The American civil rights movement came to a head under the Johnson administration. Many had seen the March on Washington in August 1963 as the apotheosis of the nonviolent struggle for civil rights. Some 200,000 people had come from all over the country to gather at the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Earlier in the decade, Black and white Freedom Riders had been violently attacked when they rode through the South together on buses, hoping to provoke the federal government into enforcing its bans on segregation in interstate bus travel and in bus terminals, restrooms, and other facilities associated with interstate travel. With passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the civil rights movement saw many of its goals embodied in federal law.

Despite the Civil Rights Act, however, most African Americans in the South found it difficult to exercise their voting rights. In the summer of 1964, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which both had been instrumental in the Freedom Rides—and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), whose history reached back to W.E.B. Du Bois and the Niagara Movement—organized a massive effort to register voters in Mississippi. They also conducted “Freedom Schools” in which the philosophy of the civil rights movement, African American history, and leadership development were taught. A large number of white student activists from the North had joined this “Freedom Summer” effort, and, when one Black and two white volunteers were killed, it made headlines nationally and greatly heightened awareness of the movement. These murders echoed, on a small scale, the violence visited upon countless African Americans—those who had participated in demonstrations and many who had not—during the previous decade, in forms that ranged from beatings by police to bombings of residences and Black institutions. In 1965, mass demonstrations were held to protest the violence and other means used to prevent Black voter registration. After a peaceful protest march was halted by police violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Johnson responded with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which abolished literacy tests and other voter restrictions and authorized federal intervention against voter discrimination. The subsequent rise in Black voter registration ultimately transformed politics in the South.

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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 neighborhoods 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).

In 1954, in Hernandez v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the conviction of an agricultural laborer, 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.

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 behavior 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.

The Vietnam War

U.S. involvement in Vietnam dated to the Truman administration, when economic and military aid was provided to deter a communist takeover of French Indochina. When France withdrew and Vietnam was divided in two in 1954, the United States continued to support anticommunist forces in South Vietnam. By 1964, communist insurgents were winning their struggle against the government of South Vietnam, which a decade of American aid had failed to strengthen or reform. In August, following an allegedly unprovoked attack on U.S. warships patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin, a resolution pledging complete support for American action in Vietnam was passed unanimously in the House of Representatives and with only two dissenting votes in the Senate.

After the fall elections, Johnson began deploying a huge force in Vietnam (more than half a million troops in 1968, together with strong air and naval units). This power was directed not only against the Viet Cong insurgents but also against North Vietnam, which increased its efforts as American participation escalated. Despite massive U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, the communists refused to yield. On January 30, 1968, disregarding a truce called for the Tet (lunar new year) holiday, the communists launched an offensive against every major urban area in South Vietnam. Although the Tet Offensive was a military failure, it proved to be a political victory for the communists because it persuaded many Americans that the war could not be ended at a bearable price. Opposition to U.S. involvement became the major issue of the 1968 election. After Sen. Eugene McCarthy, a leading critic of the war, ran strongly against him in the New Hampshire primary, Johnson announced that he would not seek or accept renomination. He also curtailed bombing operations, opened peace talks with the North Vietnamese, and on November 1 ended the bombing of North Vietnam.

While war efforts were being reduced, violence within the United States seemed to be growing. Just two months after King’s assassination, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, was assassinated. President Johnson then secured the nomination of Vice Pres. Hubert H. Humphrey at the Democratic National Convention at Chicago, where violence again erupted as antiwar demonstrators were manhandled by local police. Humphrey lost the election to the Republican nominee, former vice president Richard Nixon. The narrowness of Nixon’s margin resulted from a third-party campaign by the former governor of Alabama, George Wallace, who attracted conservative votes that would otherwise have gone to Nixon. Democrats retained large majorities in both houses of Congress.