Carl Chancellor: Of Beatles, boomers, and black history

  It was 50 years ago this week that the Beatles taught us how to play. In case you missed it—as if that were possible with the wall-to-wall media hoopla—four mop-top lads from Liverpool made their audacious U.S. debut in February 1964.

  Just as Cassius Clay, soon to be Muhammad Ali, would do two weeks later in Miami, the Beatles "shook up the world"—particularly the world of this then-11-year-old black boy—when they appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show" on February 9, 1964.