 Hello, I'm Dr. Gene Pruice. This lecture will look at American history from 1960 to 1967, challenges to traditional America. We'll look at the effects of the Cold War on U.S. foreign policy, we'll assess the frustrations that baby boomers had with American leadership, political leadership especially, and we'll analyze the expansion of the civil rights movement. The title of this lecture, some of the country's history, comes from this Jules Pfeiffer cartoon from 1970. In it you see a construction worker talking about his children who are going to college and how he learned a different type of history. The construction worker says, I learned that George Washington never told a lie. Slaves were happy on the plantation. The men who opened the West were giants. We won every war because God was on our side. But, he says, where my kid goes to school he learns that George Washington was a slave owner, that slaves hated slavery, the men who opened the West committed genocide. The wars we won were victories for U.S. imperialism. He comes to the conclusion, no wonder my kid is not an American. They're teaching him some other country's history. And so let's look at some of the changes that might have made people feel this way in the 1960s. First, we'll look at the growing concerns people had over Cold War issues. We went over the Cold War in a previous lecture, and this is the idea of the United States and capitalism versus the Soviet Union and communism. And many of these conflicts were not in the Soviet Union or the United States or even between those two countries, but in other countries. And this plays out in Guatemala in Central America. The CIA helped in 1954 to overthrow a democratically elected government that of Jacob Arbenz, and many people were upset about this and concerned about this. In space, the Soviets seemed to be winning the space race. In 1957, they launched a satellite. You see that on the left here. Sputnik 1 was the first man-made satellite in orbit. In Cuba, communism won the day when Fidel Castro launched the Cuban Revolution in 1960. In Vietnam, the French were defeated at Diem Ben Phu in 1954. And while Vietnam remained its post-World War II division between North and South at the 17th parallel, the United States participated in the creation of a new organization, the Southeast Asia Trady Association, CETO, that helped maintain that division at the 17th parallel. And a U.S.-friendly leader was installed in South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, in 1955. By the time the 1960 election, and this was a remarkable election for many reasons, none the least of which was that it was the first time ever the American public got to see on television, which was relatively new at that time, a presidential debate. And here it pitted Richard Nixon for the Republicans against Democrat John Kennedy. In the general election, Kennedy beat Nixon by 120,000 popular votes, but in the Electoral College, he won handily 303 to 219. John Kennedy's domestic program was called the New Frontier. And in the New Frontier, the tone was set by looking towards space. Space, poverty, and peace were three of the goals of the New Frontier program. And likewise, the president ordered a commission to investigate the status of women in 1961 to look at the place women held in American society and look at discrimination in other charges of inequality that women faced. In the Cold War, in Europe, they began construction on the Berlin Wall. And this divided, and already divided Berlin. Berlin had been divided since World War II, since the end of World War II, with the Soviets controlling half of the city and Eastern European governments and the United States controlling the Western half. Now, while Berlin proper was inside of East Europe, inside of Russian control territory, Western governments, French, Great Britain, and the United States had access to West Berlin. But with the construction of the Wall in 1961, this erected a physical barrier between East and West Berlin. And although still situated in Eastern Berlin, Westerners still did have access, but it provided a physical reminder of the division within the city. In Cuba, closer to home, the United States CIA was involved in a failed invasion plot hoping to overthrow the Castro regime. This was the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The United States had promised to help, but in the end, it did not support the invaders. And they were arrested. And the United States basically had egg on its face as a result of the embarrassment caused by this revelation that we were involved in this failed invasion. The next year, the failed invasion led the Soviets to build missile silos in Cuba when United States spy planes discovered these missile installations. They raised an alarm. The United States complained about this. And it seemed to many observers, both at home and abroad, that maybe we were on the brink of another world war. Luckily, this was evaded. The Soviet Union agreed to withdraw the missiles, and so peace resumed. However, because the Cuban refugees, a couple of things happened. One, there was a update on the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act. This helped to consolidate and focus many of the refugee and migration programs that had developed since World War II. Also, there was a Cuban refugee program aimed at assisting those refugees fleeing communist Cuba and coming into Miami and other parts of the United States. In Vietnam, Yem's policies proved to be very repressive. And this led to a lot of internal problems in South Vietnam. One of the most dramatic illustrations of this was a Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in a public street in June of 1963. Kennedy and his administration supported a CIA coup to oust Yem from office. But also remember that in November of 1963, Kennedy himself was assassinated. On the civil rights movement in 1960, you have the beginnings of the sit in movement. And this is where college age students, African American students, would go into segregated restaurants and lunch counters especially. The students would go in and sit there peacefully. They knew they wouldn't be served. They were often met with a lot of opposition and violence and insults from the crowd. In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality Corps, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, and others began freedom rides. They would get on buses, trailways and Greyhound buses throughout the South. And they were testing the Interstate Commerce Commission, which had banned segregation on buses and trains by November. But many times this was still being violated by custom in the South. Oftentimes, these freedom rides, actually the times of these freedom rides did occur. They did end in violence. Buses were burned and attacked. The riders were assaulted. In 1962, after much legal travail, James Meredith was the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. In Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other groups like Corps and SNCC began the so-called Birmingham Campaign. This was a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama to protest voting rights violations. George C. Wallace, the governor of Alabama, in his inauguration speech had pridefully remarked that he supported segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. And in an attempt to desegregate a school, Wallace stood in front of the schoolhouse door and refused to stand aside until he was approached by federal officials. Civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered outside of his home during this period, and probably the biggest symbol of segregation was that of Eugene Bull Connor, the Birmingham police chief, who was a staunch opponent of integration. He had hundreds of protesters arrested, turned police dogs on them, fire hoses on them, arrested Martin Luther King Jr. And it was there while he was under arrest that Martin Luther King Jr. wrote the famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail that you have perhaps read. Also, sadly, one of the acts of violence during this time was the Ku Klux Klan detonated a bomb under the steps of a church, and four young girls were killed outside the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. In August of 1963, that summer, Martin Luther King Jr. and others organized the march on Washington. And about half a million people came to Washington, D.C., between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, and demanded justice, demanded civil liberties. And Martin Luther King gave his famous I Have a Dream speech. With the death of Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson ascended to the presidency. Now, Johnson was from Central Texas and had long been seen in as many years as a congressman and as a senator, as kind of a moderate, if not a supporter of the status quo in the South. But as president, he began supporting civil rights and he envisioned and called his domestic policy program the Great Society. And he envisioned a society with improved education, improved civil rights, a war on poverty, and reforms on some racist immigration laws that had been in effect for a long time. In civil rights, two civil rights bill were the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This was a public accommodations act that desegregated places like waiting rooms and bus stations and other areas where that prohibited blacks from meeting in and parks and hospitals and such. And the next year, the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which was a voting rights act, which aimed at eliminating efforts in the South at preventing blacks from voting. In his war on poverty, Lyndon Johnson developed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. He pushed for this and signed this into law. This put economic improvement measures in the hands of communities. And in fact, one of the programs is called the Community Action Program. Ironically enough, it was many young people who found work in these jobs, in these community outreach associations, and they learned how to get the government to work for them and their people. And they later on oftentimes became involved in the civil rights movement as well. The war on poverty also got food stamps passed and Medicare and Medicaid to help with medical costs for not only elderly and the poor, but also people with other disabilities. Educational improvement. Education changed dramatically under Johnson's administration of the laws that he signed into being. Some were institutional, for example, the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. And this created things like project head start, but it also tied desegregation into school funding. And that schools, of course, you had the Brown decision in 1954, but many schools were reluctant to integrate. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act tied integration into funding. And if schools refused to integrate, then they would not get funding. So this provided additional leverage of the federal government to make integration the law to put it into practice. Likewise, in 1965, higher education was changed with the Higher Education Act, which also provided many programs, public assistance and loan programs, student loan programs, but also tied integration in higher education to funding as well. As far as public education, two acts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, both provided funding for public arts, performances, entertainment, and literature. And these two programs are still in existence today. As far as immigration is concerned, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, sometimes known as the Heart Cellar Act, this had changed a 40 year law that had put restrictions on immigration based on national origins. Many saw this as racist. And in the post-World War II years, this was increasingly criticized. And so this law replaced national origin quotas. Also in 1966, in response to the problems in Cuba, there was the Cuban Adjustment Act, which provided a clear path to citizenship for those Cubans who had come to the United States as refugees. In the middle of the 1960s, problems at home domestically increased. And some of them were caused by internal problems, but also by foreign problems as well. The so-called Long Hot Summers of 1964 to 1967 were a series of urban riots that happened in places like Chicago and Detroit, Los Angeles. These Long Hot Summers were addressed. The president called for a commission to investigate these. In June of 1964, three civil rights workers, Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman, were murdered in Mississippi in the so-called Mississippi Freedom Summers. They were part of groups of young people who had traveled to the south to try to get Black Americans registered to vote based on a lot of violence. And the murder of these civil rights workers launched a national investigation. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed in March and large public support came as a result of the Selma to Montgomery march of 1965. That was in response to the murder of a civil rights worker during a night time demonstration in Alabama. In August of 1964, in the Vietnam crisis, there was a attack or maybe even a supposed attack. It may not have actually been an attack on the USS Turner Joy in American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam. And this led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. I'll talk about that in a minute. In the Dominican Republic, in the Caribbean, there was Operation Power Pack, which was an attempt to try to stabilize regime in the Dominican Republic. Again, another American intervention that raised a lot of concerns. Civil rights was also influenced by the Black Power movement. And the most recognizable figure of that period was Malcolm X. Malcolm X was a minister for the nation of Islam. And he was an outspoken civil rights advocate. You also had the development of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I mentioned them earlier, led by Stokely Carmichael, who coined the phrase Black Power. In 1964, you saw the Democratic National Committee. There was a protest within the committee over whether or not Black caucus members from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party would allowed to be seated. And this was seen as a betrayal of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party by the National Party in favor of the Southern Wing of the Party. London Johnson was also running for reelection against a Republican conservative named Barry Goldwater. Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21st, 1965. And in 1966, you have the development of the Black Panther Party in California, led by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. You also have the growth of the so-called counter culture. And this was kind of seen as a revolt against normal or what we might call normal or traditional American values. And it's kicked off in part and led by the British invasion. This was the invasion, so-called invasion, of British bands and music into the United States and getting a United States audience, bands like The Beatles and others, Hermans Hermits, The Rolling Stones and others who came along later. Designs in women's fashion changed. The advent of the miniskirt was seen as provocative. Then you had the development of groups like the New Left. This was more of a college group of young people who were not communists but leftists. But they didn't want to be associated with the Communist Party. And so you had groups like Students for a Democratic Society in 1962. They issued a statement of their beliefs in the Port Huron statements. Later on a group of them were sometimes called the weathermen. There was the free speech movement in Berkeley, California in 1964. Most notable among the free speech movements was Mario Savio, a student who talked about freedom of speech on the college campus. And then in 1965, other college members, faculty and students, they held teach-in in favor of the free speech movement. They believed that universities were too influenced by corporate donors and funders. You also had probably one of the more recognizable groups in what was called the hippies. And these were people with long hair and wearing unconventional clothing and influenced or at least interested in the new drug LSD. In 1967, kind of a symbol of the so-called summer of love were a few music concerts, most notably the Woodstock Concert in New York and in upstate New York. And the Woodstock music genre, other concerts very similarly held, attracted a lot of these young people marked by a lot of alcohol, LSD, marijuana, and other types of drugs. And people really saw this as kind of a non, very much against the traditional way of behaving. And there was a lot of criticism and comment on this. And this summer of love, there was also a lot of free love that sex outside of marriage, which at that time was kind of seen as being very taboo. And all of this came to it head and it kind of was reined in by the, by excesses, but also by some violence that occurred a couple of years later during the summer in California. The Tate-Lobianca murders by a group of people under a charismatic leader, maybe cult leader named Charles Manson. On the other hand, there was a development of a new breed of conservatives. This is called the new right. Again, a lot of these are coming out of colleges and universities. But you all had other groups like the John Birch Society, which had started in 1958, which was kind of a reactionary right-wing organization, somewhat conspiratorial in their outlook. But you also had other more centrist conservative organizations, one notably led by William Buckley Jr. And he was the editor for a magazine called National Review. You see his picture here on the right. There was a group of college students that he helped form called Young Americans for Freedom, for Freedom. And again, this was more of a centrist organization led by intellectuals. You also had political leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who would eventually run for president against Lyndon Johnson. And then you had the development of the so-called Southern Strategy. And this was an attempt by the Republicans and some Democrats to exploit racial issues, especially in the South and politics, to draw attention to the civil rights movement that African Americans were getting more attention. There was more attention to civil rights that maybe they felt was warranted. You also had the organizations like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and Phyllis Schlafly, who was a woman who was opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment. She supported conservative organizations and she plays heavily in politics for conservative women for many decades. Likewise, there was an attention to the environment and this was probably helped by the efforts to go to the moon. Concerns about things like pesticides. Rachel Carson's book in 1962, Silent Spring, brought attention to the fact that pesticides were maybe perhaps bad for the environment while killing pests. They were also killing birds and other animals as well. In 1965, the Highway Beautification Act, this was largely sponsored by First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, to clean up highways and to prevent dumping of trash along our nation's highways and roads. And as I mentioned earlier, this Earthrise photo from Apollo 8 in 1968 and just a few months later in 1969, you do have the moon landing. The Civil Rights Movement continued to expand, not just to African Americans, but also to other groups as well. And we'll talk about some of those. First of all, Native Americans, the Red Power Movement was kind of a takeoff on the Black Power Movement, took a lot of inspiration from it. You had the development of groups like the National Indian Youth Council who held and also people who held fish-ins. Native Americans did have rights, hunting rights, beyond those of regular Americans, and so they decided to take advantage of some of these rights. And even though there were more limitations, there were limitations on what they could hunt and fish, they decided to hold fish-ins and just ignore those limitations. And they wanted to preserve their fishing rights off the reservation, not just on the reservation. They occupied the former prison island in San Francisco Bay of Alcatraz, used to be a Native American island, and they reclaimed it for Native Americans for over a year. And they also called for an end of the termination policy. The termination policy was a government policy started in the mid-1950s and this was to end federal recognition and protection of Native American tribes. And what Native Americans argued for is that they wanted their own self-determination, since the federal government was trying to no longer recognize them and to no longer system they wanted to build their own infrastructure. You also had the group of civil rights activists that were known as the American Indian Movement or AIM. For Hispanic Americans, similarly, you had people who were fighting for civil rights, a variety of different issues. One was Reyes Lopez Tijerina, who was actually from West Texas, but moved to New Mexico and began a movement to reclaim land that was stolen from Native Americans and Mexican Americans in the American Southwest, going all the way back to the Treaty of Hidalgo in 1948. Cesar Chavez and people like Dolores Huerta and others who would work with him helped organize a Farm Workers Union, United Farm Workers. The problem that they had seen was that many Mexican American and Asian farm workers were prohibited from joining traditional unions and so they sought to start one of their own. And they began a protest, la huelga, the strike, especially against produce coming out of California, like the Delano grape strike, which went on for several years, encouraging consumers not to buy grapes from companies that would not allow farm workers to unionize or to pay them good wages. Other protesters, like Jose Angel Gutierrez from South Texas, who was also in Houston for a while and then in Dallas, he formed an organization called the Mexican American Youth Organization with some other people and they were protesting students' rights in America's in the schools, especially in Texas and the Southwest. And then you had a group that formed a political organization known as La Raza Unida in 1970. Civil rights also included gender equality and we see this the women's movement, which we've talked about a little bit already. One of the turning points in the women's movement was publication in 1963 of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and this book talked about ways in which women were limited in career and life aspirations, discrimination they faced. You had the development on a federal level of the Equal Opportunity Commission, which investigated women's complaints of discrimination and unfair pay and employment conditions and also you had political groups like the National Organization for Women, which was a big supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. For the LBGTQ community, this was a community that was often easily abused because they lived kind of hidden. There were clubs and communities of gay and lesbian and others, but they were often faced a lot of persecution and one of these happened at the nightclub that you see on the left here, the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan. The so-called Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 and this had been going on for some time. Police would come in and threaten the people who were at the bar and the management and asked for bribes and other things to keep from arresting people. Well finally, the gay community had had enough and at Stonewall Inn, many of the police came in there to harass people and the people fought back and this led to protests that spread from there and this is sometimes seen as the birth of the Gay Liberation Movement. You had groups like the Gay Liberation Front, you had groups like other groups around the nation that organized parades and in fact the Pride Parade is a commemoration of the Stonewall Uprising and then you had the development of other groups and civil rights communities for the LBGTQ and now transgendered communities which came about a little bit later on. You also see changes in churches and changes affecting religion. One of the big changes that you see for a lot of Americans and many of the minorities were Vatican II. In 1962 to 1965 a series of meetings were held under the auspices of the church in Rome and these led to widespread changes in church the way the mass was said that mass could be said in people's language and before that they were held in Latin. No matter where you were the mass would be in Latin and this said the mass could be in the language of the people who attended the mass. There were changes in women's role while the church would not go so far as to say that women could be priests. It did increase the role and the responsibilities of nuns and lay women and the church also started devoting more attention to human rights. For the Supreme Court other changes were afoot in Engle versus Vitali in 1962. The court said that school could not mandate prayer and what this means is it didn't say that this is widely misunderstood is that they didn't say people couldn't pray in schools. What they said was that schools could not force students to pray a certain prayer. The court recognized that people of different faith said different prayers and rather than enforcing a prayer it really allowed individual students to pray or not pray as they wished. In Abington versus Shemp in 1963 likewise they declared that school mandated Bible reading was unconstitutional again noting that people came from different faiths. And so by the mid to late 1960s we see in the United States various changes. One was that the Cold War had an effect on American foreign policy because people fear that communism was going to spread and this caused us to get involved sometimes to the CIA or the military in other nations. Baby boomers were frustrated with the leadership because they wanted quicker and more substantial change and less compromise. And finally the civil rights movement changed as well the strategies and successes of the black civil rights movement were copied by others with some success there as well and continued success later on. We'll continue this in the next lecture. Thank you very much.