Fracture: Vietnam, Watergate, and After, 1968–1980

This is Unit Fifteen, part one, on the movements of the late sixties and seventies: Red Power, gay liberation, women, and Chicano politics. Unit Fourteen closed on its two questions, the Great Society and Black Power, and carried the decade's divisions into the nineteen seventies. Carry one habit through this part: for each movement, count what it won and what it did not. AIM chose Wounded Knee for its history. Gay liberation won its first victories and its first officeholders. The women's movement won laws, and lost an amendment. By the end you will be able to explain why AIM occupied Wounded Knee. To describe the end of termination and the Native movement's wider protests. To trace gay liberation from Stonewall to the first openly gay officeholders. To describe what the women's movement won. And to explain why the Equal Rights Amendment failed.

Seven entries on Red Power: a new movement, the conditions behind it, an island, a march, a siege, a change of policy, and a day of mourning.

The American Indian Movement.

USH2 2101 The American Indian Movement

In nineteen sixty-eight Dennis Banks, George Mitchell and Clyde Bellecourt gathered two hundred activists in Minneapolis and founded the American Indian Movement, demanding that the government honour its treaties and protect Native religions and culture. The Yawp places AIM within a Red Power movement that staged the dramatic occupations of Alcatraz and Wounded Knee.

Native life in nineteen seventy.

USH2 2102 Native Life in 1970

In nineteen seventy the average Native American could expect to live forty-six years, against a national average of sixty-nine, the anchor records, and Digital History calls Native Americans the nation's poorest minority through the nineteen sixties, by virtually every measure. A new spirit of political militancy, it says, arose among the first Americans as it had among Black Americans and women.

Alcatraz.

USH2 2103 Alcatraz

On November twentieth, nineteen sixty-nine, Native American activists went ashore on Alcatraz, the old prison island in San Francisco Bay, and held it, and the Mohawk Richard Oakes read a proclamation claiming the island for all American Indians by right of discovery. Government forces removed the last occupiers on June eleventh, nineteen seventy-one, nineteen months later, the anchor records.

The Trail of Broken Treaties.

USH2 2104 The Trail of Broken Treaties

In nineteen seventy-two AIM members marched on Washington, calling the journey the Trail of Broken Treaties, and took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs' offices, protesters inside the federal agency that administered Indian policy. The march's name carried its grievance: the United States had not honoured its treaties.

Wounded Knee.

USH2 2105 Wounded Knee, 1973

In February nineteen seventy-three AIM occupied Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, after a failed effort by Oglala residents to impeach a tribal president they accused of corruption. Federal marshals and FBI agents surrounded the town, and a siege of seventy-one days wounded a marshal and an FBI agent and killed two Native Americans; Dennis Banks and Russell Means were arrested, and the charges were later dismissed. The site was chosen. The anchor says Wounded Knee carried historical significance as the place of the eighteen ninety massacre, and AIM used the occupation to accuse the government of failing to keep its treaties. The misreading treats the two events as a coincidence of place. Unit two taught the massacre.

The end of termination.

USH2 2106 The End of Termination

Before Wounded Knee, the anchor records, Nixon's administration ended the termination policy and returned millions of acres to the tribes, with more federal money for Native education, health care, legal services, housing and economic development. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, occupied in nineteen seventy-two, hired more Native American employees, the anchor adds.

A Thanksgiving protest.

USH2 2107 A Day of Mourning

On Thanksgiving Day, nineteen seventy, Wampanoag people held a National Day of Mourning at Plymouth, Massachusetts, Digital History records, descendants of the first Thanksgiving's Wampanoag guests retelling the holiday three hundred fifty years on. The Yawp counts hundreds of Indigenous organisations formed by the mid-nineteen seventies.

Five entries on gay liberation, from a bar in Greenwich Village to an election in San Francisco.

Stonewall.

USH2 2108 Stonewall

Early on June twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-nine, the anchor says, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village; Digital History dates the raid June twenty-seventh. Patrons resisted instead of submitting, and riots filled the streets over two nights. Such raids were common, the anchor notes; the resistance was not.

Gay liberation.

USH2 2109 Gay Liberation

After Stonewall activists formed the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists' Alliance to protest discrimination, homophobia and violence, and to promote gay pride, what the Yawp reads as liberation rooted in pride of difference rather than assimilation. Digital History notes that gay and lesbian communities had already grown in many cities by the late sixties.

Decriminalisation.

USH2 2110 Decriminalisation

In nineteen sixty-two Illinois became the first state to decriminalise same-sex relations, joined in the nineteen sixties only by Connecticut, the anchor records, and eighteen more states eliminated their bans in the nineteen seventies. Police harassment continued and hate crimes escalated, the anchor cautions; decriminalisation was a first victory, not the last.

Two firsts of nineteen seventy-four.

USH2 2111 The APA and Kathy Kozachenko

By nineteen seventy-four the American Psychiatric Association had stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental illness, a classification that had cost people jobs and custody of their children, though the anchor notes it still treated it as a sexual orientation disturbance. That year Kathy Kozachenko was elected in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the first openly lesbian woman voted into office.

Harvey Milk.

USH2 2112 Harvey Milk

In nineteen seventy-seven Harvey Milk won a seat on San Francisco's board of supervisors, the first openly gay man elected to office in California. Milk and Mayor George Moscone were both killed by Dan White, a disgruntled former supervisor. The anchor gives Milk's election year but not the year of the killings, and the course follows it.

Six entries on women's gains in the nineteen seventies, and on the amendment that failed.

Title IX.

USH2 2113 Title IX

The Education Amendments Act of nineteen seventy-two, co-authored by Patsy Mink, a Japanese American from Hawaii who had become the first Asian American woman in Congress, prohibited sex discrimination in education in its Title IX. Unit fourteen's Title VII covered employment; Title IX carried the principle into schools.

Roe v. Wade.

USH2 2114 Roe v. Wade

In nineteen seventy-three the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade struck down state laws that made abortion in the first three months of pregnancy illegal, in what the Yawp records as a seven to two ruling against a Texas abortion ban. The anchor says the decision made a nontherapeutic abortion a legal medical procedure across the nation.

The Equal Rights Amendment.

USH2 2115 The Equal Rights Amendment

The Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress in March nineteen seventy-two, Digital History records, with only eight dissenting votes in the Senate and twenty-four in the House. States had seven years to ratify it; twenty-two did so in nineteen seventy-two and eight more in nineteen seventy-three, but in the next two years only four followed, short of the thirty-eight needed. The sources date the reprieve differently: the anchor says Congress granted a three-year extension in nineteen seventy-nine, Digital History thirty-nine more months in nineteen seventy-eight. No further state ratified, and the amendment died, defeated, the anchor says, by well-organised opposition from Christian and other socially conservative groups. Unit sixteen teaches that opposition.

The women's political caucus.

USH2 2116 The National Women's Political Caucus

In nineteen seventy-one Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Myrlie Evers-Williams and Gloria Steinem, with other feminists, formed the National Women's Political Caucus to elect women and draw them into party politics, raising money for female candidates. The anchor credits the caucus with helping many women win office.

Shirley Chisholm.

USH2 2117 Shirley Chisholm

In nineteen sixty-eight Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn became the first Black woman elected to Congress, and in nineteen seventy-two she sought the Democratic presidential nomination, winning ten percent of the delegates, the anchor records, though allowed only one speech in the debates. The Yawp adds that she won domestic workers a minimum wage in nineteen seventy-four.

What the movements won.

USH2 2118 What the Movements Won

In the nineteen seventies, the anchor records, feminists opened shelters for battered women, won protection against employment discrimination for pregnant women, and reformed rape laws, ending rules that a woman's report of rape needed a witness to back it. Domestic violence was criminalised, the anchor adds, and Digital History records the Supreme Court striking down all-male juries in nineteen seventy-five.

One entry to close the part: a third party in South Texas.

La Raza Unida.

USH2 2119 La Raza Unida

Building on the Crystal City vote of unit fourteen, activists there founded La Raza Unida, a third party that challenged Texas Democrats, the Yawp records, and Mexican American candidates won office across South Texas. The anchor does not carry La Raza Unida; the Yawp does. In Chicago, it adds, the Young Lords followed the Black Panthers' example.

Look at what you can now do. You can explain why AIM occupied Wounded Knee: the site of the eighteen ninety massacre, chosen to accuse the government of breaking its treaties. You can describe the end of termination, with millions of acres returned, and the wider protests, from Alcatraz to a Day of Mourning at Plymouth. You can trace gay liberation from Stonewall to decriminalisation, the psychiatric association's change, and the elections of Kathy Kozachenko and Harvey Milk. You can describe what the women's movement won: Title Nine, Roe, shelters, reformed rape laws, and a political caucus. And you can explain why the Equal Rights Amendment failed. Ratifications stalled short of thirty-eight, and organised opposition defeated it.