Equality In The 1960's

In 1960, the United States was on the verge of a major social change. The society of the country had always been more open and fluid than that of most of the nations of the world. However, it had been dominated primarily by old-fashioned white males. In the 1960s, some groups that had been inhibited or subordinate - Afro-Americans, Native Americans, women, white ethnic descendants of the "new immigration" and Latinos-began to self-affirm more strongly and successfully. Much of the support they received came from a young population, more numerous than ever, who used a system of colleges and universities that expanded at an unprecedented rate. Often affiliated with "counter-cultural" lifestyles and radical politics, many descendants of the Second
After several gradual victories in the previous decade, African-Americans became even more committed to nonviolent direct action. Some groups, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) formed by Afro-American priests, and the Student Non-Violence Coordination Committee (SNCC) comprised of younger activists, lobbied for reform through The peaceful confrontation.

In 1960 some Afro-American higher education students staged a sit-down at a segregated restaurant in Woolworth, North Carolina, and refused to leave. The sit-down attracted the attention of the media and gave rise to other similar demonstrations throughout the South. The following year civil rights workers organized "freedom tours," in which Afro-Americans and whites traveled together on buses to segregated southern terminals, leading to confrontations that captured the interest of the media and Propitiated the
Stokely Carmichael, a student leader, was also disillusioned by the ideas of non-violence and cooperation between races. He popularized the slogan of "black power" to be achieved "by all means necessary" in the words of Malcolm X. The violence accompanied the exhortations of the militants to reform. In 1966 and 1967 riots broke out in several large cities. In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot down by an assassin's bullet. Several months later, Senator Robert Kennedy, who was a spokesman for the least favored, an opponent of the Vietnam War and brother of the assassinated president, had the same fate. For many people, those two homicides marked the end of an era of innocence and idealism. The growing militancy of the left, coupled with the inevitable reaction of the conservatives, opened a gap in the mentality of the nation that would take years to close. However, by then a movement for civil rights that had the support of Judicial verdicts, congressional laws and federal administrative regulations had already irreversibly woven into the fabric of American life. The main issue was how to implement the concepts of equality and