The centennial of the Battle of Gettysburg displayed features typical of historical celebrations. It brimmed with speeches, a two-hour pageant parade, re-enactments, music, exhibits and skits.
But amid the festivities lurked conflict.
Northerners and Southerners participated, but their visions still did not match that hot, tense summer.
And though a re-enactment of Pickett’s Charge ended with blue and gray joining ranks around a flagpole at the Angle while patriotic music played, the show of unity couldn’t mask the tension that existed in 1963.
A century after the battle, the issue of racial inequality remained in the foreground and the background.
The celebration lay between two important events in civil rights history.
On June 12, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was shot and killed in his driveway in Jackson, Miss.
Two months later, on Aug. 28, people from across the country gathered for the march on Washington, a civil rights demonstration at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln memorial.
In Pennsylvania, too, racial problems arose. Days before the Gettysburg celebration, the state Department of Public Instruction urged public schools to stop sponsoring black-face minstrel shows. The request came in response to a controversy in which the NAACP protested plans by two Montgomery County public schools to put on the shows.
The centennial celebration reflected these racial tensions.
About 300 state troopers were present to handle an expected 250,000 visitors as well as rumored demonstrations by blacks.
Speeches by Northern and Southern governors helped frame the tensions.
A front-page headline in The Patriot about the first day of the celebration read: “Scranton, others declare: Civil War left major ‘unfinished business.’ ” In a speech at the Eternal Peace Light Memorial, Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton said part of that “unfinished business” is “the task of driving prejudice and fear out of the human heart at least as rapidly as we are learning to drive men into outer space.”
Scranton used a metaphor of human development to describe the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln mentioned in his Gettysburg Address.
This freedom was weaned on the persecution of Reconstruction, then lay asleep for several decades before it began to shift into “stormy adolescence” with the civil rights movement, Scranton said.
“Real freedom is only to be found in the human heart,” the governor said. “It is only there that one man can extend it to another.”
Scranton’s speech drew loud applause, The Patriot reported. But the strongest applause came when Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace walked onstage with 10 other participating governors during a ceremony that afternoon at the Peace Light monument.
Less than three weeks before, Wallace had attempted to block two black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama by standing in the doorway.
At Gettysburg, he told The Associated Press that he made his stand against desegregation to prevent violence. It’s not that he didn’t want blacks to receive an education, he said. He simply wanted to preserve states’ rights.
Wallace, accompanied by two bodyguards, was well-received at the Gettysburg celebration, The Patriot reported. He appeared at most scheduled events, greeted by Rebel yells and vigorous applause.
Wallace touted Southern states as a model for proper government.
“Millions of Americans all over the U.S. look to South Carolina and Alabama to lead in this fight to restore constitutional government,” he said during a speech at the dedication of the South Carolina monument.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the anniversary of America’s most vitriolic, blood-soaked war would trigger tension.
But sometimes the pageantry of these major anniversaries masks the messy moments. We should remember this backdrop to the centennial and reflect on how we’ve progressed – if we have progressed – in liberty for all and malice toward none 50 years later.
Joe McClure is a curator for The Patriot-News.