The 1960s was a decade of social conflict and movements for civil rights and social change. The Vietnam War intensified existing divisions. Major events included the Freedom Rides to integrate buses in 1961, the 1963 March on Washington, and Bloody Sunday in Selma in 1965 which prompted the Voting Rights Act. The civil rights movement was joined by groups advocating for women's, gay, and environmental rights. Though progress was made, conflicts from the 1960s continue to impact American society today.

1. The 1960s

2. The Sixties
• Conflict fueled by prosperity
• Vietnam War intensifies social conflict
• Sixties conflicts continue to play out today:
• generational
• racial

3. The Freedom
Movement
• Ella Baker,April 1960:
meeting leads to Student
Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC)
• 1961 Freedom Rides:
Congress of Racial Equality
• 1963 Birmingham,AL
• August 28, 1963: March on
Washington

4. Civil Rights
• 1960: Greensboro, NC
sit-ins
• 5 months to get
service
• 70,000 participants in
sit-ins in 1960
• SNCC: Student Non-
Violent Coordinating
Committee
Text

5. Freedom Rides• 1960-1961: organized by
Congress of Racial
Equality
• Goal: to integrate
interstate buses (federal
law made segregation on
these buses illegal)

6. Images from
Birmingham,AL 1963
Eugene “Bull” Connor authorizes police attacks on children

8. March on
Washington (1963)
• Organized by A. Philip
Randolph
• “Jobs and Freedom”
• Conflict over how radical to
go: John Lewis, march
“through the heart of Dixie
the way Sherman did... and
burn Jim Crow to the
ground” (quoted on p. 775)

9. • JFK: January 1961-
November 22, 1963
• Interested in cold war,
not civil rights
• Army to restore order
in 1962 riot at
University of Mississippi
• June 1963, proposes
Civil Rights Bill: (start at
5:30, end 7:18)
Kennedy and
Civil Rights

10. Civil Rights under
Johnson
• Lyndon Baines Johnson
(1963-1969)
• Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Freedom Summer (1964) -
Student activists go to
register voters in MS
• Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party (Fannie
Lou Hamer)

11. Johnson
Presidency
• TheVoting Rights Act
(1965)
• Immigration reform: 1965
• The Great Society: Medicaid
and Medicare, federal funds
to education; EEOE; NEH
• The War on Poverty:
• food stamps
• Head Start
• VISTA
Selma Police arrest peaceful demonstrators. Selma police arresting nonviolent
marchers during their first attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery, March 7,
1965. The violence against marchers prompted President Johnson to submit a proposal
for a strong Voting Rights Act. Source: Alabama Sovereignty Commission, Administrative
files, SG13843, folder 8, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery
Alabama. From http://www.amistadresource.org

12. Changing Black
Movement
• Ghetto Uprisings -
Watts, Detroit, Newark
• Malcolm X
• The Rise of Black Power
Malcolm X at a NYC Rally, 1964. Malcolm X speaking at a NYC rally related to the citywide boycott of
schools, February or March 1964. Source: Courtesy of Builder Levy, photographer. From http://
www.amistadresource.org/

13. Vietnam and
the New Left
• New Left: loneliness, isolation,
alienation, powerlessness in
the face of institutions, quest
for authenticity
• Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS): freedom as
participatory democracy
• The Antiwar Movement
• The Counterculture

14. New Movements and
Rights Revolution
• Betty Friedan and The Feminine
Mystique (1963)
• The Equal Pay Act (1963)
• National Organization for
Women (NOW) founded 1966
• “Women’s liberation” Image: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/
lesbian.history/lesbian_feminism

15. The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American
women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that
women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States.
Each suburban wife struggled with it alone.As she made the beds, shopped for
groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her
children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at
night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — "Is this
all?"
For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of
words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and
articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives
and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of
Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory
in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him,
how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with
sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread,
cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to
dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to
keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into
delinquents.

16. 1953
1968

17. Image: http://guides.library.duke.edu/content.php?pid=125273&sid=1075967

18. http://www.vfa.us/MissAmerica1968JUNE122008.htm

19. Rights Revolution
• Gay Liberation - Stonewall
Riots (1969)
• Latino Activism - César
Chávez and UFW
• Red Power - American
Indian Movement (AIM)
• Environmentalism - Silent
Spring (1962)
• The Supreme Court
protects freedom of
speech

20. Conclusions
• Civil Rights protests of the 1960s led to
other movements for rights
• TheVietnam War (details in the next unit!)
intensified conflict
• Protests did bring social change, though
we’ll see a backlash in the following
decades