Social Movements of the 1960s

1. Social Movements of the 1960s

2. Social movements occur when a large number of people try to change society in some way. • During the second world war, the society of the US was put under a lot of pressure, with many of the men being away fighting, and the traditional social roles of many people were changed. • Women had to work in what were traditionally men’s jobs, black people from the south travelled to the other side of the world to fight in the war, and society in general was shaken up.

3. When the war was over, the soldiers returned home, and everyone went back to their old lives, but some people had realised that their old lives weren’t really very good. • As the years past, people who were unhappy with how they were treated by society became more and more unhappy, and by the 1960s, these people had become angry enough to try to change things. • Three movements in particular occurred in the 1960s.

4. The civil rights movement generally refers to the fight by black people in the US to gain equal rights to white people. • The counter-culture movement refers to the refusal of many people, especially young people, to accept the traditional rules of society, especially about things like sex and drugs, and the refusal to support the Vietnam war. • The women’s movement refers to the fight by women to end sexual discrimination.

5. The Civil Rights Movement • Even though the American civil war ended slavery in the southern states of the US, the situation for black people did not become equal to white people. • At that time the Democratic party in the southern states was dominated by white politicians, and these politicians worked to make sure that white people were favoured over black people.

6. The governments in the south made many laws that did not agree with the US constitution, but for many years these laws were not challenged by the federal government, and so they continued up until the 1960s. • Many of these laws were to do with segregation. • These were laws that tried to keep the black people from having a lot of direct contact with the white people.

7. In public places white people and black people would have to use different facilities, and black children could not go to the same schools as white children. • The southern governments also used their power to make it difficult for black people to vote, so that they would not be able to elect their own politicians. • Black people formed organisations to fight against this situation, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. (NAACP)

8. The NAACP worked hard during the early 1900s to fight against discrimination, especially in the courts. • In 1954, they achieved a great success when the supreme court of the US ruled that having separate schools for black children and white children was unconstitutional. • Their legal successes were not moving fast enough for many people, who took action on their own. • Rosa Parks was the woman who started this trend.

9. Rosa Parks was a black woman who was catching the public bus home from work one day in 1955. • The buses had separate sections for black and white people, and when the white section filled up, the bus driver told Rosa Parks to stand up and let a white man sit down instead of her. • She refused to do so, and as a result the bus driver called the police. • They arrested her, and took her to jail.

10. The black people in the community were encouraged to boycott the bus company, spreading the word through their churches and newspapers. • Eventually, with the bus company losing so much money, the law was changed to stop segregation on the buses. • In early 1960s a new tactic of the black civil rights movement was used, the sit-in. • In Greensboro, North Carolina, four black students from the local university went to eat lunch at a local store.

11. The counter where the lunches were served had seats, but only for white people. • The black students sat down in the seats, and stayed even though the staff would not serve them any food. • They kept going back for the next several days, and each day more students came to the shop to support them, until over 300 people were crowded in to the store. • Eventually, there was a bomb threat, and the owner took the opportunity to close the store for the next few weeks.

12. The peaceful sit-in in Greensboro motivated people in other towns and states in the south to hold their own sit-ins, and soon this way of demonstrating spread. • By the end of that year, the store in Greensboro, and similar stores in other places, had desegregated their lunch counters. • In 1961, one of the civil rights organisations decided to test a new court decision. • The Supreme Court had ruled in 1960 that interstate buses could not be segregated.

13. Civil rights activists therefore got on buses and travelled into southern states with black and white people sitting together, and used the same bathrooms and water fountains in the bus stations. • This mission turned out to be quite dangerous, as mobs in the southern states attacked buses, and assaulted the people travelling on them. • In one place(Birmingham, Alabama)a local official gave the KKK 15 minutes to bash the activists before sending in the police.

14. Who are the Ku Klux Klan? • After the civil war in the US was over, some soldiers who had fought on the confederate (southern) side joined together to form a group opposed to equality between black and white people. • The members tried to use methods of violence and secrecy to make sure that white people stayed in power in the south, even though they had lost the war.

15. Different groups with similar ideas called themselves the Ku Klux Klan over the years, and in the 1960s, these organisations became more active when black people started to fight for their rights. • They used tactics such as intimidation, violence and even murder to try to stop the activists, with KKK groups bombing activists’ houses in some areas. • They are known for their white uniforms and cross-burning at their meetings.

17. After the violence in Alabama, the freedom rides were stopped until other civil rights organisations joined in, and they started up again. • Eventually the activists reached Mississippi, were the police arrested them for breaking the local segregation laws, and sent them to jail, where they beaten and kept in poor conditions. • By the end of 1961, the government had been forced to change the laws for the whole country.

18. After the freedom rides, the next challenge for the civil rights movement was voter registration of black people. • Because the southern states had tried to discourage black people from registering to vote for so long, the activists went to places like Mississippi to help black people to enrol to vote. • Once again, the local police and white power organisations like the KKK tried to stop the activists with arrests and violence.

19. The activists persisted, despite the violence against them, states across the southern US, and their efforts again proved successful. • In 1964, the Civil Rights Act, and in 1965, the Voting Rights Act were passed by the federal government, cancelling the racist laws in the southern states in schools, public facilities, government and employment.

20. Civil Rights Leaders – Martin Luther King Jr. • Martin Luther King Jr. was the most famous of the civil rights leaders of the 1960s. • He grew up in the south, in Atlanta Georgia, and his father was a minister in the Baptist church. • King also became a minister, beginning his work in a church in Alabama when he was 25. • During his college years, King had contact with other civil rights leaders, and became aware of the work of Mahatma Gandhi.

21. The success of Gandhi’s methods of non-violent resistance inspired King, and he even went to India to visit Gandhi’s birthplace, and to learn more about his philosophy. • King was one of the organisers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, after Rosa Parks was arrested, and the leader of one of the largest civil rights groups. • His actions put him in constant danger: his house was bombed during the bus boycott, and he was stabbed during a book signing.

22. He stuck to his non-violent beliefs, and organised protests by his organisation to be peaceful.

23. Malcolm X • Malcolm X (originally Malcolm Little) was another important black civil rights activist during the 1960s. • He was born in Nebraska, and his father was a civil rights leader in his local community. • The family had to move a number of times to avoid trouble with white supremacist groups like the KKK.

24. Malcolm X was one of the top students in his Junior High School, and had plans to become a lawyer. • But he dropped out after being told by one of his 8th grade teachers that being a lawyer was “no realistic goal for a nigger”. • As a young man he drifted around various cities in the US, becoming involved in various criminal activities. • Eventually he was arrested and sent to jail for burglary and weapons charges.

25. He was sentenced to 8 to 10 years in prison, and while inside he began a process of educating himself, spending a lot of his time reading. • His family contacted him and encouraged him to become a member of a religious organisation called the Nation of Islam. • The teachings of this group seemed to make sense to him, so he decided to change his ways and to join the Nation of Islam.

26. The Nation of Islam • The Nation of Islam is a religious organisation which concentrates on improving the lives of black Americans. • Other muslims consider the group to be a separate religion from normal Islam, since the beliefs are quite different in some ways. • When members join the Nation of Islam, they use ‘X’ instead of their surname, to represent the names that they lost when their ancestors were taken from Africa.

27. Malcolm X was a member of the nation of Islam from 1952 until 1964. • He was a gifted speaker and leader, and rose quickly in the organisation. • He taught his followers that black people were the original people of the world and that white people were inferior. • He rejected the way the civil rights organisations used non-violence to achieve their goals, and believed that black people should fight back to defend themselves.

28. To many people Malcolm X’s ideas were too extreme, and civil rights organisations worried that he would cause problems for them in their work to improve the relationship between black people and white people. • Problems developed between Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, until he left in 1964. • He converted to Sunni Islam, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca. • After he left the nation of Islam, his views towards white people changed.

29. After travelling around the world, and experiencing different countries, he started to think that different races could work together. • The problems that Malcolm X had with the Nation of Islam continued, and became more serious. • There were threats against his life, and his house was burned down. • In 1965, he was shot to death by several members of the Nation of Islam during a speech.

30. The Women’s Movement • The women’s movement in the US became popular in the 1960s in a similar way to the civil rights movement. • Before that time, women’s groups had focused on trying to get the courts to change the laws that discriminated against women. • But in the early 1960s president Kennedy made women’s rights one his priorities, and appointed a commission to investigate.

31. The Presidential Commission on the Status of Women released its report in 1963, finding that there was discrimination against women in every aspect of American life. • The report made many recommendations such as fair employment policies, paid maternity leave and affordable childcare. • Also in 1963, the writer Betty Friedan had a book published called ‘The Feminine Mystique’. • The book became a bestseller.

32. Friedan was inspired to write the book after a reunion of her college class. • She found that many of the women she went to college with were dissatisfied with their lives. • Friedan thought that this was because the individual character of many women was pushed down by society. • The meaning of the lives of many women was only found in their husband and children, society didn’t allow anything else.

33. After the report was released and Freidan’s book published, many women’s groups started to form around the US, dedicated to changing not only the laws, but society’s attitudes towards women. • The civil rights movement also became involved in women’s rights, as Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther Kings wife, took over leadership of the civil rights movement after King was assassinated.

34. In 1968 opposition to abortion laws started to be expressed in public.

35. Counterculture • With the changes that society in the US was experiencing in the 1960s, younger people especially were effected. • The civil rights and women’s movements were demonstrating the rights of minorities, and the failure of the authorities to look after them. • The war in Vietnam was becoming more serious, and many people were opposed to it.

36. The success of the civil rights movement in achieving its goals proved that organised protests could be a good tactic. • The opposition to the Vietnam war gathered together many people who had similar feelings on other issues as well. • Government authorities had proved untrustworthy over issues such as the cold war, and police were viewed with suspicion by students and civil rights activists, especially after the events in the south .

37. Research testing by the CIA on psychedelic drugs had introduced the test subjects to LSD, and after the trials were over, the subjects continued to experiment on their own, trying to expand their minds. • When the city of San Francisco hosted the ‘Summer of Love’ in 1967, the hippy culture was introduced to the mainstream media. • People from different places in the US gathered there to express their new cultural and political ideas.

38. The hippies wore different kinds of clothes, lived communally, took drugs like lsd and marijuana. • The development of contraceptives had made the consequences of pre-marital sex less serious. • The hippies started the new culture of ‘free love’, which accepted sex as a natural part of ordinary life, and didn’t put any importance on things like marriage.

39. These new cultures were reflected in the music which came out of the 1960s, starting with singers such as Bob Dylan. • The Woodstock festival, near New York, was held in 1969, and was a celebration of the hippy music culture.