We all had a great time that summer. On June 24, I went to Constitution Hall to hear Ray Charles sing. My date was Carlene Jann, a striking girl I had

Rising discontent over poverty, continuing discrimination, violence against civil rights activists, and the disproportionate number of blacks fighting and dying in Vietnam had sparked a new militancy, especially in Americas cities, where Martin Luther King Jr. was competing for the hearts and minds of black America against the much more militant idea of Black Power.

In the mid-sixties, race riots of varying size and intensity swept through non-southern ghettos. Before 1964, Malcolm X, the Black Muslim leader, had rejected integration in favor of black-only efforts to fight poverty and other urban problems, and predicted more racial violence than white Americans have ever experienced.

We all had a great time that summer. On June 24, I went to Constitution Hall to hear Ray Charles sing. My date was Carlene Jann, a striking girl I had met at one of the numerous mixers the area girls schools held for Georgetown boys. She was nearly as tall as I was and had long blond hair. We sat near the back of the balcony and were among the tiny minority of white people there. I had loved Ray Charles since I heard his great line from Whatd I Say: Tell your mama, tell your pa, Im gonna send you back to Arkansas. By the end of the concert Ray had the audience dancing in the aisles. When I got back to Potomac Avenue that night, I was so excited I couldnt sleep. At 5 a.m., I gave up and went for a three-mile run. I carried the ticket stub from that concert in my wallet for a decade.

Constitution Hall had come a long way since the 1930s, when the Daughters of the American Revolution had denied the great Marian Anderson permission to sing there because she was black. But a lot of younger blacks had moved way beyond wanting access to concert halls.