Selma MarchSelma March.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Kenny Chmielewski
These gains were considerable, but many African Americans remained dissatisfied by the slow progress. The nonviolent civil rights movement was challenged by “black power” advocates, such as Stokely Carmichael, who called for a freedom struggle that sought political, economic, and cultural objectives beyond narrowly defined civil rights reform. By the late 1960s not just King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP but also SNCC and CORE were challenged by militant organizations, such as the Black Panther Party, whose leaders dismissed nonviolent principles, often quoting black nationalist Malcolm X’s imperative: “by any means necessary.” Race riots broke out in most of the country’s large cities, notably in 1965 in the Watts district of Los Angeles, which left 34 dead, and two years later in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit. Four summers of violence resulted in many deaths and property losses that left whole neighbourhoods ruined and their residents more distressed than ever. After a final round provoked by the assassination of King in April 1968, the rioting abated. Yet the activist pursuit of political and economic empowerment for African Americans continued, reflected culturally in the Black Arts movement—which pursued populist art that promoted the ideas of black separatism—and in the politicized soul music that replaced gospel and folk music as the sound track of the freedom struggle.
Latino and Native American activism
In September 1965 Cesar Chavez, who had founded the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers of America) in 1962, began leading what became a five-year strike by California grape pickers and a nationwide boycott of California grapes that attracted liberal support from throughout the country. Many of those farmworkers were, like Chavez, Latino, and the 1960s—particularly during the strike and boycott—arguably marked the first time the Latino population in the United States drew sustained attention. People of Hispanic origin had lived in the United States since the country’s origin, and their presence increased after huge portions of Mexico became part of the United States in the wake of the Mexican-American War (1846–48) and following the acquisition of Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War (1898). Large-scale Hispanic immigration to the United States began in the 20th century as Mexicans sought economic opportunity or to escape the Mexican Revolution (1910–20).
Chavez, CesarCesar Chavez.National Archives, Washington, D.C. (544069)
In 1954, in Hernandez v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the conviction of an agricultural labourer, Pete Hernandez, for murder should be overturned because Mexican Americans had been barred from participating in both the jury that indicted him and the jury that convicted him. In this landmark ruling, the court recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law extended to Mexican Americans. The Chicano (Mexican American) civil rights movement of the 1960s encompassed not only the Chavez-led efforts of agricultural workers in California but also the land grant movement in New Mexico spearheaded by Reies Lopez Tijerina as well as the struggle for equal education in Los Angeles. Yet it would not be until the 1980s that Latinos—such as Henry Cisneros, who was elected mayor of San Antonio, Texas, in 1981—began to hold prominent political office in the United States. By that point Hispanic servicemen had already racked up scores of medals in World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. And by 2010 the 50 million Latinos living in all 50 states constituted 16 percent of the U.S. population.
Activism on behalf of Native Americans also grew substantially during the 1960s. In 1968 the American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded by Russell Means and others to help Native Americans in urban ghettos who had been displaced by government programs that had the effect of forcing them from their reservations. AIM’s goals eventually encompassed the entire spectrum of Indian demands—economic independence, revitalization of traditional culture, protection of legal rights, and, most especially, autonomy over tribal areas and the restoration of lands that they believed had been illegally seized. AIM was involved in many highly publicized protests. It was one of the American Indian groups involved in the occupation (1969–71) of Alcatraz Island, the march (1972) on Washington, D.C., to protest violations of treaties (in which AIM members occupied the office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs), and the takeover (1973) of a site at Wounded Knee to protest the government’s Indian policy.
Means, RussellRussell Means.Marcy Nighswander/AP
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Social changes
The 1960s were marked by the greatest changes in morals and manners since the 1920s. Young people, college students in particular, rebelled against what they viewed as the repressed conformist society of their parents. They advocated a sexual revolution, aided by the birth control pill and later by Roe v. Wade (1973), a Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion. “Recreational” drugs such as marijuana and LSD were increasingly used. Opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam promoted the rise of a New Left, which was anticapitalist as well as antiwar. The political activists of the New Left drew on the theories of political philosopher Herbert Marcuse, sociologist C. Wright Mills, and psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm, among others. A “counterculture” sprang up that legitimized radical standards of taste and behaviour in the arts as well as in life. Feminism was reborn and joined the ranks of radical causes.
Except for feminism, most organized expressions of the counterculture and the New Left, including the influential Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), did not long survive the sixties. Nevertheless, they changed American life. Recreational drug taking, previously confined largely to impoverished inner cities, became part of middle-class life. The sexual revolution reduced government censorship, changed attitudes toward traditional sexual roles, and enabled homosexuals to organize and acknowledge their identities as never before. Although there had been earlier protests by gay groups, the Stonewall riots—a series of violent confrontations between police and gay rights activists outside the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York City, in the summer of 1969—was perhaps the first time lesbians, gays, and transvestites saw the value in uniting behind a common cause. Unrestrained individualism played havoc with family values. People began marrying later and having fewer children. The divorce rate accelerated to the point that the number of divorces per year was roughly half the number of marriages. The number of abortions rose, as did the illegitimacy rate. By the 1980s one in six families was headed by a single woman, and over half of all people living in poverty, including some 12 million children, belonged to such families. Because inflation and recession made it hard to support even intact families on a single income, a majority of mothers entered the workforce. Thus, the stable family-oriented society of the 1950s became a thing of the past.