The Civil Rights Movement Continues

So much of the energy and character of the sixties emerged from the civil rights movement of the post-war (1945) period. By the 1960s the movement itself was changing. Many of the civil rights activists pushing for school desegregation in the 1950s were middle-class and middle-aged. In the 1960s, a new student movement arose whose members wanted swifter changes and felt disillusioned when integration didn’t lead to economic, political, and social equity.

Civil rights leaders organized the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A similar march was organized by A. Philip Randolph in 1941, but was called off when President Franklin Roosevelt agreed to desegregate the defense industry that was booming during World War II. The 1963 march aimed for much more than desegregation; It called for, among other things, civil rights legislation, school integration, an end to discrimination by public and private employers, job training for the unemployed, and a raise in the minimum wage. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, an internationally renowned call for civil rights that raised the movement’s profile to new heights and put unprecedented pressure on politicians to pass meaningful civil rights legislation.

President Kennedy offered support for a civil rights bill, but Southern resistance was intense and so the bill stalled in Congress. Then, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated.  Raised in poverty in the Texas Hill Country, the man who replaced Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson lacked Kennedy’s youth, his charisma, his popularity, and his aristocratic upbringing. President Lyndon Johnson, then, an old white Southerner, embraced the civil rights movement. He took Kennedy’s stalled civil rights bill, ensured that it would have teeth, and navigated it through Congress. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred segregation in public accommodations and outlawed discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and national or religious origin.

The activists of the civil rights movement successfully pressured political leaders to pass legislation, and the movement continued pushing forward. There were many martyred to the cause of black liberation as the forces of white supremacy attempted to maintain the status quo. In 1963 the first National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Field Secretary in Mississippi Medgar Evers was murdered in the city of Jackson, MS for his activism.

His death helped spur direct action continued through the summer of 1964, as student-run organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) undertook Freedom Summer in Mississippi, a drive to register African American voters in a state. Of course there was violent pushback as three young CORE activists, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, were murdered by local law enforcement officers in 1964 and Klan members in Neshoba County, outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Activists kept fighting. In March 1965, activists attempted to march from the city of Selma to the capital, Montgomery, Alabama, on behalf of local African American voting rights. In a narrative that had become familiar, “Bloody Sunday” featured peaceful protesters attacked by white law enforcement with batons and tear gas. After they were turned away violently a second time, marchers finally made the fifty-mile trek to the state capitol later in the month. Coverage of the first march prompted President Johnson to present the bill that became the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an act that abolished voting discrimination in federal, state, and local elections.

Ninety years after Reconstruction, these measures effectively ended Jim Crow. Moreover, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (The Hart-Celler Act) abolished the quota regime established by the 1924 Reed-Johnson Act that created extreme barriers for Asians, Italians and Eastern European Jews from immigrating to the United States. American immigration, which had for more than four decades effectively barred legal immigration to the United States from anywhere other than Northern and Western Europe, finally opened the United States up to the world and forever reshaped the demographics of the nation.

In addition to civil rights and immigration, President Johnson pushed an agenda he called his “Great Society” which took on a range of quality-of-life concerns that seemed suddenly solvable in a society of such affluence. It established the first federal food stamp program. Medicare and Medicaid would ensure access to quality medical care for the aged and poor.

When Integration Isn’t Enough

President Johnson had secured a series of meaningful civil rights laws, but then things began to stall. Days after the ratification of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, race riots broke out in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The uprising in Watts stemmed from local African American frustrations with residential segregation, police brutality, and racial profiling. Waves of riots rocked American cities every summer thereafter. Particularly destructive riots occurred in 1967—two summers later—in Newark, NJ and Detroit, MI. Each resulted in deaths, injuries, arrests, and millions of dollars in property damage. Despite Black achievements African Americans faced a deeply unequal society. The phenomenon of “white flight”—when whites in metropolitan areas fled city centers for the suburbs—often resulted in resegregated residential patterns. People revolted against limited access to economic and social opportunities in Black urban areas.

Like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois before them, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, pictured here in 1964, represented different strategies to achieve racial justice. Library of Congress.

Tensions continued to mount in cities, and the tone of the civil rights movement changed yet again. Activists became less conciliatory in their calls for progress. Many embraced the more militant message of the burgeoning Black Power Movement and Malcolm X, a Nation of Islam (NOI) minister who encouraged African Americans to pursue freedom, equality, and justice by “any means necessary.” Before he was killed in 1965 by the combined forces of U.S. law enforcement and NOI assassins angered by his break with the nation, Malcolm X painted a radical alternative to the racially integrated, largely Protestant approach of black liberals. Malcolm, in the tradition of Marcus Garvey, advocated for Black control of Black institutions.

By the late 1960s, a close organizing partner Martin Luther King, Jr. in the early 1960s, Stokely Carmichaelbroke with Kings more moderate approach and adopted the language of “Black Power.” Carmichael told the crowd, “What we gonna start saying now is black power!” Carmichael asserted that “black power means black people coming together to form a political force.”

In 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) in Oakland, California. The revolutionary organization sought reparations and exemptions for Black men from the military draft in the context of the Vietnam War. Citing police brutality and racist governmental policies, the Black Panthers aligned themselves with the “other people of color in the world” against whom America was fighting abroad. Although it was perhaps most well-known for cop-watching – where police were monitored by armed Black Panthers in Black communities – the BPP, often led by female members, was deeply engaged in local community programs that provided food, clothing, medical treatment, and drug rehabilitation. BPP focused on modes of resistance that empowered Black activists on their own terms.

The BPP was also extremely successful in forging solidarities with, and inspiring movements of other marginalized groups. Fred Hampton, the deputy chairman of the BPP Illinois chapter, achieved a nonaggression pact among Chicago’s most powerful street gangs. Emphasizing that racial and ethnic conflict among gangs would only keep its members entrenched in poverty, Hampton strove to forge an anti-racist, class-conscious, multiracial alliance among the BPP, the Young Patriots Organization, and the Young Lords under the leadership of Jose Cha Cha Jimenez, leading to the Rainbow Coalition.

Hampton met the Young Lords in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood the day after they were in the news for occupying a police community workshop at the Chicago 18th District Police Station. Hampton was arrested twice with Jimenez at the Wicker Park Welfare Office, and both were charged with “mob action” at a peaceful picket of the office. Later, the Rainbow Coalition was joined nationwide by Students for a Democratic Society(SDS), the Brown Berets, AIM, and the Red Guard Party. In May 1969, Hampton called a press conference to announce that the coalition had formed. What the coalition groups would do was based on common action. Some of their joint issues were poverty, anti-racism, corruption, police brutality, and substandard housing. If there was a protest or a demonstration, the groups would attend the event and support each other.

Hampton conducted a meeting condemning sexism in 1969. After 1969, the party considered sexism counter-revolutionary. In 1970, about 40–70% of party members were women, often leading community programs providing food, healthcare and education.

Once he became leader of the Chicago chapter, he organized weekly rallies, participated in strikes, worked closely with the BPP’s local People’s Clinic, taught political education classes every morning at 6 am, and launched a project for community supervision of the police.

The Empire Strikes Back

The FBI believed that Hampton’s leadership and talent for communication made him a major threat as he was forging solidarities between diverse marginalized groups. These groups were beginning to view the elites and law enforcement, rather than each other, as the source for their economic, social and political insecurity. The FBI began keeping close tabs on Hampton’s activities considering him a “Black Messiah”. Investigations have shown that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was determined to prevent the formation of a cohesive revolutionary movement in the United States. Hoover believed the Panthers, Young Patriots, Young Lords, and similar radical coalitions that Hampton forged in Chicago were a steppingstone to the rise of a revolution that could cause a radical change in the U.S. government.

Using anonymous letters, the FBI sowed distrust and eventually instigated a split between the Panthers and other groups. The FBI released a batch of racist cartoons in the Panthers’ name, aimed at alienating white activists. It also launched a disinformation program to forestall the formation of the Rainbow Coalition, but the BPP often persevered and successfully made an alliance with the Young Patriots and Young Lords. In repeated directives, Director Hoover, the same man who got Marcus Garvey deported, demanded that agents “destroy what the [BPP] stands for”, and “eradicate its ‘serve the people’ programs”. Documents secured by Senate investigators in the early 1970s revealed that the FBI actively encouraged violence between the Panthers and other radical groups; this provoked multiple murders in cities throughout the country.

On December 4, 1969, at 4:45 am, a heavily armed police team broke into Fred Hampton’s apartment. Hampton was sleeping on a mattress in the bedroom with his partner Deborah Johnson who was eight and a half months pregnant with their child. Police officers removed her from the room and executed Hampton. Hampton’s body was dragged into the bedroom doorway and left in a pool of blood.

Hampton and Malcolm X, like Marcus Garvey decades early, were targeted by Hoover’s FBI for assassination and criminalization. They were certainly not alone. Other Panther leaders including Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Mark Clark, Huey Newton and Assata Shakur were targeted by U.S. law enforcement for arrest and assassination.

Spawned by President Richard Nixon in 1971, the War on Drugs was a way to criminalize Black and progressive communities through targeted surveillance and steep penalties for drug use. Nixon’s Domestic Policy Advisor John Ehrlichman explained, “… by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” As a result mass incarceration took off in the United States, a trend that continues to this day with the largest prison population in the world.

Ironically, if Nixon truly sought to stymie the drug trade, he would have looked at the U.S. government. U.S. officials, particularly those in the CIA, have been credibly accused of participating in various manifestations of the international drug trade. In the name of anti-communism during the Cold War, and later the War on Terror, the U.S. government has been actively involved in the production and distribution of Heroin, Cocaine and Crack.  Reporter Gary Webb exposed that in the 1980s, to fund anti-communist guerillas in Nicaragua, the CIA sold crack in Los Angeles and gave the profits to Nicaragua’s right-wing insurgents. This operation helped contest communism while also undermining the stability of Black communities in LA and beyond.

Vietnam

American involvement in the Vietnam War began during the postwar period of decolonization. The Soviet Union backed many people seeking independence from the U.S. and European Empires across the globe. The United States violently opposed many of these movements as Washington feared the expansion of communist influence and pledged to confront any revolutions aligned against Western capitalism. This contest between the divergent Soviet and U.S. visions of the world led to great suffering throughout the globe in a period known as the Cold War.

The largest most costly conflict for the United States during this period was the Vietnam War. 1946 and 1954, France fought a counterinsurgency campaign against the communist Viet Minh forces led by Ho Chi Minh who had actively campaigned for Vietnamese independence since at least 1919. The United States assisted the French war effort with funds, arms, and advisors, but it was not enough. On the eve of the Geneva Peace Conference in 1954, Viet Minh forces defeated the French army at Dien Bien Phu. But the United States feared a communist electoral victory and blocked free elections in Vietnam. A conflict broke out as the U.S. backed a brutal dictator in South Vietnam while Ho Chi Mihn led a popular communist armed movement that would defeat both the U.S.-backed puppet state in South Vietnam.

Given the perceived injustice of U.S. aggression in Vietnam, a lack of a plan for victory and the high number of killed American soldiers, particularly black and brown troops drafted to fight in the conflict against their will, the war became extremely unpopular in the United States by the late 1960s. Led by young people and minorities who were being asked to go risk their lives for U.S. empire, an unprecedented anti-war movement swept the nation. Further, the U.S. government had produced reports as early as 1965 underscoring that there was no path to victory for the United States in Vietnam. This was exposed in the pentagon papers released in 1971. By 1967 media coverage of the war was becoming more critical. That year Stokley Carmichael convinced MLK to come out against the conflict. At the NYC’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, with Carmichael in attendance, King lamented, “There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and press that will praise you when you say be nonviolent toward Jim Clark [the white supremacist sheriff of Alabama from 1955-1966], but will curse you and damn you when you say be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children” (King, 30 April 1967) The year after this speech, in 1968 King, would be assassinated in Memphis, TN. Over one million Vietnamese had been killed including hundreds of thousands of civilians, as had nearly sixty thousand U.S. Troops. The United States was forced to withdraw U.S. forces in 1975.

The Age of Revolution

Despite the crackdowns by the U.S. on black and radical movements for peace and social justice, numerous new movements were inspired to demand equity for their respective communities in a deeply unequal society. In the summer of 1961, for instance, frustrated Native American university students founded the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) to draw attention to the plight of Indigenous Americans. In the Pacific Northwest, the council advocated for tribal fishermen to retain immunity from conservation laws on reservations and in 1964 held a series of “fish-ins”: activists and celebrities cast nets and waited for the police to arrest them. The NIYC’s militant rhetoric and use of direct action marked the beginning of what was called the Red Power movement, an intertribal movement designed to draw attention to Native issues and to protest discrimination. The American Indian Movement (AIM) and other activists staged dramatic demonstrations. In November 1969, dozens began a year-and-a-half-long occupation of the abandoned Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. In 1973, hundreds occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of the infamous 1890 massacre, for several months.

Meanwhile, the Chicano Movement in the 1960s emerged out of the broader Mexican American civil rights movement of the post–World War II era. Organizations like the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDF) buoyed the Chicano movement and patterned themselves after similar influential groups in the African American civil rights movement. Cesar Chavez became the most well-known figure of the Chicano movement, using nonviolent tactics to campaign for workers’ rights in the grape fields of California. Chavez and activist Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association, which eventually merged and became the United Farm Workers of America (UFWA). The UFWA fused the causes of Chicano and Filipino activists protesting the subpar working conditions of California farmers on American soil. In addition to embarking on a hunger strike and a boycott of table grapes, Chavez led a three-hundred-mile march in March and April 1966 from Delano, California, to the state capital of Sacramento.

The feminist movement also grew in the 1960s. Women were active in both the civil rights movement and the labor movement, but their increasing awareness of gender inequality did not find a receptive audience among male leaders in those movements. In the 1960s, then, many of these women began to form a movement of their own that would become known as Second Wave Feminism. Soon the country experienced a groundswell of feminist consciousness. The Presidential Commission on the Status of Women in 1961, headed by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt headed the effort released a report in 1963 finding discriminatory provisions in the law and practices of industrial, labor, and governmental organizations, the commission advocated for “changes, many of them long overdue, in the conditions of women’s opportunity in the United States.” Change was recommended in areas of employment practices, federal tax and benefit policies affecting women’s income, labor laws, and services for women as wives, mothers, and workers. The specific concerns of poor and nonwhite women lay largely beyond the scope of the report and would be addressed in later waves of the feminist movement.

The end of the decade was marked by the Women’s Strike for Equality, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of women’s right to vote. Sponsored by the National Organization for Women (NOW), the 1970 protest focused on employment discrimination, political equality, abortion, free childcare, and equality in marriage. All of these issues foreshadowed the backlash against feminist goals in the 1970s. Not only would feminism face opposition from other women who valued the traditional homemaker role to which feminists objected, the feminist movement would also fracture internally as minority women challenged white feminists’ racism and lesbians vied for more prominence within feminist organizations.

American environmentalism’s significant gains during the 1960s emerged in part from Americans’ recreational use of nature. Postwar Americans backpacked, went to the beach, fished, and joined birding organizations in greater numbers than ever before. These experiences, along with increased formal education, made Americans more aware of threats to the environment and, consequently, to themselves. Many of these threats increased in the postwar years as developers bulldozed open space for suburbs and new hazards emerged from industrial and nuclear pollutants.

The Stonewall Riots began on June 28, 1969, after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The raid was unexpected and patrons and onlookers fought back. The riots lasted for days and included taunting police, throwing objects at them, and breaking into the police station. The Stonewall Riots marked a new beginning for the gay rights movement in the United States and around the world. The annual Gay Pride parades that are now celebrated around the world are a memorial to the Stonewall Riots. Some of the participants in the Stonewall Riots included Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two transgender women of color who resisted arrest and threw objects at the police. Marsha P. Johnson later established the Street Transvestite (now Transgender) Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a group that helped homeless transgender youth.

These movements, along with many others, were foundational to a complex assortment of American Identities demanding a more inclusive and just society.