The Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman once said about 1968, "They don't make years like that anymore." He could have been referring to the entire decade. America has never seen a decade like the 1960s, when anti-establishment turmoil was as normal as breakfast.
In a way, the '60s began on February 1, 1960, when four college students held a sit-in at a Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, to desegregate the chain's lunch counter. Although subject to violence, the four refused to back down until the company agreed to their demands. Within a year, civil rights sit-ins had spread to 100 cities across the United States.
Martin Luther King and President Lyndon Johnson
Other powerful protests were the Freedom Rides to protest segregation on interstate buses. The first, from Washington, DC, to New Orleans, was disrupted when one of the buses was firebombed in Anniston, Alabama. When the others reached the Birmingham bus station, they were brutally attacked. Some were beaten so badly they never recovered. The rides continued, however, and so did the violence. In 1962, James Meredith sparked a riot when he became the first African-American to register at the University of Mississippi. The whole world watched with horror when Birmingham Sheriff "Bull" Connor let loose firehoses and dogs on civil rights activists. Although newly elected Governor George Wallace pledged segregation forever at his inaugural, groups such as the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee targeted Alabama in its civil rights campaign. Despite the good feelings generated by Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech that August, the violence continued. In October three black girls were killed when a bomb exploded inside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, were killed and buried in a levee in 1964, and in March 1965, on what became known as "Bloody Sunday," Selma's Sheriff Jim Clark and his men used tear gas and billy clubs against marchers on the Pettus Bridge.
That summer, race riots broke out in several cities around the country, including Detroit, New York, Newark and in a neighborhood of Los Angeles called Watts. Although Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and President Johnson pushed his war on poverty programs through Congress, more radical rhetoric dominated the civil rights movement through the remainder of the 1960s. Until his assassination in 1965, Malcolm X attracted thousands of his followers to the Black Muslims. Stokely Carmichael called for "black power" in the summer of 1966. That fall, the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland; its popularity grew rapidly thanks to the charismatic leadership of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. In contrast, at the time of his assassination in April 1968, Martin Luther King's nonviolent movement appeared to be losing steam.
The student movement also came to life in 1960 when the Students for a Democratic Society was formed. Although the 1962 Port Huron Statement served as the organization's manifesto, clearly its best recruiting tool was the Vietnam War.
The war in Southeast Asia was only the latest battle in a cold war that seemingly had no end, even with the defeat of Richard Nixon by John F. Kennedy. Kennedy won in large part because he looked better than the Vice President during their three televised debates. Their foreign policy proposals weren't that far apart. Shortly after Kennedy's inauguration, the CIA launched its ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, which would lead to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. In Europe, tension between the US and the Soviet Union also increased after the Berlin wall was built in 1961. American efforts to loosen the Soviets' hold on its satellite states had limited success, with the possible exception of Czechoslovakia, although its brief Prague Spring rebellion was crushed by Soviet tanks in August 1968.
President Kennedy sent the first military advisers to Vietnam in 1961. After Kennedy's assassination, President Johnson, who easily defeated ultra-right candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964, drastically escalated the number of troops following Congressional approval of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. It wasn't long before antiwar marches were held in New York and Washington. The Tet Offensive and the My Lai massacre spread the belief that the war was an unwinnable quagmire, but the antiwar movement suffered from a serious split over tactics. A faction of ultra-left radicals separated themselves from the SDS, calling themselves the Weathermen. The group and its allies were responsible for a number of bombings around the country. The FBI's COINTELPRO program also managed to sow dissension within the peace movement and the women's liberation movement as well.
In 1968, the Yippies organized a massive protest outside the Democratic convention in Chicago. Several of their rallies were violently broken up by police. The beatings of the protesters were caught on TV cameras, but the protesters, not the police, were indicted. The subsequent Chicago 8 trial became a showcase for the defendants, who included Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, David Dellinger and Tom Hayden, among others.
The Democratic Party in 1968 seemed to be as divided as the rest of the country. After being denied a majority in the New Hampshire primary by the upstart antiwar campaign of Eugene McCarthy, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not accept the party's nomination. The fight for the nomination went on between McCarthy, Robert Kennedy and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who secured the nod after Kennedy was assassinated in June. The party remained divided, however, when Democrat George Wallace ran as an independent. Having wrapped up his party's nomination early, Richard Nixon appeared to be coasting toward victory in November until a last-minute halt to the bombing in Vietnam helped close the gap between them. The rally fell short, however, and six years after a defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial race had seemingly relegated him to the political graveyard, Richard Nixon became the thirty-seventh President of the United States.
The 1950s
