CHAPTER 25 The Sixties, 1960–1968
This chapter recounts the history of the 1960s, with emphasis on the civil rights movement, the Great Society
program, and the war in Vietnam. The chapter opens with the sit-in movement of 1960, demonstrating the growing
frustration over the slow pace of civil rights change. As the decade progressed, the civil rights movement grew with
grassroots organizations and substantial student participation. The chapter explores the Freedom Rides,
Birmingham, and the March on Washington, revealing the core demands of the civil rights movement. The Kennedy
years are looked at next, discussing John F. Kennedy’s foreign policy, the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress,
and the Cuban Missile Crisis. After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson immediately worked to get the Civil
Rights Act through Congress. Following that, the civil rights movement rallied around the Freedom Summer,
Johnson’s 1964 election campaign, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Genuinely concerned about civil
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: Greensboro Sit-in
II. The Civil Rights Revolution
A. The Rising Tide of Protest
1. Ella Baker met with young activists who formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC).
2. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the Freedom Rides in 1961.
3. As protests escalated, so did the resistance of local authorities.
a. Albany, Georgia
b. James Meredith
B. Birmingham
1. The high point of protest came in the spring of 1963.
2. Martin Luther King Jr. led a demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama.
a. “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
C. The March on Washington
2. The March on Washington reflected an unprecedented degree of black–white cooperation in support of
racial and economic justice while revealing some of the movement’s limitations and the tensions within
it.
III. The Kennedy Years
A. Kennedy and the World
1. Kennedy’s agenda envisioned new initiatives aimed at countering communist influence in the world.
2. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress was aimed at Latin America.
3. Kennedy failed at ousting Castro from power in Cuba.
B. The Missile Crisis
1. The most dangerous crisis of the Kennedy administration came in October 1962, when American spy
2. In 1963, Kennedy moved to reduce Cold War tensions.
a. Limited Test-Ban Treaty
C. Kennedy and Civil Rights
1. Kennedy failed to protect civil rights workers from violence, insisting that law enforcement was a local
matter.
3. Kennedy was shot on November 22, 1963, in Dallas.
IV. Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency
A. The Civil Rights Act of 1964
1. Immediately after becoming president, Lyndon Johnson identified himself with the black movement
more passionately than any previous president.
2. In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.
B. Freedom Summer
1. The 1964 law did not address a major concern of the civil rights movement—the right to vote in the
South.
3. Freedom Summer led directly to the campaign by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).
a. Fannie Lou Hammer
C. The 1964 Election
1. Lyndon B. Johnson’s opponent was Barry Goldwater, who was portrayed as pro–nuclear war and anti–
2. Goldwater was stigmatized by the Democrats as an extremist who would repeal Social Security and risk
nuclear war.
D. The Conservative Sixties
1. With the founding in 1960 of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), conservative students emerged as
2. Proposition 14 repealed a 1963 California law banning racial discrimination in the sale of real estate.
E. The Voting Rights Act
2. The federal government acted when there was violence against nonviolent demonstrators.
F. Immigration Reform
1. The belief that racism should no longer serve as a basis of public policy spilled over into other realms.
a. Hart-Celler Act
2. Taken together, the civil rights revolution and immigration reform marked the triumph of a pluralist
conception of Americanism.
G. The Great Society
2. Unlike the New Deal, however, the Great Society was a response to prosperity, not depression.
H. The War on Poverty
2. In the 1960s, the administration attributed poverty to an absence of skills and a lack of proper attitudes
and work habits.
3. The War on Poverty concentrated on equipping the poor with skills and rebuilding their spirits and
motivation.
a. Office of Economic Opportunity
I. Freedom and Equality
1. Johnson resurrected the phrase “freedom from want,” all but forgotten during the 1950s.
2. Johnson’s Great Society may not have achieved equality as a fact, but it represented a remarkable
reaffirmation of the idea of social citizenship.
V. The Changing Black Movement
A. The Urban Uprisings
1. The 1965 Watts uprising left thirty-five dead, 900 injured, and $30 million in property damage.
2. By the summer of 1967, violence had become so widespread that some feared racial civil war.
a. Kerner Report
4. In 1966, King launched the Chicago Freedom Movement, with demands quite different from its
predecessors in the South.
a. The movement failed.
B. Malcolm X
2. After a trip to Mecca, Malcolm X began to speak of the possibility of interracial cooperation for radical
change in the United States.
C. The Rise of Black Power
1. Black Power immediately became a rallying cry for those bitter over the federal government’s failure to
2. The idea of Black Power reflected the radicalization of young civil rights activists and sparked an
explosion of racial self-assertion.
3. Inspired by the idea of black self-determination, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
and CORE repudiated their previous interracialism, and new militant groups sprang into existence.
a. Black Panther Party
VI. Vietnam and the New Left
A. Old and New Lefts
2. The New Left was not as new as it claimed.
3. The New Left’s greatest inspiration was the black freedom movement.
B. The Fading Consensus
C. The Rise of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
1. In 1964, events at the University of California at Berkeley revealed the possibility of a far broader
mobilization of students in the name of participatory democracy.
a. Mario Savio
D. America and Vietnam
1. What transformed student protest into a full-fledged generational rebellion was the war in Vietnam.
2. Fear that the public would not forgive them for losing Vietnam made it impossible for Presidents
Kennedy and Johnson to remove the United States from an increasingly untenable situation.
E. Lyndon Johnson’s War
1. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, authorizing the president to take “all necessary
measures to repel armed attack” in Vietnam.
become more and more brutal.
F. The Anti-war Movement
2. Opposition to the war became the organizing theme that united all kinds of doubts and discontents.
a. The burden of fighting fell on the working class and the poor.
3. SDS began anti-war demonstrations in 1965.
a. Carl Oglesby
G. The Counterculture
2. Liberation was a massive redefinition of freedom as a rejection of all authority.
3. The counterculture in some ways represented not rebellion but the fulfillment of the consumer
marketplace.
H. Personal Liberation and the Free Individual
2. The counterculture emphasized the ideal of community.
I. Faith and the Counterculture
2. The desire for social justice and brotherhood in the New Left also had Christian roots.
3. The quest for authenticity inspired a variety of religious and spiritual experiments, ranging from the “Jesus
People” to adaptations of Buddhism to the suicidal People’s Temple of Jim Jones.
VII. The New Movements and the Rights Revolution
A. The Feminine Mystique
2. The immediate result of The Feminine Mystique was to focus attention on yet another gap between
American rhetoric and American reality.
3. The law slowly began to address feminist concerns.
B. Women’s Liberation
1. Many women in the civil rights movement concluded that the treatment of women in society was not
much better than society’s treatment of blacks.
2. The same complaints arose in SDS.
C. Personal Freedom
2. Radical feminists’ first public campaign demanded the repeal of state laws that underscored women’s
lack of self-determination by banning abortions or leaving it up to physicians to decide whether a
pregnancy should be terminated.
D. Gay Liberation
1. Gay men and lesbians had long been stigmatized as sinful or mentally disordered.
2. The 1960s transformed the gay movement.
a. Stonewall Inn
E. Latino Activism
1. The movement emphasized pride in both the Mexican past and the new Chicano culture that had arisen
2. In New York City, the Young Lords Organization, modeled on the Black Panthers, staged street
3. Like SNCC and SDS, the Latino movement gave rise to feminist dissent.
F. Red Power
1. Truman and Eisenhower had sought a policy known as termination, meant to integrate Native
Americans into the American mainstream, but it was abandoned by Kennedy.
G. Silent Spring
2. The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring brought home to millions of readers the effects
of DDT.
H. The New Environmentalism
1. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring spurred the modern environmental movement.
2. Environmentalism attracted the broadest bipartisan support of any of the new social movements, despite
3. Closely related to environmentalism was the consumer movement, spearheaded by the lawyer Ralph
Nader.
I. The Rights Revolution
1. Under the guidance of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Supreme Court vastly expanded the rights enjoyed
by all Americans.
J. Policing the States
1. The Court simultaneously pushed forward the process of imposing on the states the obligation to respect
the liberties outlined in the Bill of Rights.
a. Miranda v. Arizona
b. Baker v. Carr
c. Engel v. Vitale
K. The Right to Privacy
1. With Griswold v. Connecticut, the Warren Court outlined entirely new rights in response to the rapidly
changing contours of American society.
VIII. 1968
A. A Year of Turmoil
1. The 1960s reached their climax in 1968, a year when momentous events succeeded each other with such
rapidity that the foundations of society seemed to be dissolving.
a. Tet offensive
e. Robert Kennedy assassinated
f. Chicago Democratic National Convention
B. The Global 1968
1. 1968 was a year of worldwide upheaval.
C. Nixon’s Comeback
1. The year’s events opened the door for a conservative reaction.
2. Richard Nixon campaigned as the champion of the silent majority.
D. The Legacy of the 1960s
1. The 1960s produced new rights and new understandings of freedom.
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• How did cultural movements in the 1960s expose the limitations of traditional New Deal liberalism?
• How did the 1960s movement culture force a reconsideration of foreign policy?
• Why did the Vietnam War take place and how did it impact American society?
• Discuss how the Great Society expanded the freedoms and liberties of Americans left out of Roosevelt’s New
Deal.
• Who made up the New Left? How does their manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, define freedom and
democracy in America? Why do you think they were so critical of American society and politics? Compare
their manifesto with the Young Americans for Freedom’s manifesto, the Sharon Statement.
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
Free Speech Movement
www.fsm-a.org
This site chronicles the free speech movement at Berkeley, including oral histories and primary documents.
John F. Kennedy
www.jfklibrary.org
The John F. Kennedy Library & Museum website offers many resources for the teacher, including access to speeches, photos,
and documents.
Lyndon B. Johnson
www.millercenter.virginia.edu/academic/americanpresident/lbjohnson
This website from the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia has informative essays by prominent
historians regarding Lyndon Johnson’s tenure as president.
Vietnam
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/
PBS’s American Experience series has created Vietnam: A Television History, a video series with a companion book. The site
is full of resources pertaining to the Vietnam War.
Vietnam: A Television History (Richard Ellison, 13 Parts, 1983, 11 hrs.)
The most successful documentary shown by PBS at the time, this landmark series provides a penetrating analysis of the
decisions that led to war, and the combat that ensued.
The Vietnam War (Ken Burns, 2017, 16 hrs., 30 mins.)
http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/home/
The latest major documentary on the war includes modern commentary and oral history of the conflict from both Vietnamese
and American perspectives.
Vietnam War Oral Histories
http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/
The Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University hosts this useful site for teachers to gather oral histories from the war. The site
also has other links and information, but the audio oral histories are unique.
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Bresler, Robert. Us vs. Them: American Political and Cultural Conflict from WWII to Watergate. Wilmington, DE: SR Books,
2000.
Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.
DeGroot, Gerard. A Noble Cause? America and the Vietnam War. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Longman, 2000.
1999.
McCartin, James P. Prayers of the Faithful: The Shifting Spiritual Life of American Catholics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010.
Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York: Dell Publishing, 1968.
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
1. Music as History: Black Power
At the very time that young Americans in the 1960s were discovering their own soundtrack to civil disobedience and anti-war
protests, record labels perfected their business strategy for the counterculture. Gil Scott–Heron’s 1971 song “The Revolution
Will Not Be Televised,” from Pieces of a Man, is a rich source on the 1960s, with its clear rejection of commercial culture, its
critique of the moderation of the civil rights movement, and its dismissal of the apolitical counterculture. But the artist’s work
and influence on rap and hip-hop also allow for connections to the 1980s and contemporary black music.
“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?vQnJFhuOWgXg
1. What part of American popular culture did Scott-Heron draw from for most in his lyrics? What critique of American
society did he try to convey that way?
2. Scott-Heron not only seemed to mock contemporary consumer culture with his lyrics, he picked on the 1960s
counterculture and the women’s movement. Can you detect the relevant passage?
3. When you listen to the music, what different styles can you detect? Where in the ‘60s and ‘70s, for example, would you
have heard a flute in popular music? What about the rhythm? What about Scott-Heron’s own performance? Does this
resemble more modern popular music styles?
4. Look up Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young online. What did Scott-Heron seem to think of these men?
5. What did Scott-Heron mean when he predicted that the revolution would not be televised? Consider the role television
1. Ask students to listen to a variety of other Gil Scott-Heron songs (“Whitey on the Moon,” “Angola,” “Louisiana,” “We
2. Ask students to listen to, transcribe, and evaluate Scott-Heron’s “Message to the Messengers.” Do they agree with the
criticism of modern rap and hip-hop?
3. Ask students to bring in their own rap or hip-hop tracks and ask them to explain how they compare to “The Revolution
Will Not Be Televised.”
2. The Black Panther Party
The Black Power movement has significant appeal to students as a historical topic. They can more easily relate to the urban
roots, confrontational style, and confidence of Malcolm X than with the self-sacrificial church-based southern civil rights
1. Summarize the list of demands of the Black Panther Party and try to categorize them. Which of these freedoms are
negative (freedoms from something) and which are positive (the freedom/right to something)?
2. Compare the types of freedoms the Black Panthers seek with those we associate with postwar liberalism. Franklin D.
Roosevelt posited these first in his “Four Freedoms” speech. How do they differ, and where do they align?
3. The nonviolent civil disobedience of Martin Luther King Jr. drew on the strategies of India’s Mahatma Gandhi. Do you
see connections to a global struggle for freedom here? How does it differ from King’s and Gandhi’s nonviolence?
4. How do the Panthers tie their own movement to the American tradition of protest and revolution?
5. Did the Black Panther Party take a position on the Vietnam War in its platform? Where, and why?
1. Ask students to visit the link that lists all Black Panther Community Programs that existed between 1966 and 1982.
Have them categorize these programs and ask them to discuss whether these initiatives matched the image of the
Black Panthers as a radical black militia. What do these initiatives tell them about the Black Panthers and also about
the black communities at the time?
2. Ask students to visit the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project and choose one of the oral history videos with
former Black Panthers featured in the site. Ask them to report back to the group with a summary of their narrators’
personal lives, their political perspectives, the way their outlook changed over time, and their own critical assessment of the
oral history. In the next step, students should compare different histories and identify similarities and differences, which
they should then try to explain.
Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project
http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/BPP_interviews.htm
Group Activity:
Divide students into groups of five to eight and ask them to identify all the changes in the Black Panther Party’s platform
between 1966 and 1972. Ask them to discuss the reasons for these changes. Do they think the party became less radical
over time?