The Civil Rights Revolution

The Civil Rights Revolution - The Rising Tide of Protest • Ella Baker met with young activists who formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). • The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the Freedom Rides in 1961. • As protests escalated, so did the resistance of local authorities. - Albany, Georgia - James Meredith - Birmingham • The high point of protest came in the spring of 1963. • Martin Luther King Jr. led a demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama. - "Letter from Birmingham Jail" • King made the bold decision to send black school children into the streets of Birmingham. - Bull Connor unleashed his forces against the children. • The events in Birmingham forced white Americans to decide whether they had more in common with fellow citizens demanding their basic rights or violent segregationists. - Medgar Evers - The March on Washington • The March on Washington was organized by a coalition of civil rights, labor, and church organizations led by A. Philip Randolph. • The March on Washington reflected an unprecedented degree of black-white cooperation in support of racial and economic justice while revealing some of the movement's limitations and the tensions within it. The Kennedy Years - Kennedy and the World • Kennedy's agenda envisioned new initiatives aimed at countering communist influence in the world. - Peace Corps - Space program • Kennedy's Alliance for Progress was aimed at Latin America. • Kennedy failed at ousting Castro from power in Cuba. - The Missile Crisis • The most dangerous crisis of the Kennedy administration came in October 1962, when American spy planes discovered that the Soviet Union was installing missiles in Cuba capable of reaching the United States with nuclear weapons. • In 1963, Kennedy moved to reduce Cold War tensions. 1 - Limited Test-Ban Treaty - Kennedy and Civil Rights • Kennedy failed to protect civil rights workers from violence, insisting that law enforcement was a local matter. • The events in Birmingham in 1963 forced Kennedy to take more action. • Kennedy was shot on November 22, 1963, in Dallas. Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency - The Civil Rights Act of 1964 • Immediately after becoming president, Lyndon Johnson identified himself with the black movement more passionately than any previous president. • In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. - Freedom Summer • The 1964 law did not address a major concern of the civil rights movement—the right to vote in the South. • Freedom Summer was a voter registration drive in Mississippi. - Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney • Freedom Summer led directly to the campaign by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). - Fannie Lou Hammer - The 1964 Election • Lyndon B. Johnson's opponent was Barry Goldwater, who was portrayed as pro-nuclear war and anti-civil rights. • He was stigmatized by the Demo crats as an extremist who would repeal Social Security and risk nuclear war. - The Conservative Sixties • With the founding in 1960 of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), conservative students emerged as a force in politics. - Sharon Statement • Proposition 14 repealed a 1963 California law banning racial discrimination in the sale of real estate. - The Voting Rights Act • In 1965, King led a group in a march from Selma to Montgomery. • The federal government took action when there was violence against nonviolent demonstrators. - 1965 Voting Rights Act - Twenty-fourth Amendment - Immigration Reform • The belief that racism should no longer serve as a basis of public policy spilled over into other realms. - Hart-Celler Act 2 • Taken together, the civil rights revolution and immigration reform marked the triumph of a pluralist conception of Americanism. - The Great Society • Johnson outlined the most sweeping proposal for government action to promote the general welfare since the New Deal. • Unlike the New Deal, however, the Great Society was a response to prosperity, not depression. - The War on Poverty • The centerpiece of the Great Society was the crusade to eradicate poverty. - Michael Harrington's The Other America • In the 1960s, the administration attributed poverty to an absence of skills and a lack of proper attitudes and work habits. • The War on Poverty concentrated on equipping the poor with skills and rebuilding their spirits and motivation. - Office of Economic Opportunity - Freedom and Equality • Johnson resurrected the phrase "freedom from want," all but forgotten during the 1950s. • Johnson's Great Society may not have achieved equality as a fact, but it represented a remarkable reaffirmation of the idea of social citizenship. • Coupled with the decade's high rate of economic growth, the War on Poverty succeeded in reducing the incidence of poverty from 22 percent to 13 percent of American families during the 1960s. The Changing Black Movement - The Ghetto Uprisings • The 1965 Watts uprising left thirty-five dead, 900 injured, and $30 million in property damage. • By the summer of 1967, violence had become so widespread that some feared racial civil war. - Kerner Report • With black unemployment twice that of whites and average black family income little more than half the white norm, the movement looked for ways to "make freedom real" for black Americans. - Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged - Freedom Budget • In 1966, King launched the Chicago Freedom Movement, with demands quite different from its predecessors in the South. - The movement failed. - Malcolm X • Malcolm X had insisted that blacks must control the political and economic resources of their communities and rely on their own efforts rather than working with whites. • After a trip to Mecca, Malcolm X began to speak of the possibility of interracial cooperation for radical change in the United States. - The Rise of Black Power 3 • Black Power immediately became a rallying cry for those bitter over the federal government's failure to stop violence against civil rights workers, white attempts to determine movement strategy, and the civil rights movement's failure to have any impact on the economic problems of black ghettos. • The idea of Black Power reflected the radicalization of young civil rights activists and sparked an explosion of racial self-assertion. • Inspired by the idea of black self determination, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and CORE repudiated their previous inter-racialism, and new militant groups sprang into existence. - Black Panther Party Vietnam and the New Left - Old and New Lefts • What made the New Left new was its rejection of the intellectual and political categories that had shaped radicalism for most of the twentieth century. • The New Left was not as new as it claimed. • The New Left's greatest inspiration was the black freedom movement. - The Fading Consensus • The years 1962 and 1963 witnessed the appearance of several path breaking books that challenged one or another aspect of the 1950s consensus. • The Port Huron Statement offered a new vision of social change. - Freedom meant participatory democracy. - The Rise of SDS • In 1964, events at the University of California at Berkeley revealed the possibility of a far broader mobilization of students in the name of participatory democracy. - Mario Savio - America and Vietnam • What transformed student protest into a full fledged generational rebellion was the war in Vietnam. • Fear that the public would not forgive them for losing Vietnam made it impossible for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to remove the United States from an increasingly untenable situation. - Lyndon Johnson's War • Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, authorizing the president to take "all necessary measures to repel armed attack" in Vietnam. • Although Johnson campaigned in 1964 against sending U.S. troops to Vietnam, troops arrived in 1965. • Also in 1965, Johnson sent 22,000 U.S. troops to the Dominican Republic. • By 1968, the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam exceeded half a million and the conduct of the war had become more and more brutal. - The Anti-war Movement • As casualties mounted and U.S. bombs poured down on North and South Vietnam, the Cold War foreign policy consensus began to unravel. 4 • Opposition to the war became the organizing theme that united all kinds of doubts and discontents. - The burden of fighting fell on the working class and the poor. • Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) began anti-war demonstrations in 1965. - Carl Oglesby - The Counterculture • As the 1960s progressed, young Americans' understanding of freedom increasingly expanded to include cultural freedom as well. • Liberation was a massive redefinition of freedom as a rejection of all authority. • The counterculture in some ways represented not rebellion but the fulfillment of the consumer marketplace. - Personal Liberation and the Free Individual • To young dissenters, personal liberation represented a spirit of creative experimentation, a search for a way of life in which friendship and pleasure eclipsed the single-minded pursuit of wealth. • The counterculture emphasized the ideal of community. - Faith and the Counterculture • Reforms in the Catholic Church inspired a split between conservatives and adherents to a transnational "liberation theology." • The desire for social justice and brotherhood in the New Left also had Christian roots. • The quest for authenticity inspired a variety of religious and spiritual experiments, ranging from the "Jesus People" to adaptations of Buddhism and the suicidal People's Temple of Jim Jones. The New Movements and the Rights Revolution - The Feminine Mystique • The public reawakening of feminist consciousness came with the publication in 1963 of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. • The immediate result of The Feminine Mystique was to focus attention on yet another gap between American rhetoric and American reality. • The law slowly began to address feminist concerns. • 1966 saw the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW), with Friedan as president. - Women's Liberation • Many women in the civil rights movement concluded that the treatment of women in society was not much better than society's treatment of blacks. • The same complaints arose in SDS. • By 1967, women throughout the country were establishing consciousness-raising groups to discuss the sources of their discontent. • The new feminism burst onto the national scene at the Miss America beauty pageant of 1968. - "Bra burners" - Personal Freedom 5 • Women believed that "the personal is political," thus permanently changing Americans' definition of freedom. • Radical feminists' first public campaign demanded the repeal of state laws that underscored women's lack of self determination by banning abortions or leaving it up to physicians to decide whether a pregnancy should be terminated. - Gay Liberation • Gay men and lesbians had long been stigmatized as sinful or mentally disordered. • The 1960s transformed the gay movement. - Stonewall bar - Latino Activism • The movement emphasized pride in both the Mexican past and the new Chicano culture that had arisen in the United States. - Cesar Chavez • In New York City, the Young Lords Organization, modeled on the Black Panthers, staged street demonstrations to protest the high unemployment rate among the city's Puerto Ricans and the lack of city services in Latino neighborhoods. • Like SNCC and SDS, the Latino movement gave rise to feminist dissent. - Red Power • Truman and Eisenhower had sought a policy known as termination, meant to integrate Native Americans into the American mainstream, but it was abandoned by Kennedy. • Indian activists demanded not simply economic aid but greater self-determination. - American Indian Movement - Indians of All Nations - Red Power movement - Silent Spring • The new environmentalism was more activist and youth oriented and spoke the language of empowering citizens to participate in decisions that affected their lives. • The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring brought home to millions of readers the effects of DDT. - The New Environmentalism • Rachel Carson's Silent Spring spurred the modern environmental movement. • Environmentalism attracted the broadest bipartisan support of any of the new social movements, despite vigorous opposition from business groups that considered its proposals a violation of property rights. - Environmental legislation passed - April 22, 1970—Earth Day • Closely related to environmentalism was the consumer movement, spearheaded by the lawyer Ralph Nader. - The Rights Revolution • Under the guidance of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Supreme Court vastly expanded the rights enjoyed by all Americans. 6 • In 1957, the Court moved to rein in the anticommunist crusade on what is known as Red Monday. • The Court continued to guard civil liberties in the 1950s and 1960s. • In the 1960s, the Court continued to push toward racial equality. - NAACP v. Alabama - New York Times v. Sullivan - Loving v. Virginia - Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. - Policing the States • The Court simultaneously pushed forward the process of imposing on the states the obligation to respect the liberties outlined in the Bill of Rights. - Miranda v. Arizona - Baker v. Carr - Engel v. Vitale - The Right to Privacy • With Griswold v. Connecticut, the Warren Court outlined entirely new rights in response to the rapidly changing contours of American society. • Roe v. Wade created a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. • Griswold and Roe, which followed, unleashed a flood of rulings and laws that seemed to accept the feminist view of the family as a collection of sovereign individuals rather than a unit with a single head. 1968 - A Year of Turmoil • The 1960s reached their climax in 1968, a year when momentous events succeeded each other with such rapidity that the foundations of society seemed to be dissolving. - Tet offensive - Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the 1968 election. - Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated - Columbia University student strike - Robert Kennedy assassinated - Chicago Democratic National Convention - The Global 1968 • 1968 was a year of worldwide upheaval. • Massive anti-war demonstrations took place. • Throughout the world, the second wave of American feminism found echoes among women who resented being relegated to unequal citizenship. - Nixon's Comeback 7 • The year's events opened the door for a conservative reaction. • Richard Nixon campaigned as the champion of the silent majority. - The Legacy of the 1960s • The 1960s produced new rights and new understandings of freedom. 8