576 Identity of the grassy knoll coupleCompare:71 Jim Hood Photograph325 Footage of interview with unknown witness569 Officer Haygood’s TSBD-shooter witnessA little over sixty years ago, two young black people in Dallas found themselves eyewitnesses to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — yet their voices have never been heard. Indeed, more than a half century later, even their names are unknown. In the annals of black history, they are one hell of a missing page.
These two young people sat in Dealey Plaza, in the vortex of history, in that very small, very famous piece of real estate immortalized in the phrase "the grassy knoll,” in that heart-stopping moment that novelist Don DeLillo dubbed “the six seconds that broke the back of the American century.” If you go to Dallas today, you can see the spot almost exactly — but not quite — as it was on the day of JFK’s assassination.
Seated on a park bench, this young woman and her male companion had a hamburger lunch and a front row seat on the making of history. They might have been students at Bishop College, a historically black school in Dallas at the time. One bystander thought they were a couple.
[...]
[Marilyn] Sitzman had accompanied her boss, dressmaker Abraham Zapruder to Dealey Plaza to watch President Kennedy's mid-day motorcade. They found a spot on a marble wall atop a grassy embankment overlooking the parade route. Sitzman steadied Zapruder as he filmed the approaching motorcade. With his Super 8 movie camera , Zapruder captured the killing of the president.
(Jefferson Morley, JFKfacts, 19 Feb 2024)
The area where the couple sat, as photographed in 2008. (Francois Gorik, CC BY-SA 2.0. via Wikimedia Commons)Josiah Thompson: Darn right. I know. I've seen the films too. Now, to get to this area between the stockade fence and the cement abutment, or small mall: Did you turn after the shot to look in this general area?
Marilyn Sitzman: Yes.
Thompson: And did you see anyone in this area?
Sitzman: No, just the two colored people running back.
Thompson: I see. They were already ... they'd gotten up from the bench and were now running around into the gap made between the stockade fence and the pergola.
Sitzman: Either in the gap there or back in the alcove. I don't recall which way they went. I saw ... I heard the bottles crash, and of course I looked that way, to my right, right away, and they were getting up and running towards the back. And I turned back to see if there was anything in the front street, because then they didn't affect me one way or another.
A plaque commemorates the pedestal from which Zapruder
filmed the assassination. (Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC,
Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.)Thompson: To see if anything else was going on. Had you seen them sitting on the bench before you stood next to them?
Sitzman: Oh year, yes. Everybody is ... oh, ten or fifteen minutes before, everybody was milling around down there, trying to find a place to stand and everything, and I know when we went over to get up on the marble thing, they were already sitting there.
Thompson: Well, did you notice at any point whether either of these two moved up to the end of the, to the point of the wall?
Sitzman: No. They may have. I don't know.
Thompson: Of course, you were looking at the parade at that point, and you wouldn't have seen what they did.
Sitzman: Yeah. I always have the feeling that they were still sitting on the bench, because when I looked over there, they were getting up from the bench.
(
Josiah Thompson 1966 interview with Marilyn Sitzman)