Death of JFK: When I heard the news as a Harnett County third-grader

November 22, 2023, was the 60th Anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Presently, there are less than a third of Americans still alive who shared that tragic moment in time. I remember the date very well.

I was an eight-year-old third-grader at South Harnett Elementary School rehearsing a Thanksgiving play when we heard the news on the PA system. Unfortunately, I shared the same where-were-you-when moment that many other Americans did on that fateful day.

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The thing I remember most was the universal grief displayed by adults.

The murder of the popular young President stunned the nation, and the Black community was even more terrified. They believed his death would be a significant setback for Civil Rights. I repeatedly heard African-American adults saying that Kennedy was killed because of his support and love for Black people. Although, at that time, the operative word for Black was Negro.

Racism and the sting of Jim Crow was very evident even through the eyes of a child like me. Everything was separate and unequal. The only interaction between southern Blacks and whites was sharecropping farm labor, and that was when the whites were supervising, and the Blacks were doing the work.

Hard grief in the nation

The nation grieved hard as Kennedy’s 34-year-old widow, Jacqueline, planned the President’s state funeral.

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We only had three antenna television stations: Channel 11 (CBS), channel 5 (ABC), and channel 6 (NBC), and they spent the entire weekend committed to wall-to-wall coverage of the assassination.

I wish I could say I was glued to the TV set, but that was not the case. Watching CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite’s continuous coverage, my parents’ favorite news anchor, was not how I wanted to spend my weekend.

Interview with a pallbearer

Another defining moment for me was the pride among African Americans when they saw that a couple of Kennedy’s pallbearers were Black. In the minds of Black people, that was a big deal: the two African-American pallbearers.

The were a Navy corpsman and Army Sgt. James Felder, who was the head of the Arlington Cemetery detail. Felder, 84, is originally from Sumter, South Carolina, and resides in Columbia. I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Felder via phone for this story.

He said that when Kennedy was inaugurated, he noticed that none of the Honor Guard Ceremonial Unit members were Black, and JFK immediately changed that after becoming President. Felder, drafted as a college graduate from Clark Atlanta University, a historically Black school, became only the 10th Black person to serve in the elite unit.

Making history

After his enlistment, Felder continued to make history, finishing Howard University’s Law School, returning to South Carolina, and becoming one of the first three Black men elected to the South Carolina Legislature since Reconstruction. He is also the first Black Assistant Solicitor in South Carolina. He is a South Carolina Black Hall of Fame inductee. He authored the book: “I Buried John F. Kennedy.”

It was exciting talking to Mr. Felder about that critical moment in history. I’m 68 now, but revisiting the past, I felt like I was in the third grade again in 1963.

Troy Williams is a member of The Fayetteville Observer Community Advisory Board. He is a legal analyst and criminal defense investigator. He can be reached at talk2troywilliams@yahoo.com.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Remembering JFK's death, as an 8-year-old in Harnett County, NC