In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, struck down state laws that established separate schools for black and white students. They ruled unanimously that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Ten years later, on July 16, 1964, and just days after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law, off-duty New York Police Lt. Thomas Gilligan shot to death James Powell, a black summer school student in Harlem. The killing sparked days of looting, beatings, fires and violent clashes between the police and rioters. All this set the stage for my first close-up encounter with one of the most significant social issues of the 1960s.

Earlier in the summer of 1964, my father, two brothers and I set out from Los Angeles on a cross-country bicycle trip that ended in New York City in August. My father, ever alert to educational opportunities for his children, decided this would be a great time to go over to Harlem and meet Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. I don't remember where we were staying, but we hopped on our bicycles and pedaled over to Harlem. We were the only white people to be seen.

Powell was a major figure in the civil rights movement. Searching for him in post-riot Harlem personalized race issues for me in ways a white surfer boy from Southern California would never have expected.

While many, especially white folks, think of the 1960s as a social and cultural revolution, looking back it is astonishing to see the number of watershed civil rights moments in the 1950s and 1960s. Among them:

1955: Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white passenger.

1957: Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus blocks nine black students from entering a formerly all-white high school in Little Rock. President Eisenhower sends in federal troops and the National Guard on behalf of the students.

1959: Motown Records is founded in Detroit.

1961: James Meredith becomes the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

1962: Malcolm X becomes national minister of the Nation of Islam. He rejects the nonviolent civil rights movement and integration.

1963: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. writes his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" urging civil disobedience to unjust laws; NAACP leader Medgar Evers is murdered at his home in Jackson, Miss.; King delivers his "I Have a Dream" speech.

1964: Civil Rights Act of 1964 is enacted.