3. John Kennedy Attractive and articulate senator from Massachusetts. He was the son of the wealthy, powerful, and highly controversial Joseph P. Kennedy, former American ambassador to Britain. When he campaigned, he promised a set of domestic reforms more ambitious than the new deal, a program he described as the “New Frontier” Kennedy made his own personality an integral part of his presidency and a central focus of national attention. Tragedy struck on November 22, 1963 when Kennedy was assasinated.
5. He was Kennedy’s successor in the White House after his assassination. Johnson was a native of the poor “hill country” of west Texas and had risen to become majority leader of the U.S. Senate by extraordinary, even obsessive, effort and ambition. Constructed a remarkable reform know as the “Great Society”
6. The Assault on Poverty 1960’s, the federal government created new social welfare programs. The most important program was Medicare: a program to provide federal aid to the elderly for medical expenses. -Avoided the stigma of “welfare” by making Medicare benefits available to all elderly Americans. -Created a large middle class constituency. -Defused the opposition of the medical community.
7. The centerpiece of the “war of poverty” as Johnson called it, was the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) -Created an array of new educational, employment, housing, and health care programs. Community Action was an effort to involve members of poor communities themselves in the planning and administration of the programs designed to help them. - However, impossible to sustain because of administrative failures because the apparent excesses of a few agencies damaged the popular image of the Community Action programs.
9. The Housing Act offered 4.9 billion dollars in federal grants for the preservation of open spaces, the development of mass transit systems, and the subsidization of middle-income housing. Johnson established a new cabinet agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He also inaugurated subsidies for urban redevelopment programs. Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 which extended aid to both private and parochial schools and based on the aid on the economic conditions of students.
10. Immigration Act of 1965 One of the most important pieces of legislation of the 1960’s This law maintained a strict limit on the number of newcomers admitted to the country each year. It eliminated the “national origins” system established in the 1920’s.
11. Legacies of a Great Society 11.5 billion tax cut that Kennedy had first proposed in 1962 increased the federal deficit, but substantial economic growth over the next several years. The high costs of the Great Society programs, the deficiencies and failures of many of them, and the inability of the government to find revenues to pay for them. Despite many failures, The Great Society, significantly reduced hunger in America, and made medical care available to millions of elderly, poor, and those who can’t afford it.
13. Expanding Protests John F. Kennedy had been sympathetic towards the cause of racial equality for some time but he had never really committed to it because he feared he would alienate southern Democratic voters and those in Congress. J.F.K hoped to make progress to racial equality while not creating politically damaging divisions. In February 1960, black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter, and in the following weeks, similar demonstrations spread throughout the South, forcing many public places to integrate. John F. Kennedy
14. S.N.C.C. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee worked to keep thespirit of resistance alive. SNCC workers began fanned through black communities and to rural areas to encourage blacks to challenge theobstacles the Jim Crow laws had created to their voting rights.
15. Freedom Riders In 1961, an interracial group of students, working with the Congress ofRacial Equality, began what they called “freedom rides”. Traveling by bus throughout the South, the freedom riders tried toforce the desegregation of bus stations.
16. Birmingham In April, Martin Luther King Jr. helped launch a series of nonviolentdemonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, a city unsurpassed inthe strength of its commitment to segregation. Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor (not nice) tried to break up peaceful marches by using attack dogs, tear gas, electric cattle prods, and fire hoses and sometimes even against children.
17.
18.
19. Alabama and Mississippi Two months after the Birmingham incident, Governor George Wallace (also not nice) stood in front of a doorway at the University of Alabama to prevent the court-ordered enrollment of black students but thanks to Robert Kennedy and some federal marshals he was kicked out. That same night NAACP official Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi.
20. A Nationalist Commitment “If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?" -John F. Kennedy
21. March on Washington Days after the speech, Kennedy proposed new legislation prohibiting segregation in public places, barring discrimination in employment, and increasing the power of the government to file suits on behalf of student integration. To generate support for the legislation more than 200,000 demonstrators marched down the Mall in Washington D.C. in August 1963 and gathered before the Lincoln Memorial. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I have a dream” speech at this march.
22. Victory Early in 1964, after Johnson applied both public and private pressure, supporters of the measure finally mustered the two-thirds majority necessary to close debate and end a filibuster by southern senators; and the Senate passed the most comprehensive civil rights bill in the nation’s history.
24. “Freedom Summer” During the summer of 1964, thousands of civil rights workers, black and white, northern and southern, spread out through the South, but primarily in Mississippi. The campaign was known as “freedom summer”, and it produced a violent response from some southern whites. The “freedom summer” also produced the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. It permitted the MFDP to be seated as observers, with promises of party reforms later on, while the regular party retained its official standing.
25. Voting Rights Act A year later, in March 1965, King helped organize a major demonstration in Selma, Alabama to press the demand for the right of blacks to register to vote. Two northern whites participating in the Selma march were murdered in the course of the effort there- one, a minister, beaten to death in the streets of the town; the other, a Detroit housewife, shot as she drove along a highway at night with a black passenger in her car. The Civil Rights Act of 1965, better known as the Voting Rights Act, which provided federal protection to blacks attempting to exercise their right to vote.
26. The Changing Movement Economic Conditions By 1966, 69 percent of American blacks were living in metropolitanareas and 45 percent outside the South. Well over half of all American non-whites lived in poverty at thebeginning of the 1960s and black unemployment was twice that ofwhites.
27. Affirmative Action Over the next decade, affirmative action guidelines gradually extended to virtually all institutions doing business with or receiving funds from the federal government. Organizers of the Chicago campaign hoped to direct national attention to housing and employment discrimination in northern industrial cities in much the same way similar campaigns had exposed legal racism in the South.
28. Urban Violence Before the Chicago campaign, the problem of urban poverty had thrust itself into national attention when violence broke out in black neighborhoods in major cities. The first large race riot since the end of World War II occurred the following summer in the Watts section of Los Angeles. The incident triggered a storm of anger and a week of violence. 34 people died during the Watts uprising, which was eventuallyquelled by the National Guard; 28 of the dead were black.
29.
30. More Violence Televised reports of the violence alarmed millions of Americans and created both a new sense of urgency and a growing sense of doubt among many of those whites who had embraced the cause of racial justice only a few years before. A special Commission on Civil Disorders, created by the president in response to the disturbances, issued a celebrated report in the spring of 1968 recommending massive spending to eliminate the abysmal conditions of the ghettoes.
31. Black Power Disillusioned with the ideal of peaceful change in cooperation with whites, an increasing number of African Americans were turning to a new approach to the racial issue: the philosophy of “black power”. The most enduring impact of the black-power ideology was a social and psychological one: instilling racial pride in African Americans, who lived in a society whose dominant culture generally portrayed blacks as inferior to whites. It encouraged the growth of black studies in schools and universities.
32. A Divided Civil Rights Movement Traditional black organizations that had emphasized cooperation 20 with sympathetic whites- groups such as the NAACP, the Urban League, and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference now faced competition from more radical groups. In Oakland, California the Black Panther Party promised to defend black rights even if that required violence.
33. Nation of Islam In Detroit, a once-obscure black nationalist group, the Nation of Islam, gained new prominence. Founded in 1931 by and Elijah Poole (Muhammad) , the movement taught blacks to take responsibility for their own lives, to be disciplined, to live by strict codes of behavior, and to reject any dependence on whites.
34. Malcolm X Malcolm became one of the movement’s most influential spokesmen, particularly among younger blacks, as a result of his intelligence, his oratorical skills, and his harsh, uncompromising opposition to all forms of racism and oppression. He did not advocate violence, but he insisted that black people had the right to defend themselves, violently if necessary from those who assaulted them. Malcolm died in 1965 when black gunmen, presumably under orders from rivals within the Nation of Islam, assassinated him in New York.
35. “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.” -Malcolm X
37. Diversifying Foreign Policy The Kennedy administration came in convinced that the U.S. needed to counter communist aggression in more flexible ways than the atomic weapons oriented defense strategy of the Eisenhower years. In particular, Kennedy was unsatisfied with the nation’s ability to meet communist threats in “emerging areas” of the Third World the areas in which Kennedy believed the real struggle against communism would be waged in the future.
38.
39. Kennedy also favored expanding American influence through peaceful means. He proposed an “Alliance for Progress” to repair the badly deteriorated relationship with Latin America, the proposal was a series of projects for peaceful development and stabilization of the nations of that region. Kennedy also inaugurated the Agency for International Development and one of the most popular innovations in the Peace Corps.
40.
41. Bay of Pigs One of Kennedy’s first foreign policy ventures, was to finish what the Eisenhower administration started which was a disastrous assault on the Castro government in Cuba. The CIA had been working for months to train a small army of anti-Castro exiles in Central America. On April 17, 1961, with the approval of Kennedy, 2,000 of the armed exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. When they had landed, the exiles were expecting American air support then an uprising from the people, but neither had occurred. Instead, well-armed Castro forces easily crushed the invaders and within two days the mission had collapsed.
43. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had gone to Vienna in June 1961 for his first meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. During the summer of 1962, American intelligence agencies had become aware of the arrival of a new wave of Soviet technicians and equipment in Cuba and of military construction in progress. To the Soviets, placing missiles in Cuba probably seemed reasonable and relatively inexpensive way to counter the presence of American missiles in Turkey. This was seen as an act of aggression by the Soviets to the United States. On October 22, he ordered a naval and air blockade around Cuba, a “quarantine” against all offensive weapons. Confrontations with the Soviet Union
44. On October 26, Kennedy received a message from Khrushchev that the Soviet Union would remove the missile bases in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba, the president agreed and the crisis was OVER.
45.
46.
47. Johnson and the World Lyndon Johnson entered the presidency lacking even more than John Kennedy’s limited prior experience with international affairs and he was eager to prove that he was a strong and forceful leader.
48.
49. A 1961 assassination had toppled the repressive dictatorship of General Rafael Trujillo, and for the next four years various factions in the country had struggled for dominance. Conservative military regime began to collapse in the face of a revolt by a broad range of groups on behalf of Juan Bosch, and he planned to establish a pro-Castro, a communist regime. Johnson dispatched 30,000 American troops to seize the disorder and only after a conservative candidate defeated Bosch in the 1966 election were forces withdrawn.
50. The King and Kennedy Assassinations On April 4, MLK was assassinated from the balcony of his motel by James Earl Ray who was later captured and revealed that he was hired but hadn't spoke of the identity of his employers. The King's death led to riots and sixty Americans died, and many left injured. After the announcing of Robert Kennedy's victory in California's primary, he was assassinated by SirhanSirhan a young Palestinian who didn't like Kennedy's pro-Israeli remarks. Robert Kennedy set an idea for a time known as the "Kennedy Legacy" which would become central to American liberalism.
53. TheConservative Response The most visible sign of the conservative backlash was the surprising success of the campaign of George Wallace for the presidency. Wallace had established himself in 1963 as one of the nation's leading spokesmen for the defense of segregation when, as governor of Albama, he had attempted to block the admission of black students to the University of Alabama. George Wallace didn't pose as a serious threat though, as Nixon ended being the Republican candidate and winning against Humphrey by an extremely tight race, cause of his views on stabilizing the country.
