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The American Yawp, Volume 2, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 13 · pp. 405–433
The 1960s were a decade of rapid and sometimes violent change in the United States. The civil rights movement won its biggest victories, and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society expanded the federal government's role in fighting poverty and discrimination. The Vietnam War, a youth counterculture, Black Power, Red Power, the Chicano movement, feminism, and early environmentalism also reshaped the nation. This part covers the first stretch of the story: the civil rights movement from 1960 to 1965.
The civil rights movement of the 1950s was led mostly by middle-class, middle-aged activists. In the 1960s, students joined and demanded faster change (p. 406).
The turning point came in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Four Black students sat at a whites-only lunch counter and refused to leave until they were served. They knew they might be insulted, attacked, or arrested. Woolworth's desegregated within about a month, which proved that direct action could work. Copycat sit-ins then spread across the South (p. 406).
Sit-ins worked because they took away the option of doing nothing. Imagine a store owner facing a sit-in. She could desegregate and anger segregationists. She could refuse service and anger Black customers and white liberals. She could close the counter and lose money. Each choice had a cost. White mobs that attacked protesters were photographed, and the pictures stirred sympathy across the country (p. 406).
The same year, Ella Baker left the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She was frustrated with the distant, professional style of the older southern ministers who led it. She helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to support grassroots student activism. Its young members included Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, Diane Nash, and John Lewis, and they pushed the movement toward faster, more confrontational tactics (p. 406).
In 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the Freedom Rides. Many southern states ignored a Supreme Court ruling that banned segregation on interstate buses and trains. An interracial group boarded buses in Washington, D.C., and sat in integrated patterns as they traveled into the Deep South. In Alabama, a mob firebombed a bus in Anniston and beat the riders who escaped. In Birmingham, police let a mob attack riders at the bus terminal. The violence drew national attention. In November 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission enforced integration of interstate buses and trains (pp. 406–407).
That fall, the Albany Movement in Georgia ran into a different problem. Police Chief Laurie Pritchett arrested protesters in large numbers but did not use brutality. He also bailed out leaders so the jails did not overflow. With no violent images, the movement lost the publicity that had helped it elsewhere. Activists took this lesson with them to their next campaign (p. 407).
White resistance stayed fierce. In October 1962, James Meredith became the first Black student at the University of Mississippi. Segregationists rioted on the Oxford campus in what is called the Battle of Ole Miss. President Kennedy sent US Marshals and National Guardsmen. Two people died and hundreds were injured. The clash showed how strongly many whites opposed integration, especially in schools (pp. 407–408).
In spring 1963, the SCLC launched the Birmingham Campaign, aimed at a city widely seen as the most segregated in America. "Project C" combined boycotts, sit-ins, and marches. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed and wrote his famous letter, which defended active but nonviolent confrontation with injustice. This time the police commissioner, Bull Connor, chose all-out violence. Photos and film of fire hoses and attack dogs used on protesters spread worldwide. Bombings hit Black homes, businesses, and churches. On September 15, a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church killed four girls. The public was shocked, and pressure produced an agreement to desegregate public accommodations in the city (pp. 407–408).
Black churches were central to the movement. Marchers sang hymns and spirituals. Preachers spoke of justice and hope. Churches hosted meetings and trained people in nonviolence. Above all, religious leaders called segregation a moral evil, which challenged the rest of postwar society. Not everyone was happy with this leadership. Some younger activists thought the pastors were autocratic, and many women disliked the male-dominated SCLC (pp. 408–409).
George Wallace became the symbol of white resistance. In his 1963 inaugural address as Alabama governor, he promised "segregation forever." In June 1963 he blocked the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama, in the "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door." He backed down only when Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard. His acts were mostly symbolic, but they made him a hero to many white opponents of civil rights (p. 409).
That evening, June 11, Kennedy asked for a comprehensive civil rights bill. He said the nation would not be fully free until all its citizens were free. The next day, Medgar Evers, Mississippi's first NAACP field secretary and a World War II veteran, was murdered at his home in Jackson. His death showed the danger activists faced even as federal support grew (p. 409).
In August 1963 came the March on Washington. Its demands went beyond ending segregation. They included civil rights laws, school integration, an end to job discrimination, job training, and a higher minimum wage. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. The march raised the movement's profile and increased pressure on politicians to act (pp. 409–410).
Kennedy backed a bill but would not spend much political capital against southern opponents, so it stalled. After his assassination on November 22, 1963, Lyndon Johnson became president. Johnson was a white Texan who admired FDR and the New Deal. He also knew Washington better than almost anyone. He strengthened the bill and guided it through Congress (pp. 411–412).
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred segregation in public accommodations, so a restaurant could no longer refuse customers because of race. It also banned job discrimination and outlawed discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and national or religious origin. It is considered one of the most important civil rights laws in American history (pp. 412, 415).
Laws did not end intimidation. In summer 1964, SNCC and CORE ran Freedom Summer in Mississippi, a state with a long history of keeping Black citizens from voting. Volunteers worked to register voters and set up schools for Black children. Violence followed. Three CORE activists, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, were murdered by law enforcement officers and Klan members in Neshoba County (pp. 412–413).
Black Mississippians were shut out of the state's regular Democratic primary. So civil rights groups formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and over two thousand people met in Jackson to choose delegates. The MFDP asked the Democratic National Convention to seat them but was offered only two at-large seats, and it protested. Fannie Lou Hamer questioned America in a televised speech. Johnson did not back the delegates, and many SNCC activists lost faith in working through institutions (pp. 413, 421).
The struggle for the vote continued in Selma, Alabama. On March 7, 1965, "Bloody Sunday," law enforcement attacked peaceful marchers with batons and tear gas. Marchers were turned back violently a second time. Later that month they finished the fifty-mile walk to the state capitol in Montgomery. News coverage led Johnson to propose the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which abolished voting discrimination in federal, state, and local elections. With the 1964 act, it attacked de jure (legal) segregation and disenfranchisement in two consecutive years (pp. 413–415).
On a May morning in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to graduating students at the University of Michigan. He announced a package of reforms he called the Great Society. Its goals were to end poverty and racial injustice and to raise the quality of life for everyone. He asked the graduates, and the country, to improve national life and American civilization (p. 414).
The plan had two sides. First, it aimed to lift up Americans who were shut out because of race or income. These citizens had long been denied the federal promise of equal democratic and economic opportunity. Second, it aimed to improve life for all Americans at the same time (p. 414).
The programs were wide-ranging, and many still exist. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned job discrimination and ended segregation in public places like restaurants and hotels. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 put southern election laws under strong federal oversight so that everyone could reach the ballot. About ninety years after Reconstruction, these two laws effectively ended Jim Crow (p. 415).
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, called the Hart-Celler Act, ended the national-origins quota system. That system came from the 1924 Reed-Johnson Act. For more than forty years it had effectively allowed legal immigration only from Northern and Western Europe. The 1965 law opened the country to people from the rest of the world (p. 415).
Senator Ted Kennedy promised that the law would not upset the nation's ethnic mix. He was wrong. The law permanently changed the demographics of the United States (p. 415).
The country was wealthy, so many quality-of-life problems seemed solvable. The Great Society attacked several of them (p. 415):
For example, an elderly person who could not afford a doctor gained access to care through Medicare. A struggling school district could use federal funds to pay for resources it lacked.
After this burst of lawmaking, public debate focused on one piece: the War on Poverty. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 devoted about $3 billion to it. The most controversial part was Community Action, the cornerstone antipoverty program (p. 415).
Its guiding idea was "maximum feasible participation." Planners believed poor and marginalized people should help plan and run the programs meant to serve them. This was a major change. Earlier efforts to fight poverty had been run by local political and business elites or by charities (pp. 415–416).
In practice, Community Action Agencies often bypassed city and county governments. They built up grassroots civil rights and community groups, many of which had grown out of the civil rights movement (p. 416).
Johnson himself had never imagined poor people running their own programs. His ideas were old-fashioned. He pictured a second New Deal, with public works camps run by local elites that would teach masculine virtues to jobless young men (p. 416).
That gap between his words and his plans helped fuel attacks from both sides (p. 416):
Progress then stalled. Days after the Voting Rights Act was ratified, a riot broke out in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. An act of police violence set it off. Deeper causes were residential segregation, police brutality, and racial profiling. Riots hit American cities every summer afterward. The worst came in 1967 in Newark and Detroit, with deaths, injuries, arrests, and millions of dollars in damage (p. 416).
"White flight" made things worse. White residents left city centers for the suburbs, which often left neighborhoods resegregated. Cities lost tax revenue and could not pay for services. People left behind had few opportunities, and despair grew (p. 416).
The riots showed that racial inequality was a national problem, not only a southern one. They also showed that the civil rights struggle had no simple endpoint. Many Americans blamed the riots on the Great Society itself, which weakened support for it (pp. 416–417).
The civil rights laws and the War on Poverty provoked conservative resistance. That resistance helped the Republican Party rise in the South and the West (p. 417).
Still, later presidents and Congresses left most of the Great Society in place. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, arts and literature funding, and Head Start all survived. Even Community Action, which was troubled and short-lived, had lasting effects. It gave later community activists the feeling, in one person's words, that the government was "with us." Yet the programs frustrated both political wings. They were also neglected once Johnson turned his attention to the war abroad (p. 417).
American leaders in the postwar years feared that communism would keep spreading. The Soviet Union backed many nationalist movements in colonies that were breaking away from European rule. The US pledged to oppose any revolution that lined up against Western capitalism. This thinking rested on the Domino Theory: if one country fell to communism, its neighbors would fall soon after, like a row of toppling dominoes. (p. 417)
China's communist takeover in 1949 made the fear sharper. In response, the US began paying for France's effort to keep control of its colonies in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Example: from 1946 to 1954 France fought the Viet Minh, a nationalist force led by Ho Chi Minh that wanted an independent Vietnam. American money, weapons, and advisors did not save the French. (p. 417)
The Viet Minh crushed the French army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, just before the Geneva Peace Conference opened. Geneva split Vietnam into two states, but only temporarily. The split was supposed to end after elections monitored by the United Nations. The US expected a communist victory in a free vote, so it blocked the elections. The "temporary" line became permanent. The US then set up the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) under Ngo Dinh Diem, an anticommunist who had lived in the United States. (p. 417)
This was a weak foundation. Diem was corrupt and had little support at home, and he depended on American backing. His army, the ARVN, had more troops and better technology than the Vietcong (VC) insurgents, yet it still struggled against them. Diem was assassinated in 1963, and a string of military dictators followed while conditions worsened. (pp. 417–418)
Most Americans paid little attention at first. This was true even though President Kennedy had sent about sixteen thousand military advisors to help South Vietnam fight the insurgency. (p. 418)
Things changed in 1964. On August 2, the USS Maddox reported fire from North Vietnamese ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Historians still dispute what happened. Even so, Johnson's administration used the event as a pretext to expand the war. Congress then passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which let Johnson use the military to defend South Vietnam. US Marines landed in March 1965, and the American ground war began. (p. 418)
General William Westmoreland led US forces against the VC and the regular North Vietnamese Army (NVA). This was not a war of captured cities or territory. Officials measured progress by body counts and kill ratios instead. That measure made it hard to tell whether the US was truly winning. (p. 418)
Officials such as Westmoreland and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara kept predicting that communism would be defeated. The facts pointed the other way. By 1968 about half a million American troops were in Vietnam, nearly twenty thousand had died, and victory was no closer. Protests spread across the country and became the backdrop for the youth counterculture. (p. 418)
The 1960s changed American culture sharply. Rebellion shook the supposedly stiff conservatism of the 1950s, and youth counterculture moved into the mainstream. (p. 418)
Much of the counterculture reached people through consumer culture. In the 1950s, ads urged people to fit in and buy products to conform. In the 1960s, advertisers shifted to selling "individuality" and "rebellion." (p. 419)
Clothing changed too. The typical 1950s women's outfit was the tight-waisted poodle skirt and buttoned sweater. In the 1960s clothes became looser and freer. Capri pants became common casual wear, and skirts got shorter. Mary Quant introduced the miniskirt in 1964, saying it let a woman move, run, and jump. By the late 1960s the hippies' androgynous look had become fashionable. All of this showed the new values of freedom, rebellion, and individuality. (p. 420)
Many middle-class white young people thought American society had become stagnant and bureaucratic. The New Left grew on college campuses among students angry at lifeless institutions that they believed smothered freedom. The wider counterculture looked for a cure for alienation in psychedelic drugs. LSD began as a tool in psychological research, then spread to campuses and beyond. Followers, drawing on ideas from psychologists and sociologists, believed a spiritual-psychedelic experience could heal society's numbness. (p. 420)
The drug also caused a backlash. By 1966 enough incidents were tied to LSD that the Senate held a hearing. Newspapers reported that hundreds of users had been admitted to psychiatric wards. (p. 420)
The youth culture still shaped the country. It included rock 'n' roll, looser sexual norms, acceptance of diversity, drug use, new age spirituality, and strong idealism. Conservatives called it dangerous, and leftists called it empty self-indulgence, yet it dominated the headlines. Two events became symbols of it:
The hippies' influence was exaggerated and short-lived, and Vietnam and Richard Nixon broke much of their idealism. Still, the counterculture's freer social norms and focus on personal fulfillment remain part of American life. (p. 421)
New laws did not end racial inequality, and frustration grew over the slow pace of change. Activists became less conciliatory, and many were drawn to the Black Power movement and to Malcolm X. (p. 421)
Malcolm X was a Nation of Islam minister who urged African Americans to seek freedom "by any means necessary." He defended armed self-defense and said he did not call it violence when done in self-defense. Martin Luther King Jr. led a racially integrated, nonviolent approach. He argued that Malcolm X's speeches described Black Americans' problems without offering solutions. Black nationalists went further and rejected integration. They wanted economic self-determination, Afrocentric culture, and collective uplift. This split between self-defense and nonviolent integration shaped Black political thought for the rest of the decade and after. (p. 421)
The turn came after the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Johnson refused to back the Black delegates of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. SNCC activists lost faith in working through established institutions and moved away from their founding principle of nonviolence. The group later changed its name from Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to Student National Coordinating Committee. It also expelled its white members and shifted its focus from the rural South to northern cities. (pp. 421–422)
In June 1966, Stokely Carmichael told a crowd the movement would now say "black power." The slogan contrasted with King's "Freedom Now!" It meant self-determination for Black people in political, economic, cultural, and social life. Carmichael described it as Black people joining together as a political force, while for others it meant armed self-defense. (p. 422)
In the South, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, formed in Louisiana in 1964, armed themselves to protect activists from racial violence. Armed resistance became most famous outside the South. In 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California. (pp. 422, 424)
The Panthers used the idea of decolonization, treating Black communities as needing liberation from white power structures. They pointed to police brutality and racist government policies. They also sought reparations and draft exemptions for Black men. They linked themselves with "other people of color" abroad, against whom the US was fighting. (p. 424)
Many white Americans noticed mainly the weapons, military-style dress, and nationalist beliefs. But the Party's 10-Point Plan called for jobs, housing, and education. Its "survival programs" gave out food and clothing and offered medical care, Afrocentric education, and drug rehabilitation. These programs helped Black communities on their own terms. (p. 424)
The civil rights movement showed that organized, public protest could force change. Many other groups copied its methods in the 1960s, and each applied them to its own problems.
Red Power. In 1961, Native American university students, frustrated by neglect of Indigenous people, founded the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC). In the Pacific Northwest it defended tribal fishers who claimed they should be free from state conservation laws on reservations. In 1964 it held "fish-ins." Activists and celebrities cast nets and waited to be arrested, which drew press attention to the dispute. The NIYC's sharp rhetoric and direct action began the Red Power movement, an intertribal effort to publicize Native issues and protest discrimination. (p. 424)
The American Indian Movement (AIM) and others staged larger demonstrations. Starting in November 1969, dozens occupied the abandoned Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay for about a year and a half. In 1973, hundreds occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota, for several months. Wounded Knee was the site of an 1890 massacre, so the choice of place carried symbolic weight. (p. 424)
The Chicano movement. This movement grew out of the Mexican American civil rights struggle after World War II. "Chicano" had been a put-down aimed at Mexican immigrants. Activists in the 1960s reclaimed the word and turned it into a banner for political and social change. They fought discrimination in schools, politics, farming, and other institutions. Groups such as the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDF) were modeled on African American civil rights organizations. (pp. 424–425)
Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Chavez became the best-known Chicano leader. He and Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later merged to become the United Farm Workers (UFWA). The union joined Chicano and Filipino activists who were protesting poor conditions for California farmworkers. Chavez used nonviolent tactics: a hunger strike, a boycott of table grapes, and a three-hundred-mile march from Delano to Sacramento in March and April 1966. The campaign won national attention and backing from figures such as Robert Kennedy. (p. 425)
Corky Gonzales. Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, a former boxer from Denver, stressed Chicano self-determination. In 1966 he founded the Crusade for Justice. Its National Chicano Youth Conference created the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a nationalist manifesto. It pictured Chicanos as one united group with a shared history, fighting discrimination. By 1970, the Texas-based La Raza Unida Party had a strong base for Chicano nationalism and continued civil rights work. (p. 425)
Reform through government. Early in the decade, older women worked inside official institutions. In 1961 President Kennedy created the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, led by Eleanor Roosevelt. Its 1963 report found discriminatory laws and practices in industry, labor, and government. It urged changes in hiring, taxes and benefits, labor law, and services for women as wives, mothers, and workers. Its recommendations mainly addressed problems of middle- and upper-class white working women, who were used to working through agencies and unions. The needs of poor and nonwhite women were mostly left out. (pp. 425–426)
The problem with no name. Also in 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Friedan, a suburban mother who had worked in the labor movement, described the unhappiness of housewives as "the problem that has no name." Her key point was that it was a social problem shared by millions, not a flaw in one woman or one marriage. Society could no longer blame it on lost femininity, too much education, or too much independence. The book sparked a "second wave" of feminism that shaped the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s. (pp. 426–427)
NOW and consciousness-raising. By 1966 Friedan and others were frustrated. The Equal Opportunity Commission had little power, job ads were still split by sex, and firms openly set lower pay for women. They founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) to pursue true equality. (p. 427)
Many feminists also joined consciousness-raising groups that met in homes and women's centers. The goals were to build self-awareness and to confirm that women's experiences were real. Women in the New Left and civil rights movement had found male organizers eager to discuss race and class but quick to laugh at talk of sexism. In 1965 Casey Hayden and Mary King wrote a memo describing this reaction. Groups like the Redstockings (1969) blamed society, not women, for their oppression. They argued that "the personal is political," meaning individual stories showed society-wide sexism. These stories fed other activism and created networks that could organize protests. (p. 427)
A diverse movement. Women's experiences differed, so the movement had many goals and groups. Mostly Black mothers on welfare formed the National Welfare Rights Organization in 1966. Leaders like Johnnie Tillmon won larger grants for school clothes and household equipment, plus fair hearings before benefits were cut off. Black, Chicana, Asian, and Indigenous women often formed their own groups because white-led organizations seemed too narrow. These groups had fewer resources and less attention. (p. 428)
The 1970 Women's Strike for Equality, sponsored by NOW, raised employment discrimination, political equality, abortion, free childcare, and marriage equality. These issues pointed toward the 1970s backlash. Some women who valued the homemaker role opposed feminism. Inside the movement, women of color challenged white feminists' racism, and lesbians pushed for more visibility. (pp. 428–429)
Postwar Americans hiked, fished, and went to the beach more than ever. With more education, they grew aware of threats to nature and to themselves, such as suburban sprawl and industrial and nuclear pollution. (p. 429)
In 1962 biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. She argued that ecological health and human health are connected. Overused pesticides threatened people and the ecosystems that support food production. Many Americans, including Kennedy, found her convincing. Chemical companies attacked her, saying the book came from an emotional woman, not a scientist. The movement she helped inspire led to bipartisan environmental laws in the early 1970s. (p. 429)
In 1969 Americans celebrated the moon landing as a win in the space race with the Soviet Union. It fulfilled Kennedy's 1961 pledge to reach the moon by decade's end. Neil Armstrong called his step "one giant leap for mankind." Yet the Vietnam War had disillusioned a generation, riots had shaken cities, campuses were in protest, and assassinations had killed many leaders. The wonder was brief, and uncertainty followed. (p. 429)
