WE SHALL OVERCOME

Across the river from Boston, another revolution was gathering in coffeehouses, apartments and the rooms around Harvard Square. Joan Baez emerged from the Cambridge folk scene just as a young John F. Kennedy was turning Massachusetts ambition into the New Frontier and Malcolm X was forcing America to confront everything that promise left unsaid.

Folk music stopped being something preserved from the past and became a weapon for interrogating the present—race, war, freedom, power and what America claimed to be. Then Kennedy was gone, Malcolm was gone and the innocence went with them. The beatniks were about to hand the keys to the hippies, Dylan was reaching for an electric guitar and Boston was heading toward its next collision.