The Nineteen-Sixties, 1960–1968

This is Unit Fourteen, part three, on the decade's widening movements and its two closing questions. Part two closed with Black Power becoming a watchword, and pointed to the Black Panthers. Carry one observation through this part: by the late sixties the movements multiplied. Black Power, the farm workers, Chicano activists, students and women each built on what came before. Then the unit closes on two questions. Did the Great Society succeed? And did Black Power break with nonviolence? By the end you will be able to describe the urban riots and King's assassination. To describe the farm workers' and Chicano movements. To describe the student movement's turn against the war. To explain why Title VII places women's rights inside the Civil Rights Act. And to answer the unit's two closing questions.

Four entries: a party founded in Oakland, cities burning from Watts to Detroit, and the assassination in Memphis.

The Black Panthers.

USH2 1991 The Black Panthers

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, in nineteen sixty-six, holding that African Americans were victims of capitalism as much as of White racism, and chapters spread, the Yawp says, to dozens of cities with thousands of members by nineteen seventy. It names Fred Hampton's Illinois chapter among the most active.

Watts.

USH2 1992 Watts

In nineteen sixty-five a traffic stop in Watts, a Black neighbourhood of Los Angeles, set off riots in which thirty-four people died, most of them African Americans killed by police and the National Guard, and thousands of businesses were destroyed. The anchor counts three hundred twenty-nine riots in two hundred fifty-seven cities between nineteen sixty-four and nineteen sixty-eight.

Detroit.

USH2 1993 Detroit, 1967

In the summer of nineteen sixty-seven riots struck one hundred twenty-seven cities, Digital History records; in Detroit forty-three people died and fourteen square miles were gutted by fire. The Yawp sees one pattern in Watts, Newark and Detroit: a clash between White police and Black residents spiralling into days of destruction. The anchor does not detail Detroit's toll; the figures are Digital History's.

Memphis.

USH2 1994 Memphis

On April fourth, nineteen sixty-eight, Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, Digital History records, and violence erupted in one hundred sixty-eight cities, leaving forty-six dead and three thousand five hundred injured. The anchor calls his death a severe blow to the vision of Black and White Americans working together peacefully to end injustice.

Four entries: a marriage the Court protected, and the farm workers' and Chicano movements.

Loving v. Virginia.

USH2 1995 Loving v. Virginia

In nineteen sixty-seven the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Loving v. Virginia that race-based bans on marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment, leaving the Lovings, after a series of appeals, free at last, the anchor says, to be a public couple. The ruling voided the remaining state bans on interracial marriage; Brown had applied the same amendment to schools.

The farm workers.

USH2 1996 Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta

In nineteen sixty-two Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association to organise migrant farm workers in California's fields, through nonviolent campaigns, including a hunger strike, as the Yawp describes. The bracero programme of unit twelve had brought Mexican labour to these same fields; Mendez and Hernandez of unit thirteen stand behind the movement.

The grape strike.

USH2 1997 The Grape Strike

In nineteen sixty-five Filipino grape pickers led by Larry Itliong struck, Chavez's workers joined them, and the two groups merged as the United Farm Workers, while consumers across the country boycotted grapes and longshoremen refused to unload them. King telegraphed support, calling Chavez a brother; in nineteen seventy growers recognised the union, the anchor records.

The Chicano movement.

USH2 1998 The Chicano Movement

In Denver in nineteen sixty-five Rodolfo Corky Gonzales founded the Crusade for Justice, offering Mexican Americans jobs, legal services and health care, and Reies López Tijerina fought to reclaim lost ancestral lands in New Mexico. Digital History records hundreds of Mexican Americans in Crystal City, Texas, voting on Election Day nineteen sixty-three, most of them for the first time.

Three entries on students: a statement, a campus movement, and the teach-ins against the war.

SDS.

USH2 1999 SDS and Port Huron

Students for a Democratic Society, organised in nineteen sixty, adopted the Port Huron Statement in nineteen sixty-two, written by Tom Hayden and committed to fighting economic inequality and discrimination, drafted by five dozen students at a lakeside camp, as Digital History describes. It calls the statement one of the pivotal political documents of the decade.

Berkeley.

USH2 2000 The Free Speech Movement

In nineteen sixty-four, at the University of California, Berkeley, rules restricting political advocacy on campus gave rise to the Free Speech Movement, after a student was arrested in October for handing out CORE literature and a mass sit-in followed. The anchor says the movement failed in the short term but inspired student activism across the country.

The teach-ins.

USH2 2001 The Teach-Ins

In April nineteen sixty-five SDS organised a march on Washington against the war in Vietnam; about twenty thousand people came, and University of Michigan faculty suspended classes that same week for a twenty-four-hour teach-in on the war. On May fifteenth the first national teach-in was held at one hundred twenty-two colleges and universities, the anchor records.

Six entries on the women's movement: the pill, a book, a law's seventh title, an organisation, a protest, and a magazine.

The pill.

USH2 2002 The Pill

In nineteen sixty the birth control pill won the approval of the Food and Drug Administration, and within five years some six million women were using it, freer to delay childbearing and to work, study and marry later, the anchor explains. Digital History records that women's full-time earnings averaged only about sixty percent of men's in nineteen sixty.

The Feminine Mystique.

USH2 2003 The Feminine Mystique

In nineteen sixty-three Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, contesting the postwar belief that women's destiny was to marry and bear children, the same year a presidential commission on women, created by Kennedy and chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, reported. Unit thirteen's image of the contented housewife is the target of Friedan's book.

Title VII.

USH2 2004 Title VII

The Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-four outlawed job discrimination by race, color, religion and national origin, and its Title VII added sex to the list. The Yawp credits Black feminists such as Pauli Murray, who warned members of Congress that if sex were not included, the bill would cover only half of those it should. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was created under Title VII to enforce the law. The misreading treats women's rights as a separate story that followed the civil rights movement. The protection against sex discrimination sits in the same title of the same Act. Its full impact came slowly, the Yawp says, as women across the nation went to court and pressed employers.

NOW.

USH2 2005 NOW

In nineteen sixty-six the National Organization for Women formed, framed by a statement of purpose Friedan wrote, to open all of American life to women with the rights men enjoyed, and it organised airline workers against advertisements that sexualised flight attendants, as the Yawp records. The anchor says NOW set the feminist movement's agenda.

The Miss America protest.

USH2 2006 Miss America

In September nineteen sixty-eight New York Radical Women protested at Atlantic City's Miss America pageant against its exploitation of women, crowning a sheep and tossing away high heels, curlers, girdles and bras, as the anchor describes. The pageant, the anchor notes, had barred Black and Native American women under a rule requiring contestants to be White.

A new magazine.

USH2 2007 Ms.

Gloria Steinem, a journalist who had pushed through barriers to cover serious subjects, co-founded Ms. magazine, which the anchor says avoided homemaking and fashion for articles on women's rights and empowerment, featuring women such as Shirley Chisholm. The anchor names Steinem's co-founder as the founder of New York City's first shelter for victims of domestic violence.

Two entries to close the unit, each a question this unit has carried: whether the Great Society succeeded, and whether Black Power broke with nonviolence.

Whether the Great Society succeeded.

USH2 2008 Whether the Great Society Succeeded

The sources support a qualified answer. The anchor records that the proportion of Americans in poverty had fallen by nearly half by the time Johnson left office, and that Medicare and Medicaid, larger Social Security benefits and federal money for education improved many lives. The Yawp adds that later presidents and Congresses left the bulk of it intact: Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start and federal spending on the arts. The critics' case is in the sources too. The Yawp calls Community Action the most controversial programme, fraught during its few short years. Digital History records that Nixon campaigned in nineteen sixty-eight on eliminating wasteful federal antipoverty programmes. Two misreadings sit on either side. One calls the Great Society a failure, which the poverty figure and the survival of its programmes contradict. The other calls it a completed triumph; the Yawp says the long goal of economic justice proved as elusive as ever. The course's position: the Great Society cut poverty and built programmes that lasted, and it did not end poverty.

Black Power and nonviolence.

USH2 2009 Black Power and Nonviolence

The anchor's own sequence suggests rupture. SNCC was founded in nineteen sixty on Ella Baker's participatory democracy, among students committed to nonviolence; by the middle of the decade its chairman preached Black Power, and in nineteen sixty-six the Panthers organised in Oakland. The Yawp describes activists growing less conciliatory as frustration mounted, and the assassinations of King and Malcolm X fuelling disillusionment. The witnesses complicate the rupture. The Yawp says King and Malcolm X shared the goal of ending racial discrimination and differed on how to reach it, as Washington and Du Bois had. The anchor traces Black Power's idea of separate institutions to Marcus Garvey, older than the nonviolent movement itself, and notes that the slogan Black is beautiful was coined by the abolitionist John S. Rock in eighteen fifty-eight. Two misreadings sit on either side. One sets the two against each other as good and bad, which the shared goal contradicts. The other erases the difference, which Malcolm X's advocacy of armed resistance contradicts. The course's position: different strategies, a shared goal, and a movement that contained both.

Look at what you can now do. You can describe the riots, from Watts to Detroit, and the violence in one hundred sixty-eight cities after King's assassination in Memphis. You can describe the farm workers' movement, Chavez, Huerta and Itliong's grape strike, and the Chicano movement from Denver to Crystal City. You can describe the students' turn, from Port Huron and Berkeley to the teach-ins against the war. You can explain why Title VII matters: the protection against sex discrimination sits in the same Act as the protection against racial discrimination. And you can answer the two closing questions. The Great Society cut poverty and did not end it; Black Power and nonviolence were different strategies with a shared goal.