This document summarizes several key events and developments in the United States between 1953-1960. It discusses the rise of suburban housing developments, the ongoing legal challenges to school segregation led by Thurgood Marshall, President Eisenhower's moderate conservative policies, and the emergence of the Beat generation of writers. It also covers the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional, the Montgomery Bus Boycott sparked by Rosa Parks, and the resistance to desegregation efforts that followed including in Little Rock, Arkansas. John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election campaigning on a platform of support for civil rights and new social programs.

1. Chapter 24: An Affluent
Society, 1953-1960
JSRCC
HIS 122 01PR

2. Levittown
• Low-cost, mass-produced developments of suburban tract housing tabby
William Levitt after World War II on Long Island and elsewhere.

3. Segregation
• School segregation
• For years, the NAACP, under the leadership of attorney Thurgood Marshall, had
pressed legal challenges to the separate but equal doctrine, and in the 1950s, attitudes
began to shift.

4. Modern Republicanism
• Also called "dynamic conservatism," President Eisenhower's domestic
agenda advocated conservative spending approaches without drastically
cutting back New Deal social programs.

5. Brinksmanship
• the art or practice of pursuing a dangerous policy to the limits of safety
before stopping, typically in politics.

6. Vietnam
• 1954
• US actively aids against Ho Chi Minh and Communists
• French defeat at Dien Bien Phu

7. Beats
• A term coined by Jack Kerouac for a small group of poets and writers who
railed against mainstream culture.

8. Jack Kerouac
• American novelist and poet

9. Allen Ginsberg
• visionary poet and founding father of the Beat generation inspired the
American counterculture of the second half of the 20th century with
groundbreaking poems such as "Howl" and "Kaddish."
• 1960s, Ginsberg experimented with a number of different drugs, believing
that under the influence he could create a new kind of poetry.
• 1980s, Ginsberg was the most famous living American poet

10. Jim Crow
• Jim Crow laws
• were racial segregation laws enacted between 1876 and 1965 in the United
States at the state and local level

11. Earl Warren
• was an American jurist and politician who served as the 14th Chief Justice of the
United States
• 1942 Warren ran successfully for Governor of California as a Republican and was
reelected in 1946 and 1950
• He ran for Vice President of the United States in 1948 on the Republican ticket
with Thomas Dewey
• Within a year Warren had managed to bring a divided Court together in a
unanimous decision, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), overturning the
infamous 1896 "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson with regards to
public education

12. Plessy V. Ferguson
• Plessy v. Ferguson, is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in
the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of
state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine
of "separate but equal"

13. Brown V. Board to Education of Topeka, KS
• U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down racial segregation in public education
and declared separate but equal unconstitutional.
• 1954
• Schools were not-equal-no running water, no toilets, no busses
• Oliver Brown sued Topeka Board to allow 8 years old daughter Linda to attend a
closer white-only school
• Supreme court chief justice Earl Warren ruled “separate facilities are inherently
unegual:
• Court ruled all schools to be desegregate “with all deliberate speed”

14. Thurgood Marshall
• Lawyer in the Brown V. Board of Education

15. Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Sparked by Rosa Parks’ arrest on December 1, 1955, for refusing to surrender her
seat to a white passenger, a successful year-long boycott protesting segregation on
city buses; led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
• Began with Rosa Parks in December-refused to move, was arrested and stood trial
• Organized a boycott- called for Africa Americans to refuse to use the entire bus
system until the company agreed to change its policy
• Movement went on for one year
• Supreme court ruled bus segregation was unconstitutional

16. Massive Resistance
• In 1954, John Foster Dulles announced an updated version of the doctrine
of containment. Massive retaliation, as it was called, declared that any Soviet
attack on an American ally would be countered by a nuclear assault on the
Soviet Union itself.

17. Little Rock, AR
• Reaction to brown v. board-whites hostile, 82 congressmen opposed the ruling
• Governor Orval Faubus said he could not keep order if he had to enforce
integration
• Faubus placed AK National Guardsman at a high school who stopped black
students
• Direct challenge to Constitution
• Eisenhower used the 101st airborne to protect black students

18. Richard Nixon
• Republicans ran Richard M. Nixon
• Remained on defensive throughout campaign
• Performed poorly in first of several televised debates

19. John F. Kennedy
• Democrats ran John F. Kennedy
• New Frontier
• Support for civil rights
• Social Programs
• Tax cuts and deficit spending
• Heavy defense spending and “ flexible” response to communist threat

20. • Civil Rights
• Concerned about Southern conservatives
• Sit-in movement, early 1960
• CORE and SNCC
• Freedom rides, 1961,
• Forced to send marshals to protect riders
• Universities of Mississippi and Alabama
• Forced to intervene to protect black students
• Executive order banning segregation in public housing, November 1952
• Kennedy assassinated
• Shot in Dallas and November 22, 1963
• Official report blamed Lee Harvey Oswald as lone assassin
• Conspiracy theories and uncertainties remain decades later

21. Sputnik
• First artificial satellite to orbit the earth; launched October 4, 1957, by the
Soviet Union