The 1960s

The Sixties

• Conflict fueled by prosperity

• Vietnam War intensifies social conflict

• Sixties conflicts continue to play out today:

• generational

• racial

The Freedom Movement

• Ella Baker, April 1960: meeting leads to Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

• 1961 Freedom Rides: Congress of Racial Equality

• 1963 Birmingham, AL

• August 28, 1963: March on Washington

Civil Rights

• 1960: Greensboro, NC sit-ins

• 5 months to get service

• 70,000 participants in sit-ins in 1960

• SNCC: Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee

Text

Freedom Rides• 1960-1961: organized by Congress of Racial Equality

• Goal: to integrate interstate buses (federal law made segregation on these buses illegal)

Images from Birmingham, AL 1963

Eugene “Bull” Connor authorizes police attacks on children

March on Washington (1963)

• Organized by A. Philip Randolph

• “Jobs and Freedom”

• Conflict over how radical to go: John Lewis, march “through the heart of Dixie the way Sherman did... and burn Jim Crow to the ground” (quoted on p. 775)

• JFK: January 1961-November 22, 1963

• Interested in cold war, not civil rights

• Army to restore order in 1962 riot at University of Mississippi

• June 1963, proposes Civil Rights Bill: (start at 5:30, end 7:18)

Kennedy and Civil Rights

Civil Rights under Johnson

• Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963-1969)

• Civil Rights Act of 1964

• Freedom Summer (1964) - Student activists go to register voters in MS

• Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (Fannie Lou Hamer)

Johnson Presidency

• The Voting Rights Act (1965)

• Immigration reform: 1965

• The Great Society: Medicaid and Medicare, federal funds to education; EEOE; NEH

• The War on Poverty:

• food stamps

• Head Start

• VISTASelma Police arrest peaceful demonstrators. Selma police arresting nonviolent marchers during their first attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery, March 7, 1965. The violence against marchers prompted President Johnson to submit a proposal for a strong Voting Rights Act. Source: Alabama Sovereignty Commission, Administrative files, SG13843, folder 8, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery Alabama. From http://www.amistadresource.org

Changing Black Movement

• Ghetto Uprisings - Watts, Detroit, Newark

• Malcolm X

• The Rise of Black Power

Malcolm X at a NYC Rally, 1964. Malcolm X speaking at a NYC rally related to the citywide boycott of schools, February or March 1964. Source: Courtesy of Builder Levy, photographer. From http://www.amistadresource.org/

Vietnam and the New Left

• New Left: loneliness, isolation, alienation, powerlessness in the face of institutions, quest for authenticity

• Students for a Democratic Society (SDS): freedom as participatory democracy

• The Antiwar Movement

• The Counterculture

New Movements and Rights Revolution

• Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique (1963)

• The Equal Pay Act (1963)

• National Organization for Women (NOW) founded 1966

• “Women’s liberation” Image: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/lesbian.history/lesbian_feminism

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that

women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her

children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — "Is this

all?"

For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and

articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of

Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread,

cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to

keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents.

1953

1968

Image: http://guides.library.duke.edu/content.php?pid=125273&sid=1075967

http://www.vfa.us/MissAmerica1968JUNE122008.htm

Rights Revolution• Gay Liberation - Stonewall

Riots (1969)

• Latino Activism - César Chávez and UFW

• Red Power - American Indian Movement (AIM)

• Environmentalism - Silent Spring (1962)

• The Supreme Court protects freedom of speech

Conclusions

• Civil Rights protests of the 1960s led to other movements for rights

• The Vietnam War (details in the next unit!) intensified conflict

• Protests did bring social change, though we’ll see a backlash in the following decades