Columbia Pictures released “Easy Rider” on July 14, 1969, fifty-five years ago last Sunday.

I missed seeing it that summer, because I was busy on the farm driving a 92 Massey Harris combine in wheat harvest. I missed the film later, because I was busy my sophomore year in high school running here, there and everywhere: cross country, track, and basketball.

I admit. I have never watched Easy Rider. Other things have crowded out my time.

The film was a runaway success, grossing $60 million, but only cost between $360,000 and $400,000 to shoot, plus another million for licensed music tracks that played throughout.

The songs included: “Born to Be Wild,” by Steppenwolf; “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” by the Byrds; “Groovin,” by the Young Rascals; “With a Little Help From My Friends,” by Joe Cocker; and “Nights in White Satin,” by the Moody Blues.

The actor Peter Fonda produced “Easy Rider,” the actor Dennis Hopper directed it, and Terry Southern wrote the screenplay, along with help from Fonda and Hopper. In the movie, Peter Fonda plays the part of Wyatt, aka Captain America, and Dennis Hopper plays Billy.

Astride chopper motorcycles, sporting lots of facial hair, and bedecked in a U.S. flag, Wyatt and Billy leave the southwest part of the country and head east, aiming for the Mardi Gras.

In New Mexico, police throw the pair into jail, until a young attorney named George Hanson bails them out, played by Jack Nicholson. George Hansen is a straight guy with a white shirt and tie, an establishment guy, even though he drinks to excess.

George finds his place on the back of Wyatt’s motorcycle, ditches his tie, and leaves town.

The film stands yet today as the counter-culture film of the age, an anti-establishment statement of the 1960s and 1970s. “When George Hanson left town, the country did likewise.”

“Rotten Tomatoes” said of the film, “Edgy and seminal, Easy Rider encapsulates the dreams, hopes, and hopelessness of 1960’s counterculture.”

The Academy Awards nominated Jack Nicholson for Best Supporting Actor. Fonda, Hopper, and Southern were nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Yet, none earned an Oscar.

Jack Nicholson did earn an Oscar for Best Actor in the 1975 movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” I was then in college, and still busy, now studying, but I did go see that movie.

To the best of my recollection, I have only met one celebrity in my life, one, that is, whom I conversed with person to person, and that was Jack Nicholson.

Three years ago this next week, my wife and I decided to take a quick one-hour flight to Durango, Colorado. On July 17, 2021, on the streets of Durango, surrounded by hundreds of tourists, I opened the door to a shop to allow my wife to enter, looked up, and saw Jack.

I ran after him, caught his attention, and asked, “Is your name Jack?” He nodded his head. I plunged ahead, “Are you Jack Nicholson?” He nodded a second time, as I backed away.

My wife and I saw him and his girlfriend again that day at a pizza shop, where we all ate lunch, but not together, and a third time in the lobby of the Strater Hotel, where my wife and I were staying in downtown Durango.

Jack explained to me that he and his girlfriend were driving to Arizona but veered north to the cooler Colorado mountains.

I took three pictures of Jack Nicholson that day, and in one, he holds his girlfriend’s hand.

Three months later, in October, Jack disappeared from the public’s eye. By then, he was eighty-four years old, and had ceased appearing in movies. It was rumored he could no longer memorize his lines. Jack’s last film, his eightieth, was “How Do You Know,” filmed in 2010.

Dennis Hopper died on May 29, 2010, at 74. Peter Fonda died on August 16, 2019, at 79.

At 87, Jack Nicholson, the Irishman, the ultimate party animal, still an “Easy Rider,” lives on, at 12850 Mulholland Drive, an easy five-mile drive due north of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

In 2022, a jury convicted Elizabeth Holmes, founder of biotech firm Theranos, of four counts of defrauding investors. A judge sentenced Holmes to 11 years and 3 months in prison.

The film producer Harvey Weinstein was declared guilty of inappropriate relations with women twice, first at a trial in New York in 2020, and the second in California in 2022.

In 2018, the comedian Bill Cosby was sentenced to 10 years in prison for drugging and assaulting a woman, but in 2021, after serving three years in prison, he was released.

On October 2, 1978, Tim Allen was arrested in Michigan on drug charges. He received a sentence of three to seven years, but was paroled on June 12, 1981, after serving two years.

Allen went on to achieve fame on the sitcom “Home Improvement,” as well as in the movies.

On June 13, 1994, thirty years ago, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman lost their lives at Nicole’s home. O. J. Simpson, the football star, was brought to trial, but a jury declared him not guilty of the crimes. The Trial of the Century did not end with a conviction.

On September 13, 2007, Simpson and other men entered a Las Vegas hotel room and left with sports memorabilia that Simpson claimed belonged to him. He was charged with multiple felony counts, was convicted, and on December 5, 2008, was sentenced to 33 years in prison.

He was released in December of 2021, but then died on April 10, 2024, of prostate cancer.

In October 1989, the televangelist Jim Bakker was convicted on all 24 counts of having defrauded investors in his PTL Club out of $158 million and was sentenced to 45 years in prison.

He was released on parole in 1994, after completing almost five years of his sentence.

In 2004, a jury found Martha Stewart, the television celebrity, guilty of “conspiracy, making false statements, and obstruction of justice.” She served five months in a federal prison.

On August 30, 1989, Leona Helmsley, the New York City real estate mogul, was convicted of 33 felony counts of mail fraud and conspiracy. She served twenty-one months in prison.

On June 29, 2009, Bernard Madoff was sentenced to the maximum number of years allowed, 150 years. He died at a Federal prison of kidney disease on April 14, 2021, at 82 years of age.

In 1992, the heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson was sentenced to prison for six years, but was released early in 1995.

From the above list one can see that men and women from all walks of life—sports, comedy, business, religion, television, and real estate—can find themselves in trouble with the law.

On May 30, 2024, a jury convicted a former president, Donald J. Trump, of 34 felony counts for falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 payment to an adult film star.

This is the first time ever that the judicial system has convicted a former president of the United States for crimes committed when in office. Judge Juan Merchan will sentence Trump on July 11, and the judge may sentence Trump to prison for years.

Reaction to the conviction varies. Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institute writes,

“The United States has a more than two-century-long tradition of not prosecuting presidents, but the United States now has a president whose criminality was so relentless, so dangerous, and so unrepentant as to require the abrogation of that tradition.”

Republicans call Trump’s trial, “a travesty of justice,” “a kangaroo court,” “that the decision will get overturned by a higher court,” and that “ the judge advised the jury to use bad logic.”

Who do you believe? Whose words do you trust? I say, “This too shall pass.”

Trumpism, like McCarthyism of the 1950’s, will drift away. In the future, the American people will abandon Trumpism, and latch onto another ideology, one that, we can hope, is more wise, more congenial, and more suitable for the American people. “This too shall pass.”

Last time in these pages I discussed the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, out of Topeka, Kansas. It attempted to rollback the premise that, if schools were “equal” in quality, then they may remain “separated” between blacks and whites.

Chief Justice Earl Warren disagreed. On May 31, 1955, Earl Warren insisted that Southern states must initiate desegregation plans in their schools “with all deliberate speed.”

“Massive resistance” across the Southern states erupted. School boards closed their schools, abolished compulsory attendance laws, and redirected public funds to schools now made private.

The primary test for desegregation occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957, at Central High School, when its doors opened on September 4, the first day of school.

Daisy Gaston Bates—president of Arkansas’s NAACP and co-publisher of the Arkansas State Press—recruited 9 African-American students, 3 boys and 6 girls, who agreed to try to walk in and attend the all-white school that day.

Their names were Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Thelma Mothershed, Gloria Ray, Melba Pattilo, Carlotta Watts, Ernest Green, Terrance Roberts, and Jefferson Thomas.

On Tuesday, September 3, a federal judge named Ronald Davies ruled that desegregation would continue as planned the next day.

That evening Daisy Gaston Bates called eight of the nine, except for Elizabeth Eckford, and offered to drive them to the school together. Elizabeth did not get the message as to where to meet because her family had no telephone.

On Wednesday morning, September 4, a mob of over 1000 angry white adults and students gathered at the school’s front door and chanted, “Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t gonna integrate!”

Arkansas’s Governor, Orval Faubus, ordered the state’s National Guard to the school “to prevent violence.” The soldiers stood ramrod straight, each holding a firearm with a bayonet.

The crowd went wild once they heard the news, “They’re inside,” because the eight had slipped into the school through a side door.

It was then that fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford stepped toward the front door alone.

Students, adult men, and women, all white, gathered around her, jeered at her, ridiculed her, called her names, and hurled a stream of “racial slurs, vicious insults, and threats” of violence. A photographer’s pictures of the girl’s brave attempt made world wide news.

She later described the day, “When I was able to steady my knees, I walked up to the guard who had let the white students in. He didn’t move. When I tried to squeeze past him, he raised his bayonet, and then the other guards moved in, and they raised their bayonets.

“They glared at me with a mean look, and I was frightened and didn’t know what to do. The crowd came toward me.”

None of the nine attended school that day. Each were rounded up and driven off.

A team of NAACP lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall, objected in court to Governor Faber’s resistance, and the courts favored the students, but each of the nine refused to return.

On Monday, September 23, President Dwight D. Eisenhower dispatched 100 paratroopers from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, to enforce desegregation, and on September 25, the nine attended classes for the first time, but not without continual name-calling and violence.

Governor Fabus declared, “This is military occupation,” dredging up bitter memories of the Reconstruction years, 1865-1877, when the North’s Union army oversaw local and state politics. Many across the Southern states cried out, “This is a violation of our State’s Rights!”

Of the nine, one graduated from Little Rock’s high school, Ernest Green, on May 25, 1958, the first African American to graduate from Central High.

Those nine broke the racial barrier. America’s destiny now incorporated desegregation.

In Topeka, Kansas, on February 20, 1943, a black girl named Linda Brown was born.

When still a child in the early 1950’s, her father, Oliver Brown, was required to drive Linda to an all-black school five miles across Topeka, when an all-white school, the Sumner School, was a few blocks distant from Oliver’s home.

Oliver was angry. An assistant pastor at St. John African Methodist Episcopal Church, he joined the NAACP and other plaintiffs to file a lawsuit against Topeka’s Board of Education, challenging the law that separated white students from black students in that city’s schools.

By 1952, four similar cases—in Delaware, Washington D.C., South Carolina, and Virginia—had wound their way through the courts.

Each of the five cases pointed to Section 1 of the 14th Amendment: “no State shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

And yet, state laws did deny African-American citizens “equal protection of the laws.”

Almost 60 years before, in 1896, the Supreme Court—with support from Southern states—had shoved aside the high-minded ideals of the 14th Amendment of building a multi-racial society and had replaced it with a divisive legal principle named “separate but equal.”

That principle emerged through the Supreme Court’s decision in “Plessy v. Ferguson.”

Henry Billings Brown, an associate justice on the Supreme Court from 1891 until 1906, and a lawyer from Michigan, and no relation to Oliver and Linda Brown, wrote the legal opinion.

In it, Brown argued, that “racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality.”

By Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court justices gave their stamp of approval on existing state laws that insisted upon segregation in the schools. For decades no black children were permitted to attend the all-white schools across the Southern states.

And yet, most people understood that the white schools were superior to the black schools.

In 1954, the Supreme Court listened to arguments in the case titled “Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas,” and on May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling. He wrote,

“In each of the cases, minors of the Negro race seek the aid of the courts in obtaining admission to the public schools of their community on a nonsegregated basis. . . . This segregation was alleged to deprive the plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws.

“Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law. . . . A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn.

“We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

Before the ink was dry on Warren’s ruling, Southern white leaders denounced the Warren Court’s decision and “vowed to defy it.” There was “massive resistance” across the South.

Over the next term, the Supreme Court listened to further arguments “to determine how the ruling would be imposed.” A year later, on May 31, 1955, the justices rendered a unanimous decision in “Brown II,” and it was again Earl Warren who delivered the ruling.

He instructed the Southern states to initiate desegregation plans “with all deliberate speed.”

The push-back was fierce, and that piece of history we will consider next time in these pages.