By themselves, Vietnam and the War on Poverty created grave problems and began to transform American society in the 1960s. But, exacerbating such conditions, the American people also witnessed the most monumental struggles for African-American Civil Rights [CR] and justice and for women's liberation in modern U.S. history. Though both movements had long histories of their own, they were particularly well mobilized and effective in the 1960s and, because of the war in Vietnam and domestic reactions to it, became increasingly militant as the decade moved forward. Thus, what began in 1960 as political reform within the liberal system, became a fundamental challenge to the structure of the liberal state. Along with other groups such as Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, gays, and environmentalists, to name a few, blacks and women gained a measure of empowerment and equality and, like the New Left, challenged and help transform life in the United States, creating opportunities and engendering opposition along the way.

From the moment that slaves from Africa arrived in Virginia in 1619, the United States had a racial problem. Over three centuries later, despite a Civil War, constitutional amendments, and federal laws, an apartheid system still existed in which African-Americans in the south were legally denied the fundamental rights to accomodation, transportation, public education, the franchise, and other aspects of life that white people took for granted. Blacks themselves, since the founding of the Republic, had been pointing out the illegal, immoral, and hypocritical nature of such racial division in a self-proclaimed democracy, but without a great deal of success. Beginning in the mid-1950s, however, black activists and everyday people would make a revolution in racial politics in America. Driven by moral outrage and keen political instincts, politicians, ministers, working people, housewives, students, and children would conduct a frontal assault on southern segregation and successfully dismantle legal apartheid in the states of the old Confederacy. But once that was accomplished, African-American leaders shifted their sights on northern, de facto, segregation, where the movement would founder. By the late 1960s, conditions for black Americans would be considerably better than a decade earlier, but well short of the democratic ideals of equality that had inspired the movement early on.

The first major crack in the southern segregation system came in October 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case, ruled that separate schools for black and white students were "inherently unequal." Throughout the south, local districts had established different public schools for caucasian and African-American students, with the white kids naturally receiving much more funding and better resources. The Court, unanimously, held that educational facilities would have to be integrated, but, rather than set a specific date for schools to comply with the ruling, only ordered that desegregation occur with "all deliberate speed"--an ambiguous concept that would cause more problems. In 1957, in a major national test of Brown, the segregationist governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, ordered the National Guard out to prevent nine black students from enrolling at Central High School in Little Rock. After a few weeks of negotiations and court injunctions failed the settle the issue, President Eisenhower ordered the Army's 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock to safeguard the students' entry into Central High. If the Brown decision was going to be effective, the federal government was going to have to provide the means of enforcement.

At the same time, African-Americans were taking matters into their own hands, especially in Montgomery, Alabama. On 1 December 1955, the secretary of the local NAACP chapter, Rosa Parks, refused to give her seat on a city bus to a white man and was promptly arrested. Local black leaders, led by E.D. Nixon, thought that her arrest could be used as a test case against the bus system and decided to rally the community behind Parks, even though her husband was quite uneasy, warning her that "those white folks will kill you, Rosa." More importantly, the Women's Political Council at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, which had only recently been organized by a young minister new to Montgomery, put out a flyer "asking every Negro to stay off the buses on Monday [Parks's court date] in protest of the arrest and trial"--thus began the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The minister at Dexter Avenue Baptist, Martin Luther King, Jr., became the leader of the boycott movement and, for over a year, he coordinated the effort by Montgomery's blacks to walk and organize car pools in defiance of local segregation practices. Despite injunctions and arrests, the African-Americans community did not bend and, on 20 December 1956, after local negotiations and a Supreme Court case desegregating bus transportation was decided, blacks won the right to sit wherever they wanted on city buses. That combination of local action and federal support would become a keystone of the early CR years. While Supreme Court cases and government laws would help dismantle southern apartheid, it was the grassroots mobilization and organization of the black community itself that kept the issue in the public eye and put pressure on politicians and the media to do something about the segregated race system in the south.⁽¹⁾

By 1960, on the heels of Brown, the Montgomery boycott, Little Rock, and numerous local actions throughout the south, CR had clearly become a major issue on the national agenda. The American response, however, was ambivalent. Southern racists still forcefully opposed any attempt to desegregate their communities, while northern politicians offered support to the African-American movement, but only to a point. To many northerners and liberals, the southern system was an anachronism and the open discrimination against blacks a blight. As America waged Cold War against the Communist nations, it was imperative to have its own house in order before criticizing the "Reds" for their own violations of civil and human rights, so dealing with the African-American question was a political necessity. In addition, liberals believed that the key to America's continued leadership was constant economic growth, and thus it was important to them to bring the southern states into the modern liberal system, and segregation and economic deprecation of a significant portion of the population made that task impossible. Liberals, to paraphrase a famous scholar of the old south, were to trying to create "middle-class whites in black skin." For a time, the strategy worked, as the federal government, after wavering and hand-wringing, would enact moderate measures to dismantle segregation and place some black groups within the mainstream of American politics. When African-Americans wanted to do more than that, however, the movement would face a crisis.

In late 1959, in a speech to fellow pacifists, Martin Luther King [MLK] predicted that southern blacks would engage in "direct action against injustice without waiting for other agencies to act . . . We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices."⁽²⁾ He was right. On 1 February 1960, four black students from North Carolina A&T went to a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, took seats and asked for service, and were refused. They finally left when the store closed. A few days later, hundreds of A&T students held a demonstration in Greensboro and marched on the lunch counters. When white mobs asked "who do you think you are?" the A&T football team responded "we are the Union Army" and formed a wedge for the black demonstrators to rush the counter. From such spontaneous acts of defiance emerged one of the largest protest movements in American history. Word of the initial Greensboro action, termed a sit-in, filtered throught black communities and students throughout the south began to do likewise. Soon, sit-ins occurred in various cities in North Carolina, spread to Virginia and then into Tennessee, Kentucky, and Maryland. By mid-April, black activists, especially students, had conducted sit-ins in all the southern states, with about 50,000 blacks and whites participating. In some cases, white onlookers physically assaulted blacks sitting at lunch counters, and even when they did not, they verbally attacked and threatened them. Still, the students, in line with King's philosophy, renounced violence and their behavior impressed some in the white community. Even James Kilpatrick, a segregationist columnist in Richmond, wrote about the contrast between the "colored students in coats, white shirts, and ties" and the white hecklers--a "ragtail rabble, slack-jawed, black-jacketed, grinning fit to kill" and waving the Confederate flag.⁽³⁾

Despite their appearance and demeanor, the students had a hard time getting mainstream support. Many northern liberals and even national black organizations like the NAACP feared that the sit-ins were too militant and could provoke an even greater attack on southern blacks. King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC], thought otherwise. They threw their support and resources behind the sit-ins, helping to coordinate them and raise bail for those demonstrators, nearly 4000, arrested for trying to desegregate lunch counters. Most importantly, an SCLC officer, Ella Baker, organized a conference of young black activists that would give rise to the most important protest group in the CR era, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC, or "Snick"]. Out of SNCC would come many of the leaders of the African-American struggle in the 1960s, including John Lewis, Diane Nash, Julian Bond, James Lawson, Marion Barry, and many others. SNCC would take a different approach to CR than older, established groups. Articulate and confrontational, SNCC activists would have a hand in all the major CR actions of the decade. SNCC members became the prime target of southern hatred and violence but, to other young activists across the country they held a special place and served as role models for other movements. Tom Hayden believed that SNCC activists "lived on a fuller level of feeling . . . because by risking death they came to know the value of living each moment to the fullest . . . I wanted to live like them."⁽⁴⁾

Most establishment black leaders and white liberals, however, feared that the sit-ins and SNCC were too militant and aggressive and would provoke an even greater white backlash. But MLK continued to back the movement and agreed to join a protest, albeit reluctantly, in Atlanta in mid-October. Arrested, King and 36 others chose "jail, not bail" in line with their Gandhian principles of civil disobedience--willfully breaking unjust laws and accepting the consequences. While waiting trial, the Reverend received a sentence of four months of hard labor for violating the terms of an earlier arrest for a traffic offense. His wife, Coretta, six months pregnant, contacted an old friend and member of JFK's campaign staff, Harris Wofford, and cried "they are going to kill him, I know they are going to kill him"--a fate not uncommon to jailed blacks in the south. Immediately, Kennedy called Mrs. King to express his concern and his brother Bobby used the family's connections to arrange bond for MLK and get him released from jail. That Sunday, King's father, "Daddy King," one of the better-known ministers in the south, and scores of other African-American clergy endorsed Kennedy for president during their sermons. Up to the point the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, was enjoying fairly large black support, but Kennedy eventually received over 75 percent of the black vote, a decisive amount in a close victory over Nixon. King was grateful and optimistic that he could work with JFK and envisioned a relationship with the president like Frederick Douglass had with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, serving as a moral voice to pressure national action on race issues. Like Douglass, King would face challenges at every step along the way.

While the Kennedy administration would offer support to CR, it also valued traditional southern support and did not want to alienate loyal Democratic segregationists, so JFK's behavior on racial issues would be ambivalent and tentative. African-Americans generally were enthused by Kennedy's victory and the new president made symbolic overtures to the black community as well; many of the same Hollywood celebrities that had celebrated JFK's inaugural--including Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Count Basie, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Nipsey Russell, and others--had a gala fundraiser for King a week afterwards and raised over $50,000 for the SCLC. During the first CR crisis of his presidency, however, Kennedy wavered. In the summer of 1961 the national director of the Congress On Racial Equality [CORE], James Farmer, organized a series of freedom rides. The rides involved a challenge to laws that segregated interstate travel by having black and white activists travel by bus throughout the south.

CORE's approach was admittedly confrontational. "Our intention," Farmer proclaimed, "was to provoke the Southern authorities into arresting us and thereby prod the Justice Department into enforcing the laws of the land." Rather than arrest the riders, however, authorities in South Carolina and Alabama simply looked the other way as white mobs attacked and beat the CORE members. The original riders, battered and injured, then flew to New Orleans, but SNCC activists, led by John Lewis, traveled to Montgomery to resume the rides. They too were immediately savaged as they stepped off their bus. No police were in sight as the white mob grew to nearly a thousand. Finally, after three weeks of wavering, Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent 400 marshalls to Montgomery to protect the riders, but also called on CORE and SNCC to end the rides and "cool off." They refused, with Farmer explaining that blacks "had been cooling off for a hundred years. If we got any cooler, we'd be in a deep freeze."⁽⁵⁾

So the rides continued. Over 1000 Americans--northern and southern, black and white--participated, over 300 were arrested, and countless others were intimidated and attacked. Their sacrifice finally paid off, though. In late 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission banned segregation in interstate travel and most southern communities began to comply with the laws in 1962. If whites could be provoked into violent responses to CR demonstrations, the freedom riders proved, then the media would report on it and politicians would have to act. That scenario would only become more common as the struggle continued. Indeed, blacks continued to defy authority and fill jails in 1962. In Albany, Georgia, the main CR theater in 1962, one out of twenty African-Americans spent time behind bars, much to the satisfaction of Police Sheriff Laurie Pritchett, who was fond of saying that he followed a policy of "mind over matter" because whites "didn't mind" and blacks "didn't matter." Southern governors such as Ross Barnett of Mississippi and George Wallace of Alabama believed likewise, and made defiant public stands against the admission of black students into state universities.

Racist southerners, however, were not the movement's only enemies at the time. Northern liberals, as the mixed Kennedy response to the freedom rides had shown, were wary of the confrontational nature of the CR actions in 1961-1962. The Department of Justice did little to investigate the myriad cases of police brutality and lynchings against blacks, while the FBI did less because it was afraid of being seen as "a crusader on civil rights." Other liberals redbaited the movement, claiming that it had been infiltrated and taken over by subversives. Militants, the liberal journalist James Wechsler wrote, were "staging an uprising against the major civil rights blocs . . . encouraged by a fragment of Communists."⁽⁶⁾

In particular, liberals attacked King's relationship with Stanley Levinson, an SCLC advisor with past ties to the U.S. Communist Party. Though the Atlanta office of the FBI found no evidence of Red influence over the SCLC, the reactionary head of the Bureau, J. Edgar Hoover, rejected their conclusion and, with Kennedy's approval, began conducting surveillance on King and other movement leaders, reporting on all facets of their public and private lives. At one point the Bureau suggested to King, who was having extramarital affairs, that he should commit suicide to avoid embarassing the movement if word of his dalliances got out--as if the FBI supported CR in the first place. In fact, Hoover publicly called King the "most notorious liar" and "one of the lowest characters" in America, and another FBI official considered the Reverend "the most dangerous Negro . . . in this nation from the standpoint of Communism . . . and national security."⁽⁷⁾

King's southern foes were, of course, even less tolerant of the CR struggle. In April 1963, in one of the epic battles of the era, King began a campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama businesses at Eastertime, traditionally one of the busiest and most profitable times of the year. Eugene "Bull" Connor, who fit the image of the "redneck" sheriff better than anything Hollywood could have invented, used attack dogs and fire hoses to disperse marchers, and jailed hundreds of black protestors--including King. Various Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergy criticized the demonstrations as untimely, provocative, and illegal. Time Magazine called it a "poorly timed protest"; the Washington Post sneered at its "doubtful utility"; and the New York Times gushed that a "warm sun was shining" on Birmingham under the leadership of a new mayor, while the "giggles of little girls" at his inagural was a welcome relief from the "sounds of demonstrations" of black protestors.

King responded with his classic "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in which he confessed to being "gravely disappointed with the white moderate." Not unlike Frederick Douglass's oration on "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" King attacked southern racism and northern liberalism, wondering whether whites who claimed to support CR were more committed to "order" than to justice and might be a greater barrier to racial progress than the Ku Klux Klan. King was tired of northern calls for him to go slowly:

For years now, I have heard the word 'Wait!' . . . This 'wait' has almost always meant 'Never.' We have waited more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights . . . Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say 'Wait.' But . . . when your first name becomes 'nigger,' your middle name becomes 'boy' . . . when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a negro . . . when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness'--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.⁽⁸⁾

King's powerful letter, however, did not end the protests in Birmingham. That would be up to the local African-American population, especially the children. With so many blacks jailed or awaiting trial, the movement was running out of demonstrators, so King made one of the more controversial decisions of his career, approving of a plan to let Birmingham schoolchildren march in protest. On 3 May 1963, with nearly a thousand black children inside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Bull Connor had police bar the doors. Hundreds of kids escaped, however, and joined a crowd in a park across the street. Connor incredibly ordered his troops to attack. The ensuing scenes--police swinging clubs, German Shepherds lunging at children, water hoses knocking young protestors down--shocked Americans as they turned on network news that evening, while newspapers throughout the world ran the Birmingham story and photos on the front page the next day. The Kennedy administration was finally forced to act, dispatching representatives to Alabama to mediate a settlement and pressuring both Birmingham's white businessmen and black leaders to reach a compromise. In the meantime, the demonstrations continued, with Connor still using dogs and water hoses and Governor Wallace sending in armed state troopers to reinforce the Birmingham police. But the boycott was working and Birmingham commerce was suffering heavy losses. Finally, on 10 May, both sides reached a settlement to end the protests in return for desegregating public facilities and making jobs available to blacks. The combination of aggressive nonviolence, media attention, and especially the persistence and sacrifice of Birmingham's blacks had paid off and created the greatest CR triumph to that point.

Connor, Wallace, and other segregationists had unwittingly given JFK an opening. Their violent responses so sickened the nation that the president felt secure enough politically to finally seek federal CR legislation to prevent further Birminghams. Speaking to the nation in early June, Kennedy asserted that "now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise . . . The fires of frustration are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. Redress is sought in the streets, in . . . protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives." The president would thus ask congress for laws "giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public--hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments."⁽⁹⁾ Southern senators--including J. William Fulbright, soon to be a hero of the antiwar movement and the New Left--blocked the legislation, however, and by late summer the chances for passage were not good. King thus resurrected an old strategy, first posed by the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph during World War II, a huge rally in Washington D.C.to agitate for CR laws. The president, still fearing southern backlash, told King that the demonstration was "ill-timed," to which the Reverend replied that "I have never engaged in any direct-action movement which did not seem ill-timed. Some people thought Birmingham ill-timed."⁽¹⁰⁾

The subsequent demonstration, the famous March on Washington of August 1963, drew over 300,000 Americans of all races and from all regions to express their support for CR legislation. Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary sang "Blowin' In The Wind" and Dylan himself performed for the first time "Only a Pawn in Their Game," a haunting ballad about the murder of Mississippi CR leader Medgar Evers. Odetta, Harry Bellafonte, Sammy Davis, Jr., James Garner, Dihann Carroll, Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and Charlton Heston were among the dozens of celebrities on the stage supporting the march. Bayard Rustin, labor leader and demonstration organizer, announced the movement's demands, including passage of the CR bill, a $2 an hour minimum wage, school desegregation, a federal jobs program, and federal laws against employment discrimination. Withouth doubt, however, the highlight was King's stirring "I Have a Dream" oration, one of the greatest speeches in U.S. history. King dreamed of the United States becoming an "oasis of freedom and justice" in which all Americans would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," and he concluded with words from an old Negro spiritual, "Free at last, free at last: thank God almighty, we are free at last."⁽¹¹⁾

The March on Washington put great moral force behind the CR bill and presented the nation with an indelible image of the dignity and strength of King and other African-American leaders. But the legislation was stalled in a congress which, despite the public's horror at the scenes from Birmingham and its support of King's speech, could be quite hostile to CR. In fact, in September 1963, after a tragic bombing of a church in Birmingham which killed four young black girls, only a handful of senators would even write a resolution proclaiming the Sunday after the bombing as a national day of mourning and then they did not even present it to their colleagues because of lack of support. In late November, with Kennedy's shocking assassination in Dallas, the future of CR was uncertain at best. With a southerner, Lyndon Johnson of Texas, entering the White House, black leaders who had only won over JFK after years of vacillating were wary about the future of racial progress. But LBJ, who considered himself open-minded on racial matters and wanted to emulate FDR's appeal to the downtrodden, vowed to carry on Kennedy's work, pledging his support for the bill and even concluding a televised speech on CR with words from the old spiritual that served as an anthem for the movement, "We Shall Overcome." In 1964, then, Johnson used his considerable political skills to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregated public accomodations such as restaurants, restrooms, or businesses; authorized the federal government to take legal action on behalf of discriminated individuals; established a federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission [EEOC] to investigate racially-harmful hiring practices; and barred racial discrimination in federally-funded programs. The militant nonviolence of Birmingham and moral force of Washington had worked magic in 1964, it seemed.

On the Fourth of July, 1964, the headline of the Columbia, South Carolina State read "Southern Segregation Falls Silently, Without Violence" after passage of the CR Act. That message did not make it to Mississippi that summer, however. SNCC and other CR groups organized Freedom Summer to showcase segregation in Mississippi and force the government to act. Black and white students poured into the state to organize local African-Americans and register them to vote. Only about 7 percent of eleigible blacks were registered at that time and in may rural counties, no blacks were even on the voting lists. In return, Mississippi whites, mostly associated with the "Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission"--a quasi-official racist group with close ties to the state government--began a reign of terror. They burned 35 black churches and bombed 30 buildings; shot 35 people, severely beat 80 others, and murdered 6, all with little national attention, probably because the victims were black.

In August, however, when Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, CORE workers from New York, along with CR volunteer James Chaney of Mississippi were found dead in a swamp near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the media took notice, likely because Goodman and Schwerner were white. Again, events forced the federal government to act, and the Justice Department sent the FBI to Mississippi to investigate the murders. At the same time, however, the Johnson administration refused to seat a delegation from Mississippi--The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, or MFDP--at that summer's Democratic convention, instead authorizing the official racist white delegates to vote on the convention floor. Indeed, when Fanny Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who headed the MFDP, offered moving testimony about life as a black woman in Mississippi, LBJ hastily called a press conference to preempt her appearance at the convention. Even after that evening's news showcased Hamer nonetheless, the Democrats would only designate the MFDP as "honored guests"--a compromise the delegates rejected as "evidence of liberal hypocrisy and pervasive racism" within the party, and they then left the convention. One activist, connecting the major issues of the day, explained that the president's refusal "to negotiate with the Viet Cong is like the power structure of Mississippi not wanting to negotiate with the MFDP." ⁽¹²⁾ The whole affair harmed LBJ little at the time--he won well over 90 percent of the black vote that November--but the relationship between African-Americans and liberals was sure to be revisited later.

In 1964, blacks were encouraged by LBJ's landslide victory, believing that he now had a national mandate to follow through with his commitment to desegregation and build on the success of the CR Act. At the grassroots level, however, African-Americans still held the key to effective action. In March 1965, King--who had just returned from Norway where he had received the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize--moved into Selma, Alabama to work on a SNCC voter registration project. Again the movement was met with violence by southern whites as Sheriff Jim Clark called together a posse and Governor Wallace deployed 500 state troopers, all of whom met the black marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and beat them with clubs, cattle prods, and bullwhips while white onlookers cheered the assault. The events on "Bloody Sunday," as it became known, and the subsequent murder of a while CR volunteer, Viola Liuzzo of Detroit, shot to death by Klansmen on her way out of Selma, again shocked the nation. LBJ thus went on television just days later to denounce the mobs at Selma and announce plans to secure voting rights for southern blacks. The resulting legislation, the Voting Rights Act, would mark the denouement of the movement. Passed in August 1965, the Act barrred literacy tests as a requirement for blacks to vote, and sent federal officials to register African-Americans wherever they were being denied the right to vote. After a decade of struggle, the legal barriers to segregation had been eliminated. Court decisions and federal initiatives such as the Civil and Voting Rights Acts now offered blacks rights and opportunities they had not enjoyed before. The resistance and sacrifice of King and so many others had paid off.

But the movement was now at a crossroads as well. King and others were not content to rest on their success and wanted the struggle to continue, not just in the south but throughout the United States and not just for blacks but for all poor people. They would soon discover the limits of reform.

Selma and the Voting Rights Act came at the precise times that LBJ was committing the first U.S. ground forces to Vietnam and then "Americanizing" the war, and from that point onward Vietnam and CR would be intricately linked in American life. The war would ultimately overshadow the African-American struggle, end the sense of liberal hope that had opened the decade, and create great splits in the movement itself. King, the moral voice of desegregation, would become an angry critic of Vietnam, and CR would not again have the same levels of public support that it enjoyed earlier in the decade. King especially saw the connections between the war and racial justice, telling a Howard University audience in early 1965 that "the war in Vietnam is accomplishing nothing," and in July calling for a negotiated settlement with the VC. When challenged by reporters about his authority to speak out against the war, the Reverend told them that he was "much more than a civil rights leader" and that Vietnam did indeed affect domestic political issues.⁽¹³⁾

Younger and more radical blacks went further. Eldridge Cleaver pointed out that "those who most bitterly oppose Negro progress are also the most ardent advocates of a belligerent foreign policy"; and Stokely Carmichael of SNCC warned blacks that when LBJ "talks all that garbage about he's sending boys over there to fight for the rights of colored people, you ought to know that's a lie. 'Cause we live here with them, and they don't ever do a thing for us." The war, as he brilliantly described it, was a case of "white people sending black peole to make war on yellow people to defend the land they stole from Red people."⁽¹⁴⁾ By the mid-1960s, then, Vietnam was becoming the dominant issue in American life, as King's powerful speech in April 1967 indicated. The war also radicalized the CR movement and brought it into convergence with the antiwar movement. Students involved in the struggles to end segregation and the war, as the radical journalist I.F. Stone explained, "compare the one rebellion with the other and are doubly revolted." In Vietnam the United States had 150,000 soldiers in 1965, but in the south there were less than 150 voting registrars.⁽¹⁵⁾ Even as some mainstream black groups such as the NAACP and CORE were reluctant to take a public stand on Vietnam, many other African-Americans were furious over the commitment to Indochina at their expense. Within a few years, as they feared, Vietnam would transform and help destroy the movement.

Even before the national emphasis on Vietnam began to affect CR, the movement had to address criticism from other black representatives. Indeed, King, the Nobel Prize winner who had worked with JFK and LBJ on CR legislation, came under attack from some quarters for his alliances with white liberals. The black nationalist and spokesman for the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, was King's most vocal critic. Where King came from an educated and relatively prosperous background and spoke for southern blacks fighting legal segregation, Malcolm, an ex-convict familiar with the streets, represented the rage of urban and young blacks who believed that the reality of African-American life in the north--where discrimination was based on economic power and a de facto condition rather than the law--was little better than below the Mason-Dixon Line. Indeed, he was fond of saying that the U.S. South was "everything below Canada." Malcolm rejected cooperation or accomodation with white America and dismissed claims of improvement in black life --"you don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches," he explained, "and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress." Instead he called on blacks to reject white society and work for their own liberation "by any means necessary." The August 1963 demonstration was "The Farce on Washington" as he saw it, and its leaders were "Toms" who had been bought off or hoodwinked by JFK's people. Even many who disagreed with his views respected Malcolm X. "His early rhetoric," as the philosopher Cornel West described it, was "too honest, too candid, precisely the things black folk often felt but never said publicly due to fear of white retaliation, even in the early 60s. In fact, his piercing rhetoric had primarily a cathartic function for black people; it purged them of their deferential and defensive attitudes toward white people."⁽¹⁶⁾

Younger activists especially followed Malcolm's approach. At the 1963 march, for instance, SNCC Chair John Lewis was prepared to deliver a fiery denunciation of Kennedy's CR bill as "too little, and too late," the product of "cheap political leaders who built their careers on immoral compromises," and to attack the administration for its slow response to white assaults on southern blacks and movement workers and its appointment of "racist judges." SNCC and the black "masses," Lewis vowed, would take matters into their own hands and, nonviolently, "crack the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy." "The Revolution," he declared, "is at hand!" But Lewis did not deliver that speech. King and other black leaders, afraid of insulting the Kennedys and killing the CR bill, forced the SNCC leader to take out his militant message, while two of JFK's aides were ready to "pull the plug" on the public address system if Lewis's message was too radical. Other activists, such as Cleveland Sellers of SNCC and James Forman of CORE, were also disillusioned by the march and what they saw as the "take-over" by the white liberal establishment. To Forman, "fancy productions" like the August 1963 demonstration gave blacks a sens of satisfaction "when, in fact, nothing had been changed."⁽¹⁷⁾

Malcolm X too believed that CR legislation had not come near solving America's race problems. As he saw it, so long as whites controlled social insititutions--banks, companies, politics--black progress would be minimal. Blacks, he urged, should own businesses and run their own neighborhoods and cities. "Once you gain control of the economy of your own community," he pointed out, "then you don't have to picket and boycott and beg some cracker downtown for a job in his business." To Malcolm, the CR movement, while ending legal discrimination in the south, did not speak to the concerns of northern blacks such as lack of jobs and low wages, inadequate housing, no health care, or poor education. Blacks, he argued, were being denied their human rights, not just civil rights, and the African-American crisis in the United States was part of a worldwide system of white domination of people of color. "The same man" oppressing the people of Vietnam or the Congo, he noted, was "the same man, the same enemy, opposing the black people in Detroit."⁽¹⁸⁾

Malcolm X, however, never had the opportunity to bring his message to the black masses like King had. In February 1965--as he was softening some of his militant nationalist views and reaching out somewhat to King and other CR groups--he was assassinated by rival Black Muslims. African-Americans had been deprived, again, of a powerful spokesman for radical change. Others, however, would follow through on Malcolm's mission, and white liberals would discover than northern blacks had their own critique of American society.

In early 1965, King's own positions had been moving toward Malcolm's. Still an "apostle of militant nonviolence," King was also broadening his own analysis of U.S. society to include the north. "Some of our most nagging problems in the fiture will be in the big cities of the North on the areas of jobs and schools and housing," he understood at the time of Malcolm's death.⁽¹⁹⁾ Indeed, King was advocating a system in which, as in many countries of Western Europe and Scandanavia, the government would provide free health care, create jobs, and more equally distribute wealth. America "must move toward a democratic socialism," he announced.⁽²⁰⁾ To a large degree, King's views were being shaped by the visible anger of northern blacks, and he was being led by grassroots blacks as much as leading. In August 1965, in the most destructive racial uprising prior to Rodney King, blacks in the Watts section of Los Angeles, following a case of police brutality, rebelled. Over 30 African-Americans were killed, over 100 injured, and over $40 million in property was destroyed.

To King, the L.A. uprising was tragic and counterproductive; "fewer people have been killed in ten years of nonviolent demonstrations across the South," he pointed out, "than were killed in one night of riots in Watts." Nor did the rebellion lead to jobs or housing, and, in fact, most whites blamed African-Americans for the destruction and found them "ungrateful" for the progress of previous years. In one poll, 75 percent of whites thought that blacks were gaining too many rights too soon. King recognized that the movement had entered a new phase and "the paths of Negro-white unity . . . began to diverge." The "first phase" of CR, 1954-1965, had been a struggle "to treat the Negro with a degree of dignity, not of equality." When blacks looked for a "second phase, the realization of equality," they discovered that many white allies had "quietly disappeared."⁽²¹⁾

King's liberal allies had not disappeared so much as shifted their attentions to Vietnam at the expense of race relations. Indeed, Vietnam was exacerbating the divide between American blacks and whites. Twice as many blacks fought and died in the war, in proportion to population, as whites, while the United States spent over $300,000 per each enemy killed in Vietnam, vastly more than the amount spent on jobs and education combined for blacks. The war in Indochina moreover alienated and angered many blacks who charged the government with racism and hypocrisy for attacking nonwhite peoples (not just in Vietnam but Africa as well) and for praising the passive resistance of the CR movement but then sending, as King put it, "black young men to burn Vietnamese with napalm, to slaughter men, women and children." The Reverend wondered "what kind of nation it is that applauds nonviolence whenver Negroes face white people in the streets . . . but then applauds violence and burning and death when those same Negroes are sent to the field in Vietnam."⁽²²⁾ Indeed, King's increasing public criticism of Vietnam in the mid-1960s marked his transformation from a CR leader only to a radical spokesperson for all marginalized Americans. King even suggested that Vietnam was in large part responsible for much of the urban tumult of the era. The racial implications of a war against "gooks" was not unnoticed by people of color in the United States and the behavior of the forces of order, politicians and police forces, was analogous to America's military response in Vietnam. Little wonder, then, that white leaders, who had praised King's passivism, were now, as the Reverend charged, jumping ship. In the summer of 1966, for instance, King decided to bring the movement to the north, to Chicago, where he would agitate for decent housing in the ghettos and avocate the formation of tenant unions against the slumlords, many allied with Mayor Daley, who controlled black communities.

The Chicago campaign, however, was far from successful. As one of King's close associates, Andrew Young, explained, "genuine school integration, housing integration, and employment opportunity for poor blacks was going to require real sacrifices," and white people were not as accomodating to such goals as they had been to southern desegregation.⁽²³⁾ Moreover, King, as Malcolm had earlier charged, did not really understand the depths of urban black rage and his nonviolent, albeit aggressive, approach was called into question. Combined with a hostile media, court injunctions, and Daley's ability to upstage King and provide favors to black leaders in Chicago, the movement was constantly on the defensive. King also saw that northern whites could be quite similar to their southern brethren: during one demonstration, thousands of whites threw rocks and bottles at King and his associates, burned cars, wore Klan attire, and waved Nazi and Confederate flags. Later, the Reverend would tell reporters that he had "never seen--even in Mississippi and Alabama--mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I've seen in Chicago."⁽²⁴⁾

To avoid further violence, Daley and King negotiated a settlement in which the city and white realtors "promised" to make housing available to Chicago blacks, a move denounced by many local African-American activists as a "sellout" to the white power structure. King, lucky to have survived, left Chicago bitter and more radicalized. His rhetoric was sounding like the New Left as much as a baptist minister as he began to link southern CR, northern racism, economic injustice, and the Vietnam War in a comprehensive critique of corporate liberalism. Throughout 1966-1967, then, he began to more stridently attack the war, call for a guaranteed annual income for all Americans, support union registration and strikes, and consequently, frustrate, if not infuriate, his white allies. Ironically, even as King was becoming more militant, younger blacks were moving far beyond the Reverend, further complicating the CR struggle in America.

Even during the heyday of southern desegregation, many black leaders such as Malcolm X, John Lewis and his SNCC comrades, Jim Forman, and others sought a more militant posture. By 1966, with memories of Watts and Chicago still fresh and the war in Vietnam growing and taking up resources that were earmarked for antipoverty programs, younger African-Americans began to abandon the earlier biracial coalition that had worked on the Civil and Voting Rights Acts and, instead of settling for laws to prevent segregation, now demanded Black Power. Stokeley Carmichael, new president of SNCC in 1966, described Black Power as a "call for black people . . . to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community . . . to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations . . . [and] to reject the racist institutions and values of this society."⁽²⁵⁾ Black Power became more than that though, developing into a militant political ideology that would markedly alter the nature of race discussions in America. King, already being abandoned by white supporters for being too radical, would also come under attack by African-Americans for being too compromising. The movement's best days, it seemed, were behind it.

SNCC and CORE were more radical than ever in 1966. Both organizations kicked out white members that year and began pressing a more militant agenda. Carmichael insisted that blacks needed to empower themselves as other ethnic groups--the Irish in Boston, Poles in Chicago, Italians in New York--had done so that they could control their own communities and not depend on the gratitude of supportive politicians. "We don't need white liberals," he announced, "we have to make integration irrelevant." Floyd McKissick of CORE went further, telling his supporters that nonviolence had "outlived its usefullness." To Carmichael, American blacks were part of a global struggle against white colonialism; he thus made common cause with revolutionaries in Vietnam and Cuba, carried VC flags at antiwar rallies, and urged resistance to the draft. Dorm rooms throughout the country had posters of Stokely with the words "Hell No, We Won't Go" written on them. "From Mississippi and Harlem to . . . Vietnam," he explained, "a powerful few have been maintained and enriched at the expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses." Within the United States, he added, the main barrier to black progress was "a federal government that cares far more about winning the war on the Vietnamese than the war on poverty . . . which is unwilling to curb the misuse of white power but quick to condemn Black Power."⁽²⁶⁾

Carmichael had a point. Up to that time most Americans could support the CR movement as a simple matter of justice. Legal desegregation, they believed, did not fundamentally challenge the structure or ideology of U.S. society. But Black Power militants--with their advocacy of defensive violence, revolution, and separatism and their solidarity with the Vietnamese, Cuban, and African Revolutionaries--terrified white Americans and many established African-American leaders as well. More so, the government intensified its surveillance of so-called black subversives. The FBI revived Operation Cointelpro [Counterintelligence Program], orginally set up in the 1950s to repress the U.S. Communist Party, to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize" groups such as the SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and the Nation of Islam. King himself, especially after publicly denouncing the Vietnam War, came under growing attack from the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover "was quite aware of how hostile the Johnson White House was toward King" and monitored and harassed him more than ever in 1967 and 1968, continuing to try to smear him as a Communist and blackmail him with reports on his personal life.⁽²⁷⁾

The emergence of Black Power marked a distinct turning point in the CR struggle. In addition to alarming whites, radicals such as Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Julius Lester and others stood in stark contrast to King and the mainstream movement leaders. By 1966-1967, then, there were in effect two movements, with the younger and more militant blacks increasing rejecting racial accomodation and cooperation with liberals in favor of separatism, black nationalism, and the rhetoric of violence. Indeed, the most publicized black group of the day was the Black Panthes, an organization of angry and armed blacks dramatically different than the SCLC or SNCC in its early days.

The Panthers grew out of the Lowndes County [Alabama] Freedom Organization, an African-American political party started in 1966 to run in local elections whose symbol was a black panther. Urban blacks in Oakland, California led by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale subsequently formed the Black Panther Party [BPP] for Self-Defense in late 1966 and became immediate media sensations. Wearing black berets and bandoliers, carrying weapons in public, shooting it out with police, and rejecting King's methods--violence was "as American as cherry pie" according to H. Rap Brown--the Panthers offered the rhetoric and romance of revolution. The BPP, however, contributed more to the backlash against CR than to black empowerment. Though the party never had a significantly large membership and it did sponsor breakfast programs and black history classes for schoolchildren, its behavior terrified whites. The media and FBI and other law enforcement groups--which ultimately killed about 30 Panthers--convinced Americans that the party was representative of black thought and thus effectively smearned the entire African-American movement. By 1967, when Muhammad Ali refused induction into the army to protest Vietnam and blacks in Detroit, Newark, New Jersey, and dozens of other cities staged violent uprisings to protest local cases of police abuse and racial discrimination, whites were only too willing to believe the worst about black America.

Adding to the distance between the races was the emergence of cultural nationalism and internationalism. "Black Power" became not just a political movement but a statement of racial identification and pride as well. African-Americans, as soul singer James Brown would express it, should "Say It Loud, I'm Black and Proud." Black men and women started wearing their hair in natural "afros" and often were clad in African-style dashikis. Universities, often pressured by African-American activists and students, established Black Studies Programs. Musicians, actors and athletes reflected this cultural ideology too, with even mainstream artists like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye eventually incorporating political themes into their songs, black writers like James Baldwin being read more widely; sports figures Cassius Clay and Lew Alcindor converting to Islam and become internationally famous as Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; and medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos being removed from the 1968 U.S. Olympic team because they had raised their gloved fists in a Black Power salute on the victory stand at the National Anthem played.

Young black activists also began to connect their own cause to that of other nonwhite peoples. Malcolm X went to the United Nations to charge the United States with violations of human rights, not just civil rights, and compared America's racial conditions to South Africa. African-American radicals serious engaged global, especially leftist, political ideas, identifying with and studying Ho, Mao, Fidel, and even Kim Il-Sung of Korea and Enver Hoxha of Albania. Just as SDS members carried and quoted Mao's Little Red Book, SNCC activists referred to The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, a black French psychiatrist and Algerian freedom fighter. To increasing numbers of blacks, CR was part of a larger global struggle being waged by the the nonwhite peoples of the world against caucasian imperial powers.

Martin Luther King was deeply conflicted by the emergence of black power and cultural nationalism. As his April 1967 attack on the war showed, he was terribly frustrated and militant himself, but he could not support the extremism of the radicals, no matter the legitimacy of their grievances. Many blacks were moving in a different direction, however, looking to the Panthers and other radicals for examples of African-American resistance. But King was not unsympathetic to the militants. "Black Power, in its broad and positive meaning," he wrote, "is a call to black people to amass the political and economic strength to achieve their legitimate goals. No one can deny that the Negro is in dire need of this kind of legitimate power." Black Power was also " a call for the pooling of black financial resources to achieve economic security." While the federal government held primary responsibility to help the poor, to develop "a kind of Marshall Plan for the disadvantaged," the black community itself had an annual income of $30 billion, and King believed it could use such buying power as an instrument for social change.⁽²⁸⁾

King, however, still fought to make common cause with white allies and retained many of the mannerisms of the elite gentleman that he was--still using the term "Negro," for instance, when younger activists were referring to themselves as "blacks" or "Afro-Americans." The biggest difference, however, was on the question of aggression and violence. The Panthers, quoting Mao, believed that "all power flows from the barrel of a gun." King, as his associate Jesse Jackson noted, "talked about the futility of violence, just in terms of strength." To take arms against the forces of order in America was "more suicidal than militant." King had no illusion about the will and ability of the military and police to crush black dissent, having witnessed it personally too many times.⁽²⁹⁾

Despite such distinctions between King and the Black Power advocates, many African-American leaders were beginning similarly to focus on the structural economic causes of racial inequality. The Vietnam War, most CR activists agreed, had highlighted the shortcomings of liberalism, daily taking away more resources and attention from needs at home. America had not just a race problem, black leaders pointed out, but a significant class problem as well, and after 1965 such issues dominated African-American discourse. Americans had paid little notice to the masses of blacks who did not require legal desegregation. The lived in ghettos, sent their kids to inferior schools, had higher crime and mortality rates, and disproportionately experienced violence. "The right to vote, eat at a lunch counter, sleep in an integrated motel, or move into an all-white neighborhood had not altered their marginal existence."⁽³⁰⁾ Black Panthers, in their party program, included class-based demands for jobs, housing, education, and "an end to robbery by the CAPITALIST of our black community" as well as racial justice. King, less militantly but just as firmly, agreed. He called on Americans to "honestly admint that capitalism has often left a gulf between superflous wealth and abject poverty, has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few, and has encouraged small hearted men to become conscienceless."⁽³¹⁾

Examinations of class also caused division within the CR community. Already in the late 1960s many lower-income and working-class blacks were pointing out the shortcomings of antidiscriminatory measures. Kenneth Clark, a prominent black sociologist, noted in 1967 that "the masses of blacks now realize . . . that they haven't really benefitted significantly from the civil rights movement"; only "a relatively small percentage of middle class and educated blacks" really gained anything from the struggle. Kathleen Cleaver, a Black Panther leader and later an honors graduate of Yale Law School, agreed, observing that the CR movement's goals "were essentially goals for easier assimilation for middle class people, and that working class people and poor people weren't going to get too much out of this." The NAACP, Cleaver joked, could have stood for the National Association for the Advancement of Certain People. Perhaps such developments should have been expected, however. King and most other black movement leaders came from the African-American bourgeoisie and, unlike Malcolm X, Panthers, or younger militants, did not really grasp conditions in the urban north for most blacks until after 1965. On top of that, as Jesse Jackson observed, "as little as Americans talk about race, they talk about class even less."⁽³²⁾

King, however, was talking about class in 1968 and thus began to organize the Poor People's Campaign. The Reverend by this point was sounding like a partisan of the New Left, offering a comprehensive analysis of race, poverty, and the Vietnam War and indicting corporate liberalism in the process. Thus King sent out a call to the poor and ethnic minorities to join him in a march on Washington D.C. to demand fair employment practices and jobs, housing, health care, justice for immigrants, union rights, and higher wages for the working poor. Cesar Chávez, dirt poor Appalachian whites, Native Americans, women, and Chicanos were among the groups that joined the cause. Linking racism, poverty and the war, King was trying to create a mass movement based on class to restructure American society. Widely praised as a "Negro" leader in the early 1960s, he was becoming a "radical" spokesman in 1968--and much of white America was nervous about it.

King, by planning the Poor People's Campaign, forced liberals to confront the limits of their own privileged thought by calling for a "radical redistribution of economic power" along with an end to the Vietnam War. Like younger radicals, he was attacking the paternal, liberal state at its base, the unequal class system that left millions without adequate employment, housing, health care, or education. If successful, the Poor People's Movement could have constituted the greatest challenge to entrenched liberal power in national history; but that would not be the case. In the early years of the movement, white liberals and labor had been crucial and effective supporters of King's efforts, but, as Andrew Young--one of the organizers of the new campaign--put it, they "were less enthusiastic when it came to social justice for the poor." The Johnson administration felt great consternation as well. This class-based movement, Young explained, "had the potential of unifying protest against a wide spectrum of ethnic and underprivileged groups [and] it could also raise massive civil disobedience to a new level in American life." In the senate, Robert Byrd called King a "self-seeking rabble-rouser"; John Stennis told the "colored people" in his home state of Mississippi to stay away from the campaign since "nothing good for them or for anyone else can come from" joining it; the White House tried to stop the march; and Harry McPherson, one of LBJ's closes aides, complained in a moment of liberal candor that "the Negro . . . showed himself to be, not only ungrateful, but sullen, full of hate and the potential for violence."⁽³³⁾

With such formidable opposition from the Washington political establishment, the Poor People's chances for success were not great to begin with, and the virtually disappeared during the first week of April 1968. King, working feverishly on the march on Washington, traveled to Memphis, Tennessee that week to show his support for striking sanitation workers. On the night of 3 April, the Reverend, in an eerily prophetic sermon, told a huge crowd at the Masonic Temple

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.⁽³⁴⁾

The next evening, while standing on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel, he was assassinated by a sniper.

Ironically, the death of the nonviolent King sparked the worst urban uprisings in U.S. history. Violence wracked nearly 200 cities, with scores dead and hundreds of millions of dollars of property destroyed. In Chicago, Daley gave his police "shoot to kill" orders to deal with rioters; in Maryland, Governor Spiro Agnew--who once referred to the slain Muslim leader as "Malcolm the Tenth"--blamed "Black Power advocates and known criminals" for the crisis. But Stokely Carmichael took a different lesson from the Memphis assassination. "When white America killed Dr. King last night, she declared war opn us. We have to retaliate for the death of our leaders," he warned. "The only way to survive is to get some guns . . . We are going to stand on our feet and die like men. If that's our only act of manhood, then goddammit, we're going to die." Rap Brown called the uprisings a "rehearsal for Revolution."⁽³⁵⁾ Fortunately, the violence stopped and racial battles were averted, but King's dream of racial equality and justice for the poor had died in Memphis just the same. Though the Poor People marched on Washington, they were demoralized and dismissed, the name of their encampment, "Resurrection City," ultimately reflecting only wishful thinking.

White America, it seemed, no longer had to care about blacks. After the progress of 1954-1965, the movement foundered as the war in Vietnam and questions of class entered into the CR equation. In 1954, Thurgood Marshall, who had successfully argued the Brown case and would later become the first black Supreme Court Justice, turned to his colleagues and said "in five years it will all be over . . . because there won't be a race problem. We will be integrated into American society."⁽³⁶⁾ And, for a time, Marshall's vision seemed possible. The sacrifice of the black masses and the powerful moral leadership of King and others had created new opportunities for African-Americans. Through direct action and federal legislation, the apartheid system below the Mason-Dixon line had been abolished. Blacks could eat and work in white-owned restaurants, ride buses, stay in hotels, and vote. Because of CR laws, the black middle class grew and gained economic power; and politically, blacks gained more clout than ever before, proving to be a vital segment of the Democratic Party's base and even being elected to office themselves.

Just over a decade after Brown, however, urban America seemed to be in chaos, with police brutality and rioting becoming a common occurrence. Many African-Americans did not identify with King so much as Malcolm X or younger militants who did not share the Nobel Prize winner's faith in integration. And, after 1965, the war in Vietnam replaced CR as the dominant national issue. Resources that might have been used to address problems of race and poverty were now going to Indochina; young black men were dying disproportionately in the war; and African-American leaders began to link their own struggle with that of other non-white peoples throughout the world. The liberal coalition that had so impressively worked on early CR legislation fell apart as King and other "ungrateful" blacks publicly decried the war. By 1967-1968, as Black Power emerged and questions of America's class system began to dominate the discourse over African-American rights, the white backlash was in force. King's assassination and the failure of the Poor People's Campaign signalled the end of the dream that had been so movingly announced in August 1963. By the 1970s, as black inmates at Attica Prison in New York were slaughtered by state troops and white mobs in Boston attacked black kids who were desegregating the schools there, Americans felt little sympathy and less outrage. To be sure, the early movement had made its mark on American society. Blacks were integrated economically and politically like never before and gained access to jobs and elected offices in significantly higher numbers. But, just the same, the war came along at the very time that black leaders were beginning to raise issues of poverty and opportunity for the black masses and the commitment to Vietnam thus made it impossible to address the larger needs of the African-American community. As King lamented, "despite feeble protestations to the contrary, the promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam. The pursuit of this widened war has narrowed the promised dimensions of the domestic welfare programs, making the poor white and negro bear the heaviest burdens, both at the front and at home."⁽³⁷⁾

While Civil Rights and the New Left constituted the most notable movements of the early to mid-1960s, by the end of the decade they would be attacked by the forces of order and divided from within. Amid the general sense of frustration and anger, however, another movement would emerge to challenge and transform American life, namely Women's Liberation. An amorphous movement with little formal organization, "Women's Lib" had no elected leaders, membership dues, or bureaucratic requirements. The 1960s Women's Movement mostly consisted of thousands of local groups and individuals, connected by word-of-mouth and newsletters. Declaring that "the personal is political," Women's Lib followers spoke to a large range of issues, both public and private, such as job and pay discrimination, educational access, health care, sexual double standards, media images of females, abortion, militarism and the Vietnam War, workplace harassment, and domestic violence. By the 1970s, women's issues were thus at the forefront of American political life.

The first indication that women would be included in the political dialogue of the 1960s came when JFK, right after his election, appointed a Presidential Commission on the Status of Women to assess women's places in the economy, family, and legal system. The Commission's report, issued in 1963, documented problems like job discrimination, unequal pay, lack of child care, and legal inequities in divorce and credit, and led to the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which required that women and men receive the same wages for the same work. Just as importantly that year, Betty Friedan, a writer and labor activist, produced her classic The Feminine Mystique, which hit the best-seller list. Friedan compared suburban domesticity to a "comfortable concentration camp" and argued that women's problems were "a problem of identity--a stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique." To millions of women--especially educated, middle-class housewives--Friedan's book seemed to describe their lives and legitimize and foster a shared experience, and the issues she raised would remain central to the Women's Movement throughout the decade.

The next year, women's issues got an unexpected boost when congress passed the 1964 CR Act. Southern congressmen, in an effort to kill the bill, put forth an amendment in Title VII that would prohibit "sex" as well as "race" discrimination. The bill nonetheless passed and women had gained, or so they thought, federal protection for equal pay, hiring, and promotions. The government, however, did not seriously examine cases of sex discrimination, thus prompting female political figures like Representative Martha Griffiths to denounce federal inaction and leading many women in October 1966 to form the National Organization for Women [NOW]. NOW was a political organization aiming to bring women into a "truly equal partnership with men . . . [to] mobilize the political power of all women and men intent on our goals." In its first victory, NOW pressured LBJ to include women in government affirmative action programs that were originally designed for African-Americans. By the mid-1960s, then, the "founding mothers" of the Women's Movement had put their issues onto the national agenda. Millions of others would pick up the struggle, often more militantly, in the coming years.

While the first measures to address women's concerns--federal laws, best-selling books, NOW, and the like--came from the top down, Women's Lib in the 1960s was mass-based and decentralized. Indeed, many of the women who brought issues of sex inequality into the national debate of the 1960s had experience in other major issues of the era, particularly in CR and antiwar activity, and formed their own groups to escape the discrimination and patriarchy they felt within those movements. Women had played a vital role in the early CR years. Many northern, white women had traveled to the south to work with SNCC and CORE on various projects. In SDS women were effective community organizers in the ERAP projects and performed crucial antiwar work. Within these organizations, however, women had second-rate status. Instead of being officers and policymakers, females disproportionately did clerical work and often were expected to be sexual partners of men in the movement. Indeed, many sexual liasons did occur in the early CR and New Left days. Men would often accuse women of being "uptight" if they did not sleep with them. In addition, interracial dating was not uncommon, which could cause conflict between white and black women. As for the men, they had traditional attitudes, often referred to as "male chauvinist," that they should lead and women should follow.

Finally frustrated by such attitudes, women in the movement responded. In a memo written for a SNCC conference in late 1964, activists Casey Hayden, Mary King, and other white women--writing anonomously because they expected ridicule from their brethren--described "Women in the Movement" in stark terms. Women in SNCC, despite their skills and experience, were usually assigned secretarial work and were expected to "defer to a man . . . for final decisionmaking." Men, Hayden and others charged, simply expected to be leaders: "assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep rooted and every much as crippling to the woman," they explained, "as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro." Men in the movement, the women in SNCC seemed to be saying, were no different than the hypocritical liberals they had all decried. Hayden and King had hoped at best to generate a discussion, "amidst the laughter" they expected, on sex issues, but they were ignored for the most part. Indeed, many African-American women in SNCC also believed that the organization needed a strong centralized administration and "considered the issue of women to be a diversion . . . [or] as disruptive and divisive.⁽³⁸⁾

Slowly, however, women involved in various groups--SNCC, SDS, the National Student Association, the Student Peace Union, and others--began to discuss their own conditions within the movement and more openly raise the issue of sex discrimination. By 1965, then, Hayden and King were willing to go further. Hayden had been working on a Chicago ERAP project--where one of her major goals was to prevent the women she was organizing from being attacked by the men Rennie Davis was working with--and King was still with SNCC when they produced "Sex and Caste: a Kind of Memo" in November 1965. This time, the women signed their names to the document and acknowledged authorship. Again, Hayden and King compared male treatment of women to white attitudes toward blacks, and added that women in the movement had become a "caste," in a "position of assumed subordination" in both organizational and personal situations. Women still did most clerical work, cooking and cleaning, and held few leadership positions. But Hayden and King were not optimistic that their manifesto would get much attention. "Objectively," the predicted, "the chances seem nil that we could start a movement based on anything as distant . . . as a sex-caste system. Therefore, most of us will probably want to work full time on problems such as war, poverty, race."⁽³⁹⁾ They were only partly right--many women did continue to work for racial equality and to end the war, but untold others formed the largest mass women's movement in U.S. history.

Women's Lib thus grew out of the CR and New Left movements of the 1960s. "Most of us," feminist activists and scholars Linda Gordon and Ann Popkin explained, "came through the male-dominated New Left." Working in CR, community organizing and antiwar activities, "we kept forgetting about ourselves." Within those movements, women were "relegated to positions of typists, office clerks, janitors, and flunkeys. . . Our opinions were seldom asked for and rarely heard."⁽⁴⁰⁾ Such conditions, already noticeable during the early 1960s, became more pronounced in the later years of the decade because, as Sara Evans pointed out, "the student movement grew most spectacularly . . . in reaction to the Vietnam War."⁽⁴¹⁾ The primacy of antiwar activity, along with the growth of black nationalism and the departure of whites from many CR organizations, brought most women into the New Left in 1965 and 1966, and thus exposed females, again, to discrimination within the movement. Women began to see a distinction between sex, a biological condition, and gender, a socially-constructed set of identifications and relations between females and males. Men in the New Left had thus subordinated women as a secondary gender--with traditional and less-respected roles. Indeed, at the December 1965 SDS convention, acrimony over the Hayden-King memo broke up the conference and motivated many women to break off and form their own caucus. Men in the movement could critique the white power structure for its racial and class attitudes, but could not tolerate women who pointed out that male behavior in the New Left was quite similar to the "enemy."

As women involved in the movement began to communicate with each other, they unearthed common experiences--strong and self-respecting mothers and supportive and politically-active families, and "they shared stories about the opposition they had met in school or SNCC or SDS." Many saw their own experiences on the left as part of a larger social system which discriminated against women, hence the admonition that "the personal is political." Toward that end, women began to focus on the questions of both their identification and their social roles. They held consciousness raising sessions to discuss common problems and plan collective action and to take a political role on women's issues. Intensifying that process was Vietnam. As the war took over center stage on the left, radicalizing the CR agenda and turning SDS into almost exclusively an antiwar group, women found themselves outside the mainstream still. In the CR struggle or ERAP, women could be on the front lines--marching, desegregating public places, registering voters, organizaing the poor, facing arrest and violence. But women were auxiliary to antiwar activity. "Men were drafted, women were not. Men could resist the draft; they burned draft cards; they risked jail." And women were supposed to support and nurture antiwar men. The "action and awareness of a mother or young lover who hides or protects her man from the draft" was highly valued, and "Girls Say Yes to Guys Who Say No" was a common slogan of the movement.

Many women, however, began to balk at such secondary roles. In 1967, in the movement journal New Left Notes, Francine Silbar called on women to organize separately from men. "Let's define our own roles," she advised. "We don't have to be secretaries to be useful. What's the matter with men's hands anyway?" By mid-1967, male-female acrimony was rampant in SDS. Female activists, building on the Hayden-King 1965 analysis, found "that women are in a colonial relationship to men and we recognize our roles as part of the Third World," like Vietnamese of blacks. They called on New Left men to recognize and deal with their male chauvinism "in their personal, social, and political relationships" and for women to demand child care, birth control and abortion rights, and equal sharing of housework. With their "Resolution for Women's Liberation," females in SDS had struck a nerve and men within the organization were furious, refusing to debate the issue and drowning out those who wanted to speak with derisive jeering and catcalls. In the next issue of New Left Notes, an article about the debate appeared "alongside a cartoon of a girl--with earrings, polkadot minidress, and matching visible panties--holding a sign: 'We Want Our Rights and We Want Them Now.'" SDS, as Sara Evans pointed out, "had blown its last chance."

By 1968, the movement in general was foundering. King and Kennedy were dead; SDS, after Columbia, was on the defensive; Nixon was entering the White House. Women's Lib, however, was growing. Once huge numbers of women left the CR and New Left struggles to go out on their own, American's gender landscape changed forever. Engaging in both personal and political actions, female activists, mostly white and middle-class, not only confronted Americans about their gendered attitudes but engaged in effective political reform. By the mid-1970s, women would break through and achieve more opportunities than at any time in U.S. history.

The first time many Americans heard of Women's Lib was in September 1968 when the "Radical Women of New York" crashed the Miss America Pageant that year. They set up a freedom trash can where they discarded, but never burned, bras, girdles, wigs, false eyelashes, and anti-woman magazines. They held signs comparing the pageant to a "cattle auction" and had a poster of a naked woman with body parts labeled "loin" and "rump" as if she were just a side of beef. And they chanted "Atlantic City is a town with class. They raise your morals and they judge your ass." Using guerrilla theater, these women wanted to introduce their agenda to a national crowd. They criticized not only sexism but racism, commercialism, and war. Miss America was a "Military Death Mascot," they claimed, a "cheerleader" for U.S. troops; "last year she went to Vietnam to pep-talk our husbands, fathers, sons and boyfriends into dying and killing with a better spirit."⁽⁴²⁾

Other women struck out on their own and conducted similar protests. WITCH--the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell--held a "Halloween Witches' Dance" on Wall Street to hex the stock market, which fell five points the next day. Women at the University of Chicago seized a building to protest the firing of a radical feminist professor. In 1970 Women's Liberation-Seattle took over the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington and demanded that scientists there stop working on nuclear submarine weapons and that the lab be turned into a daycare center. Two years later, the "February Sisters" took over the Asian Studies Building to highlight grievances over the lack of health care and day care at the University of Kansas, and shortly afterwards the administration acted on these issues and established a Women's Studies department as well. Women's publications like Off Our Backs and, later, Ms. Magazine appeared, and essays like "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" and "Why I Want a Wife" were widely read and discussed.. Feminists such as Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, Germaine Greer, Robin Morgan and others wrote best-selling books and became nationally known. An underground group of Chicago health care activists, calling themselves "Jane," made safe abortions available to thousand of women who, before the procedure was legalized, could not control their reproductive lives and who had illegal "backalley" abortions at great risk. In Boston, a group of women appalled at the lack of knowledge and care given to female health issues by male doctors published a self-help pamphlet, Our Bodies, Ourselves which became an international recognized guide for women's health care. Testing the movement's limits, SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, produced a virulently anti-male manifesto written by Valerie Solanas, later to become a radical feminist icon after shooting pop artist Andy Warhol. While such behaviour did gain media attention, it did not reflect mainstream thought and, like college takeovers or the Poor People's Campaign, probably turned off as many Americans as it attracted. Women's issues, however, were in fact being taken more seriously by the late 1960s and both their cultural images and political agenda were shifting.

Even before Women's Lib exploded into the public sphere in the latter part of the decade, images of women in pop culture were changing.⁽⁴³⁾ Two of the more highly-rated TV shows of the mid-1960s featured female leads who explored the changing roles of women in U.S. life--I Dream of Genie and Bewitched. "Genie," though a "real" genie living in a bottle, was more traditional, always looking to please her "master," an astronaut with NASA [symbolic of Cold War technological progress). "Samantha" on Bewitched also had magical abilities but often used them to assert her power as a woman, frequently bailing out her befuddled husband Darrin and, along with her mother Endora, letting him know about it. The Munsters and The Addams Family too featured strong female characters who seemed to live in a different world than Lucille Ball, June Cleaver, or Donna Reed had. More likely to cook frog-eyeball stew than bake cookies for the PTA, they were assertive and independent and could be sexy--traits generally not attributed to women by the media in the early 1960s. By the end of the decade and into the 1970s, the depiction of women reflected the success of the movement. "Ann Marie," That Girl played by Marlo Thomas, was the first female to star in a sitcom who lived independently and [gasp!] did not need or want to get married and got along quite well on her own in New York City [apparently proving the accuracy of Gloria Steinem's quip that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"]. "Mary Richards," Mary Tyler Moore's character on her show, also remained single by choice and brought feminist issues like equal pay and sexual harassment to the screen. On All In the Family, Archie Bunker's daughter Gloria constantly called him on his chauvinist views while their cousin Maude, played by Bea Arthur, broke new ground on TV by choosing to have an abortion. In less than a decade, Women's Lib had transformed the way females were being portrayed.

Politically, women were gaining ground as well. In 1968, NOW had decided to get involved in electoral politics by backing candidates who supportred feminist issues and by calling for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment [ERA] to the constitution which would outlaw any discrimination based on sex. In 1971, NOW, along with feminist leaders like Steinem, Friedan, and Representatives Shirley Chisolm and Bella Abzug, supported the establishment of the National Women's Political Caucus, a bipartisan group formed to increase women's participation in politics. By 1972--as Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" was becoming an anthem for the movement and moving to #1 on the pop charts--women were playing a vital role in the political process. During the national conventions that year, 40 percent of Democratic and 30 percent of Republican Delegates were female, up from 13 and 17 percent in 1968. That same year, Shirley Chisolm, the first black woman elected to congress, ran for president. Congress also passed the ERA in 1972 and by the end of the year 22 states had ratified it. The Higher Education Act of 1972 also passed, and it included Title IX outlawing sex discrimination in schools that received federal funding. Despite opposition from alumni groups and male athletes, Title IX was the catalyst for the tremendous growth in women's intercollegiate sports in the 1970s.

Along with Title IX, a 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, in the Roe v. Wade case, constituted the greatest successes of the first phase of the Women's Liberation Movement. Millions of American women had been illegally terminating pregnancies for years [in the 1940s Alfred Kinsey found that nearly one-fourth of American women had an abortion] with great risks to their health, so Roe v. Wade not only decriminalized that practice but helped women's health. By giving females control over their own bodies, it also enabled women to pursue the types of educational opportunities and jobs that they could not gain if pregnant or raising children. Into the 1970s, the movement continued and grew more accepted. Women were depicted more realistically in the media. Female sports gained credibilty, especially after Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in the tennis "battle of the sexes." Women were elected to office in larger numbers and became a vital part of the political process. An anti-feminist backlash, however, began as well. Led by a reactionary female lawyer, Phyllis Schlafly, conservatives prevented the ERA from being ratified. Images of unhappy, single women continued to populate TV shows and movies. Abortion rights came under attack. The number of women living in poverty, which was far greater than men, or raising children by themselves did not decline. And black women, who often felt like outsiders in the Women's Movement, continued to suffer disproportionate rates of poverty. Like CR or the New Left, women had discovered the limits of reform in American political society.

Civil Rights and Women's Lib demonstrated both the power of average Americans to seek social change and the difficulties inherent in 1960s reform movements. While the movements successfully broke through the political landscape of the early 1960s, internal division and state opposition limited their gains. The biggest factor in this regard was surely the Vietnam War. Beginning in 1965, CR passed the baton, as it were, to Vietnam as the nation's most important concern. Funding and attention was now given to the war rather than to America's racial or gender problems, thereby making activists more frustrated and militant. The result, an angry movement to end the war and restructure American society, helped prompt the Women's Movement as females in the movement found New Left men to be often as discriminating and paternal as the white male elite that they all claimed to oppose. The war had seriously impeded CR, given rise to a mass Peace Movement, caused a radicalization of youth politics, and led to division along ideological, strategic, race, and gender lines.

Other movements developed out of this process as well. More than a labor leader, Cesar Chávez was representative of a growing movement of Mexican-Americans and Chicanos for dignity and equality. In New Mexico, Chicanos called for the return of lands taken from Mexico. In California, Texas, and elsewhere, they formed their own political party, La Raza Unida, while militant young Chicanos formed the "Brown Berets," modeled on the Black Panthers. Mexican-Americans and Chicanos were also active in the antiwar movement, pointing out the similarities between the U.S. war on Asian peasants and conditions for people of color at home. Similarly, the American Indian Movement [AIM] attempted to start a national debate on the plight of Native Americans, who suffered tragic rates of poverty and alcoholism on government reservations. In 1968, militant Indians fought with Washington state officials over fishing rights and the following year Native Americans in San Francisco invaded and occupied Alcatraz Island. Vine DeLoria's Custer Died for Your Sins and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee helped propel an Indian cultural renaissance and more militancy. In 1972, AIM occupied the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington D.C. and in 1973 staged a 71-day protest at Wounded Knee, South Dakota--the site of an 1890 massacre of hundreds of Sioux by the U.S. Army--until driven off by government forces. Indeed, political ferment was widespread throughout the decade. In 1969, rather than tolerate continued police brutality, gay patrons at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village fought back, prompting a more radical and public "gay power" movement than ever before. Environmentalists--many appalled by the American ecological destruction of Vietnam and copying many of the tactics of the antiwar movement--likewise emerged in the late 1960s to form an effective mass movement.

The issues of CR, women's inequality, Chicano and Indian discrimination, gay politics, and environmentalism of course preceded the 1960s, but all grew significantly and publicly in that decade. All occurred, too, with Vietnam as the backdrop. The war was central to the militancy of the era, creating a mass movement by bringing together people from disparate causes--participatory democracy, racial justice, women's rights--to oppose the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. But the war created a paradox as well; Vietnam created a political left but the emphasis on antiwar activity overshadowed other causes and frustrated and alienated large segments of that left as well. By decade's end, blacks, women, and others had a much different place in American society, in good measure because of the grassroots activism of million of women and men--black, white and brown, gay and straight. Fighting for social justice and against a war, they led the movement to create a new society.

1. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York, 1988), 128-205.

2. In James A. Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr.: Apostle of Militant Nonviolence (New York 1993), 29.

3. In Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA., 1981), 14.

4. In Farber, Age of Great Dreams, 78.

5. In Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, 34-37.

6. I.F. Stone, In a Time of Torment, 1961-1967 (Boston, 1967), 147; in Andrew Kopkind, The Thirty Years' War (New York, 1995), 5.

7. In William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey (New York, 1991), 363-3.

8. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" was reproduced that year in Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait (New York, 1963).

9. JFK Civil Rights announcement of 11 June 1963, on PBS website for "The American Experience" show "The Kennedys."

10. In Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, 71-2.

11. In David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC (New York, 1986), 284.

12. In Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, 158.

13. In Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 394, 429-30.

14. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On Ice (New York, 1968), 166; Carmichael in "The Home Front" episode of PBS series "Vietnam: A Television History," transcript on PBS website, and in Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, 159.

15. Stone, In a Time of Torment, 363.

16. In Cornel West, "Malcolm X and Black Rage," in Joe Wood, ed., Malcolm X in Our Own Image (New York, 1992), 48-58; Cornel West, "The Paradox of Afro-American Rebellion," in Sohnya Sayres, et al, eds., The 60s Without Apology (Minneapolis, 1985), 44-58.

17. Lewis in Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 281-3; James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Washington, 1985), 336.

18. In Morgan, The 60s Experience, 75; in Mullen, Blacks and Vietnam, 18.

19. In Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 394-5.

20. In Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, 187.

21. Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston, 1967), 58, 2-4.

22. King, Where Do We Go from Here, 35.

23. Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York, 1996), 414.

24. In Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, 170.

25. Stokeley Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York 1967), 44.

26. In Chalmers, And the Crooked Places Made Straight, 31; Stokeley Carmichael, Stokeley Speaks (New York, 1971), 22-5.

27. James Kirkpatrick Davis, Assault on the Left: The FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement (Westport, CT., 1997), 8; David Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York, 1983), 207.

28. King, Where Do We Go from Here, 36-8.

29. In transcript of interview with Henry Louis Gates on "The Two Nations of Black America," PBS Frontline Series, PBS website.

30. Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict, 1919-1990 (East Lansing, MI., 1995), 243.

31. King, Where Do We Go from Here, 186.

32. William Julius Wilson, Kathleen Cleaver, and Jesse Jackson in "The Two Nations of Black America" transcript, PBS website.

33. Young, An Uneasy Burden, 440-6; McPherson to LBJ, 18 March 1968, Reference File, box 1, McPherson Memos on Vietnam, LBJ Library.

34. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 621.

35. In Miller, On Our Own, 229.

36. In William Julius Wilson interview in "The Two Nations of Black America" transcript, PBS website.

37. King in "The Home Front" episode of PBS series "Vietnam: A Television History," transcript on PBS website.

38. "SNCC Position Paper (Women in the Movement)," in Sara Evans, Personal Politics (New York, 1979), 233-35, 87; Mary King, Freedom Song (New York, 1987), 452-4. King also set the record straight on one of the infamous episodes between men and women in SNCC. The evening after they had presented their memo, King, Hayden and many other men and women went out to relax. Stokely Carmichael, who was as much a performer as an intellectual, was conducting a monologue on the day's activities and looked at King and said "the position for women in SNCC is prone." While since then most scholars have used this as evidence of Carmichael's insensitivity and misogyny, King says that everyone there, including she and Hayden, laughed at his joke and that in fact he was one of the biggest supporters of women's issues within SNCC.

39. "Sex and Caste: a Kind of Memo," in Evans, Personal Politics, 235-38.

40. Linda Gordon and Ann Popkin, "Women's Liberation: 'Let Us Now Emulate Each Other.'" I would like to thank Landon Storrs for bringing this document to my attention.

41. The following section is based on Evans's Personal Politics, a pathbreaking look at the origins of Women's Lib in the 1960s, especially pages 158-92.

42. Robin Morgan, "Feminist Guerrilla Theatre, 1968" in Susan Ware, ed., Modern American Women: A Documentary History (Belmont, CA, 1989), 341-44; Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are (New York, 1994), 139.

43. For an excellent, and hilarious, treatment of media images of women, see Douglas, Where the Girls Are.