• According to Chapter 12, a "growing sense of rights consciousness encompassed not just the advancement of formal citizenship rights, such as voting and equal access to the courts, but an entirely new set of social and economic expectations."
• an "earthly perfectionism" gave enormous spirit and energy to the social movements
• reformers affirmed "there was a political dimension to private life" that nourished a strong "movements" culture, filled a void, provided a senese of community

Birth of Civil Rights

• 1954 Brown v, Board of Education overturned "separate but equal" segregated schools, "the most significant Supreme Court decision of the twentieth century"
• much opposition: 1955 Southern Manifesto, "massive reisistance" of Sen. Harry Byrd, Gov. Orville Faubus closed Little Rock high schools, police chief Bull Connor used dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham
• NAACP and church led movement in Montgomery, Rosa Parks kept her bus seat in Dec. 1955, bus boycott for 13 months, Martin Luther King
• Greensboro NC Woolworth lunch counter sit-in began the sit-in movements of 1960, SNCC "commando raiders"
• Freedom Rides by students, CORE in 1961
• the "sit-ins and Freedom Rides opened the way for a new sense of citizenship and participation"
• desegregation of the entire community in 1961 Albany GA
• Fanny Lou Hamer for voter registration in 1962 Miss
• Mississippi: Is This America? 1962-64 from Eyes on the Prize
• James Meredith integrated Ole Miss 1962
• SCLC led desegregation of 1963 Birmingham
• A. Philip Randolph organized march on Washington August 1963
• more than half African Americans reported "a sense of personal obligation to get involved"
• Ole Miss' Lessons in Southern Symbolism from LAT, May 22, 1997
• Debating Flag, Mississippi Finds It Doesn't Have One from NYT May 5, 2000
• The Rights Revolution of the Sixties outline

Kennedy and Johnson

• JFK "found civil rights issues divisive and embarressing"
• more worried about Soviets, Asia, Africa, southern Democrats, FBI
• Our World: Up Against the Wall 1961 documentary
• TV speech June 11, 1963, made civil rights a powerful moral issue; Medgar Evers killed
• "two great consequences" of JFK assassination: legitimacy, liberalism
• LBJ declare "unconditional war on poverty"
• 1964 Civil Rights Act desegregated public accomodations
• Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman killed in Miss June 1964
• LBJ refused to seat delegates from Miss. Freedom Democratic Party at 1964 Atlantic City convention, ordered compromise plan by Hubert Humphrey and Walter Reuther
• LBJ and HHH won 61% popular vote in 1964 election, also House (295-140) and Senate (68-32)
• "At the heart of the Great Society was the legal revolution in civil rights"
• Title 7 of Civil Rights Act prohibited desgregated hiring and promotion, job discrimination, created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
• 1965 Voting Rights Act caused "greatest political transformation since the end of Reconstruction" in the South
• Medicare ended debate on "socialized medicine"
• federal aid to education, Immigration Act

War on Poverty

• Walter Heller predicted 1964 tax cut would raise growth, lower unemployment
• "most new funding went to programs designed to help the poor get an education and secure a job."
• Head Start, Job Corps, VISTA, OEO, Community Action Program
• National Welfare Rights Organization sought welfare as a right of citizenship
• "very real conflict" between states rights and federally sponsored local activism
• LBJ "ignored the most important cause of postwar poverty" - structural changes
• decline of Appalachian coal industry, mechanization of southern cotton, decline of agriculture in Puerto Rico and Mexico, immigration of poor into cities, emigration of businesses to suburbs, persistence of secondary labor market of low-paying service-sector jobs
• "liberalism failed to shift the structures of power"

Black Power

• "The riots of the 1960s were different: in response to incidents of police hostility and discrimination, blacks took angry action against white-owned ghetto property."
• Detroit factories had moved to Livonia and Wyandotte white suburbs
• Watts unemployment was 20% and state housing discrimination prohibition was repealed
• unlike southern communities, "urban ghettos were fragmented and difficult to orgnaize"
• King and SCLC failed to end discrimination in Richard Daley's 1966 Chicago
• Malcolm X, Black Muslims, Louis Farrakhan
• Stokely Carmichael, SNCC, "black power" slogan in 1966
• Black Panthers, "off the pig" slogan in 1969
• "1960s Radical Agrees to Face Georgia Murder Charges," Reuters, April 21, 2000

Workplace

• Local 1199 of Drug and Hospital Employees Union joined civil rights struggle, "union power plus soul power" and improved the living wage for hospital workers in New York
• Cesar Chavez and UFW "La Causa" strike against Delano vineyards 1965-70, gained widespread national support for grape boycott, won recognition, registered Mexican-American voters
• Chavez's Son-In-Law Tries to Rebuild Legacy from NYT, June 30, 1997

Vietnam

• Ho Chi Minh, Ngo Dinh Diem, Gulf of Tonkin, Selective Service, NLF, B-52 bombing, search-and-destroy, body count, My Lai
• "The Vietnam War was fought on two fronts: at home and abroad."
• verterans returned medals in 1971 Operation Dewey Canyon III
• New Left, SDS, Tom Hayden, Berkeley FSM, Mario Savio, Philip and Daniel Berrigan
• international New Left, Prague Spring, Weathermen, ROTC bombings
• Anita Hoffman, Widow of Yippie Leader, Dies at 56 from NYT, January 1, 1999

Counterculture

• "Music was central to the 1960s counterculture."
• Bob Dylan revived Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land"
• Dylan's 1963 "Blowin' In the Wind"
• Beatles, Motown, Grateful Dead
• Vatican II in 1962 reformed Catholicism

1968 Watershed Year

• "the nation's Cold War consensus seemed to break apart." and "modern American liberalism went into sharp decline."
• Tet offensive, Walter Cronkite, Life magazine
• Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, Dean Acheson
• Democratic National Convention, George Wallace

Nixon

• Cambodia invasion 1970, Kent State, end of the draft
• Henry Kissinger, detente with Russian and China, SALT
• Paris peace accords, fall of Saigon 1975
• Nixon's southern strategy to build a new conservative coalition
• Warren Burger Supreme Court ruled in favor of busing, equal employment, abortion rights
• NWRO opposed Moynihan's FAP
• Nixon becam "father" of affirmative action with his Philadelphia Plan in 1969 that required hiring of black construction apprentices

Environment

• "The environmental movement, which overnight became a major political force in the 1970s, was an offspring of this new participatory political culture."
• affluent suburban whites rejected the "throwaway" economy
• Sierra Club, Rachel Carson, DDT, Santa Barbara oil spill
• EPA, Earth Day, OSHA in 1970
• activists favored lobbying rather than confrontation
• "workers also became increasingly conscious of their right to a safe and helthy workplace environment."
• Karen Silkwood for OCAW union at Kerr-McGee in Oklahoma
• Mine Safety and Health Administration caused decline in coal mine accidents, but OSHA failed to help textile workers fight brown lung disease caused by cotton dust

Cultural Pluralism

• Chicano "blowouts" in LA, Puerto Rican Young Lords in NY led school boycotts
• Puyallup fish-ins of 1964 opposed Washington state court decisions limiting fishing rights
• Navajo opposed Peabody Coal Co. mining in 1969
• Alcatraz occupied 1969, AIM seized Wounded Knee 1973
• "The women's movement was by far the largest and most influential of all the social movements of the early 1970s."
• Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique 1963, started NOW 1966
• Ms. magazine 1971, consciousness-raising groups "served as springboards for action."
• petitions and class-action lawsuits to win equal jobs, opposed demeaning labels such as "chicks" and kept own surnames, reform health education and start independent clinics
• "The feminist challenge to traditional sex roles also encouraged the growth of the gay and lesbian rights movement."
• riot at the Stonewall Inn 1969 caused rise fo "Gay Power"
• Gays Mark Stonewall Anniversary from AP, June 26, 1999

Labor Movement

• "The new working-class mood had its greatest impact among public employees"
• postal employees strike 1970
• union workers decline from 29% in 1960 to 23% in 1975
• unions divided by "the two great issues of the 1960s - race and Vietnam"
• craft unions in the construction trades remained almost all-white
• AFT opposed New York school decentralization in 1968 because black school boards were hostile to Jewish teachers
• UAW opposed black radicals in Detroit after the 1967 riots
• George Meany used FBI files to discredit antiwar activists in unions
• Walter Reuther pulled UAW out of AFL-CIO 1968 to form alliance with Teamsters

Political Polarization

• hard-hat riot in New York May 8, 1970 "created a new social stereotype: the tough, pro-war, blue-collar worker"
• TV sitcom All in the Family and bigot Archie Bunker created by Norman Lear as parody, "but its popularity partially reflected the genuine anger that existed within sections of the white working class"
• "At issue was not a difference over foreign policy, but class antagonism."
• working class boys drafted and fought in Vietnam but not "those rich kids - the kids with beards from the fancy suburbs"
• "many working-class women interpreted feminist criticism of traditional women's roles as a threat to their own sense of self-worth"
• Young Americans for Freedom, John Birch Society, Barry Goldwater
• "President Nixon drew on the energy of all streams of conservatism in his 1972 reelection campaign"
• How Buckley's Firing Line on TV Transformed Conservatism from NYT, December 18, 1999

Watergate

• H. R. Haldeman, obstruction of justice, Judge John Sirica, Woodward and Bernsteins, Senate hearings on TV, Archibald Cox, "Saturday Night Massacre," resignation Aug. 7, 1974
• "Nixon's downfall marks an end to the long Sixties" but in "the coming decades, the greatest threat to American liberties would not come from an overweening executive or racial bigots but from an economic earthquake that was reshaping the world of work, both at home and around the globe."