I look at the suburbs, they are incredibly diverse.

In some ways, what's going on around the city, maybe more out there than in the city's core is really exciting and wonderful.

And yet, we have these terrible things, the mass shootings, and a lot of the crazy right-wing stuff going on about books, and critical race theory, that obviously have to do with white people that haven't gotten the memo on diversity.

Lisa: You know, we have-- we all see life from our own perspective, our own point of view and that's one thing that I think just affects everybody.

We are unable to really cross that divide to see how it feels, to be white or to be Hispanic, or to be African American, you know, to be black or Asian.

People aren't really able to discern how another person might feel in a situation.

Now, as we have, you know, open carry, I see people walking around with pistols, you know shotguns, and one wonders if that old, you know, wild west philosophy has just come back with a vengeance.

Because, for those people that lived through that horrific, international tragedy, in this city, and I happened to be there that day, I just know, even though I may not consciously be aware of how it affected me, I know it did.

I know it had to, because it affected everybody that I knew.

Quin: I think we have to tell personal stories.

I think we have to tell how it affects us in order for what's in our hearts to reach people today.

I am not doing this film to convince you of a political viewpoint, I am not even asking you to judge people from the past, I am asking you to look at the past, because it is a foundation for everything that happens today and everything that will happen.

We have to know our foundations, that's history, and it's often uncomfortable.

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