2. Civil Rights, the 60s, and 70s
• Today we will:
• Closer look at Civil Rights, the 50s and 60s
• A race through the 70s
• Next time we will:
• Briefly look at the 80s and the end of the
Cold War
• Have Review Day
3. 1950s, An Overview
• Dwight D. Eisenhower elected in 1952
• Former Army General, defeated Adlai Stevenson (who only won 9 states)
• Called a moderate Republican at the time, promised to reduce gov’t spending
• Kinda did the opposite…
• Expanded Social Security
• Federal Highway Act (1956) – the largest federal works project in history
• 25 years to complete initial phase, and still expanding to this day (Eisenhower Interstate System)
• St. Lawrence Seaway (partnership with Canada to connect the Great Lakes to the ocean)
• Created a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
• By 1954 McCarthyism was over
• In 1944, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act was passed
• What do we call this? What did it do?
• What about Persons of Color? Women?
4. Suburbs and White Flight
• What do you think of when you think suburbs?
• Levittown, NY (17,447 houses, located on Long Island)
• Initially contracts included language barring POCs, ruled illegal
• Segregation continued on an unofficial level, even Levitt (who was Jewish) discouraged
other Jews from buying his houses
• By 1955 only 5% of African Americans lived in suburbs
• This “White Flight” to the suburbs was simultaneous to a new wave of the
Great Migration
• Another 5 million African Americans left the South for urban centers elsewhere
• Some POC veterans were able to use their GI Bill benefits for Housing and Education
• In CA and the Southwest, an expansion of the Bracero Program further increased the
Latinx population
• Between 1940-60 1 million Puerto Ricans moved from the island to the mainland
(mostly NYC)
5. The Idyllic 1950s?
• TV and Consumer Culture built this idyllic depiction of life
• What did that look like?
• 25% of Americans had no financial assets, more than 50% had no savings
• This is when the notion of women going to college to get “M.R.S.” degrees
• Why are children born in this era called “Baby Boomers?”
• Most of the critiques of this era and of blind consumerism come from
literature
• Mainstream: John Updike, John Keats, JD Salinger, Ralph Ellison
• Often feature tormented souls struggling to exist in this new world
• The Beats: Writers, artists, musicians who rejected the responsibilities of middle-class
life
• Jack Keruoac, Allen Ginsberg (openly gay, and married to his longtime partner), William
Burroughs, Neal and Carolyn Cassady, etc.
• Emerged out of Greenwich Village in NYC
• Would be the precursor to the youth revolts in the 60s
• Rock ’n’ Roll
6. Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s
• 1950s
• Eisenhower felt it should be handle by the states, but he did desegregate
public facilities in DC, and intervened at some military bases in the South
• Fighting discrimination mostly fell to persons of color and their white allies
• The NAACP had been fighting separate-but-equal since the 1930s in the courts, but it
wasn’t until Sweatt v. Painter in 1950 that they received a ruling in their favor (law schools
in Texas)
• Brown v. Board of Education (1954) – Oliver Brown wanted his daughter to attend the
school closest to their home, but because of segregation she had to bused further away,
he and other parents filed a class-action lawsuit.
• By 1960, only 765 of 6676 school districts in the South had desegregated
• Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955) - Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. – Supreme Court
upholds a the case brought to end segregation on the buses. The boycott had lasted over a
year.
7. Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s
• 1950s
• The Little Rock Nine – Central High School
• The racist governor (Orval Eugene Faubus) used National Guard troops to block nine
African-American high school students from entering. President Eisenhower sent 1000
active-duty soldiers from the 101st Airborne to escort the students into the school and to
and from class
• Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
• MLK, Jr. invited 60 ministers and leaders to the Ebenezer Church in Atlanta in 1957 to form
an organization to further desegregation efforts across the South, while the NAACP would
continue to use the courts
8. Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s
• Overview of the 1960s
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkXFb1sMa38&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtMwmep
BjTSG593eG7ObzO7s&index=41
9. Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s
• 1960s
• Sit-Ins
• In Feb. 1960 four African-American college students sat down at an “all-
white” counter in a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, NC. When they weren’t
served, they returned with more students the next day, and the next, for a
week. More sit-ins began to happen across the South, leading to the
creation of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
“Snick”), which coordinated sit-ins, kneel-ins, and wade-ins.
• Freedom Rides (1961-62)
• Activists would board buses traveling across the South. The buses were
burned, the activists were assaulted and arrested. Resulted in the ICC
requiring interstate facilities and be integrated.
• James Meredith (1962)
• Tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi, when the governor (Ross
Barnett) tried to block Meredith, JFK sent National Guard troops to ensure
he was allowed to enroll.
10. Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s
• 1960s
• Birmingham, AL, Early to mid-1963
• MLK, Jr. organized a number of demonstrations, sit-ins, and picket lines.
The Governor of Alabama (George Wallace) sanctioned, and the police
chief in Birmingham, Bull Connor used, cattle prods, fire hoses, tear gas,
and dogs to try to break the protests.
• This was all televised, and was a calculated risk on the part of the
protesters
• MLK, Jr. and over 3000 others were arrested, he writes “Letter from
Birmingham Jail.”
• Nationwide the public is outraged
• Soon after Wallace attempts to block African-American students trying to
enroll at U of Alabama
• JFK commits to a new Civil Rights bill in a televised speech
• Medgar Evers is killed in Jackson, MS, assassinated by racists waiting
to ambush him (June 1963)
• March on Washington (Aug 1963) – MLK, Jr. delivers his “I have a
Dream” speech.
11. Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s
• 1960s
• Tensions continue to escalate nationwide, advances are made in
the courts, and efforts are made to send activists into the rural
South to better mobilize African American voters
• Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) required public defenders in felony cases
• Escobedo v. Illinois (1964) can speak to an attorney before interrogation
• Miranda v. Arizona (1966) informed of their rights while in custody
• Alternatives to the Non-violent movement begin to arise
• Black Power – Fighting back, mostly in urban areas across America
• Malcolm X – Nation of Islam minister that promoted Black nationalism,
assassinated in Feb. 1965
• Black Panther Party – 1966, set up as a defense force against police
brutality, militant, and labeled a terrorist organization by the gov’t
12. Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s
• 1960s
• 1965 – United Farm Workers
• Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta led the push for civil and workers rights for
Latinx (and other laborers) across California, the Southwest, and Texas
• 1968 – American Indian Movement (AIM)
• AIM and other groups would lead demonstrations for greater rights for
Native Americans, including occupying Alcatraz and staging a sit-in at the
Bureau of Indian Affairs in DC
• 1969 – The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, NYC
• NYC police raided, patrons fought back. Sparked riots that lasted 5 days, and
sparked a movement that saw the creation of the Gay Liberation Front and
the Gay Activists’ Alliance. By 1973 there were over 800 organizations
pushing for increased rights, and the APA removed homosexuality from the
list of mental illnesses.
• Feminist Movement
• Began in the 1960s, Betty Friedan was the first president of the National
Organization of Women (NOW) which was founded in 1966. Gloria Steinem
emerges as a more radical leader. Eventually the movement splits between
the more radical elements and those more moderate.
• Did eventually help get gender equality in education (Title IX, 1972) and was
influential in Roe v. Wade (1973)
13. Conservativism on the Rise (Nixon)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCrxD19DHA8&l
ist=PL8dPuuaLjXtMwmepBjTSG593eG7ObzO7s&inde
x=42
The (rest of the) Seventies
(Ford and Carter)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyN5LPHEQ_0
14. Final Thoughts
• What do you think has the most
impact on the US today? (From
the 1960s and 1970s?
• For next time:
• Finish Chapter 30
• Skim Chapter 31
• Next Time
• 80s and the End of the Cold War
• Review Day
