I listened to his speeches while my Dad sat on the couch bitching about everything the man said.
I guess today he would have just watched something else, but back then it was ONLY TV or radio and TV had at the most 2 or 3 channels depending where you were located.
My Dad thought he was "Uppity", a small minded petty bully violently angry with the closest thing to the words of God he would hear in his life.

@Willow_Wisp I was lucky to have had a father who spoke out against racism. I remember him tearing apart a racist store owner after remarks the man made after a black woman and her kids came as and went. That was 1966 in a very white bread part of Central Pennsylvania. He wasn't active in anything, just never afraid to tell some one what he thought. And, having walked through France to fight Nazis and having served in Korea, and being as bit of a hard ass fighter in his youth, no one said anything back to him. I remember he told m ed that while he never experienced any job prejudices, he had uncles tell him about "no Irish wanted" signs and such. That, and being one of the first boot sergeants to have mixed companies and seeing the uniting force of labor unions made him more accepting.
Side note- he absolutely hated Reagan, who he would even blame for bad weather. And, in my opinion is the lynchpin for when the country turned from "maybe we have a chance" to "let's fuck all the little guys and restart racial tensions."

@Beowulfsfriend I was raised in rural Alabama by a man that voted for George C. Wallace every single time, and was in denial of his sexual attraction to Ronald Ragan. A homophobic licensed minister that couldn't find a church worthy of him...
Some of us get all the luck.

My father would have supported Wallace if he had been in the south. He loved Nixon and Goldwater. The one thing we agreed on in politics was that politicians should not be controlled by religion. He was against fundies, in part because they weren't Catholic.

@Willow_Wisp Where was Mom? I had a Dad who loved the Beatles and Classical music. A recovering Catholic, a skilled trades man and a thinker. Mom was the racist, liar, insecure one even tho she broke free of the small mining town mentality of rural Pennslyvania. One of the few small town rural girls who finished high school and whne on to study to be an X-ray tech. The one thing she did sort of keep to herself was just how racist she was. I don't remember hearing anything of Martin Luther King at home either for or agin but I moved out and 3,000 miles away when I was 20. I felt free at last and my up bring was very Leave It To Beaver. It was 15 years after I graduated from high school that MLK Day was started.

@silverotter11 Mom was in a wheel chair in Missouri, he took me from her at gunpoint and I lived with my paternal grandparents in Mississippi for three years before he married again when I was six.
I met my birth mother again when I was 26.

@Willow_Wisp I have realized for a long time my crap with a disfunctional mom is very mild compared to many other stories of childhood. You have survivied some major trauma that I can not even image. I guess it's how we process it all and in the end we just do the best we can with the cards we're dealt.

@silverotter11 I got to deal with all I did because I could kind of handle it, some handled more, some broke, and some didn't make it at all.
A typical life on the planet of the apes.