American Yawp Chapter 27

JFK v. Nixon

Kennedy promised to use federal programs to strengthen the economy and address pockets of longstanding poverty, while Nixon called for a reliance on private enterprise and reduction of government spending. Both candidates faced criticism as well;

New Frontier

Kennedy entered office in 1961 without the mandate necessary to achieve the ambitious agenda he would refer to as the New Frontier

Castro v. Bautista—US

On January 8, 1959, Fidel Castro and his revolutionary army initiated a new era of Cuban history. Having ousted the corrupt Cuban President Fulgenico Batista, who had fled Havana on New Year's Eve, Castro and his rebel forces made their way triumphantly through the capital city's streets.

U.S. v. Castro

The United States, who had long propped up the Batista's corrupt regime, had withdrawn support and, initially, expressed sympathy for Castro's new government, which was immediately granted diplomatic recognition. But President Dwight Eisenhower and members of his administration were wary.

--embargo

On October 19, 1960, the United States instituted a near-total trade embargo to economically isolate the Cuban regime

--Bay of Pigs

On April 16, 1961, an invasion force consisting primarily of Cuban émigrés landed on Girón Beach at the Bay of Pigs. Cuban soldiers and civilians quickly overwhelmed the exiles, many of whom were taken prisoner. The Cuban government's success at thwarting the Bay of Pigs invasion did much to legitimize the new regime and was a tremendous embarrassment for the Kennedy administration.

--missile crisis

the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the most dramatic foreign policy crisis in the history of the United StatesOctober 28, the Soviet Union agreed to remove its missiles from Cuba in exchange for a U.S. agreement to remove its missiles from Turkey and a formal pledge that the United States would not invade Cuba, and the crisis was resolved peacefully.

--Cuban refugees

Though the Cuban Missile Crisis temporarily halted the flow of Cuban refugees into the United States, emigration began again in earnest in the mid-1960s. . In 1966 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Cuban Adjustment Act, a law allowing Cuban refugees to become permanent residents. Over the course of the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Cubans left their homeland and built new lives in America.

Civil Rights

Confrontational protests, marches, boycotts, and sit-ins accelerated

--sit-ins

he tone of the modern U.S. civil rights movement changed at a North Carolina department store in 1960, when four African American students participated in a "sit-in" at a whites-only lunch counter. The 1960 Greensboro sit-ins were typical. Activists sat at segregated lunch counters in an act of defiance, refusing to leave until being served and willing to be ridiculed, attacked, and arrested if they were not.

--Freedom riders

a bolder variation of a "sit-in" when they participated in the Freedom Rides. Activists organized interstate bus rides following a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on public buses and trains.

Albany Movement

Albany Movement, a coalition of civil rights organizers that included members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or, "snick"), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the NAACP

Meredith

In October 1962, James Meredith became the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Meredith's enrollment sparked riots on the Oxford campus, prompting President John F. Kennedy to send in U.S. Marshals and National Guardsmen to maintain order

Birmingham Campaign

n April and May, the SCLC organized the Birmingham Campaign, a broad campaign of direct action aiming to topple segregation in Alabama's largest city

--MLK's letter

SCLC leader Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed, prompting his famous handwritten letter urging not only his nonviolent approach but active confrontation to directly challenge injustice

Wallace

Few political figures in the decade embodied the working-class, conservative views held by millions of white Americans quite like George Wallace. Wallace's vocal stance on segregation was immortalized in his 1963 inaugural address as Alabama governor with the phrase: "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"

Evers

President Kennedy addressed the nation that evening, criticizing Wallace and calling for a comprehensive civil rights bill. A day later, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated at his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

March on Washington

August 1963 March on Washington. The march called for, among other things, civil rights legislation, school integration, an end to discrimination by public and private employers, job training for the unemployed, and a raise in the minimum wage. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech

JFK or LBJ better for civil rights?

Vice President Lyndon Johnson lacked Kennedy's youth, his charisma, his popularity, and his aristocratic upbringing, but no one knew Washington better and no one before or since fought harder and more successfully to pass meaningful civil rights legislation.

CRA 1964

Civil Rights Act of 1964, widely considered to be among the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in American history. The comprehensive act barred segregation in public accommodations and outlawed discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and national or religious origin.

Freedom Summer

Freedom Summer in Mississippi, a drive to register African American voters in a state with an ugly history of discrimination. Freedom Summer campaigners set up schools for African American children and endured intimidation tactics. Even with progress, violent resistance against civil rights continued, particularly in regions with longstanding traditions of segregation.

Bloody Sunday

In March 1965, when activists attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, with the support of prominent civil rights leaders on behalf of local African American voting rights. In a narrative that had become familiar, "Bloody Sunday" featured peaceful protesters attacked by white law enforcement with batons and tear gas.

VRA 1965

Coverage of the first march prompted President Johnson to present the bill that became the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an act that abolished voting discrimination in federal, state, and local elections.

Great Society

President Johnson laid out a sweeping vision for a package of domestic reforms known as the Great Society. At its heart, he promised, the Great Society would uplift racially and economically disfranchised Americans, too long denied access to federal guarantees of equal democratic and economic opportunity, while simultaneously raising all Americans' standards and quality of life

--War on Poverty (criticisms"

the left, frustrated liberals recognized the president's resistance to empowering minority poor and also assailed the growing war in Vietnam, the cost of which undercut domestic poverty spending. As racial unrest and violence swept across urban centers, critics from the right lambasted federal spending for "unworthy" and even criminal citizens

--"maximum feasible participation"?

Johnson's antipoverty planners felt the key to uplifting disfranchised and impoverished Americans was involving poor and marginalized citizens in the actual administration of poverty programs, what they called "maximum feasible participation."

Riots

Many Americans also viewed the riots as an indictment of the Great Society,

"white flight"

The phenomenon of "white flight"—when whites in metropolitan areas fled city centers for the suburbs—often resulted in "re-segregated" residential patterns.

1954 Geneva

On the eve of the Geneva Peace Conference in 1954, Viet Minh forces defeated the French army at Dien Bien Phu.

Diem

Diem, who had lived in the United States, was a committed anti-communist. Diem's government, however, and its Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) could not contain the communist insurgency seeking the reunification of Vietnam.

ARVN v. VC

Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) Vietcong (VC) could not contain the communist insurgency seeking the reunification of Vietnam. The Americans provided weapons and support, but, despite a clear numerical and technological advantage, South Vietnam stumbled before insurgent Vietcong (VC) units

Tonkin

USS Maddox reported incoming fire from North Vietnamese ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Counterculture v. conservative culture

Rebellion rocked the supposedly hidebound conservatism of the 1950s as the youth counterculture became mainstream.Much of the counterculture was filtered through popular culture and consumption

Woodstock

Woodstock concert became shorthand for the new youth culture and its mixture of politics, protest, and personal fulfillment.

Black Power

encouraged African Americans to pursue freedom, equality, and justice by "any means necessary.

--X

i don't call it violence with it is self defense. Malcom X

--NOI

a Nation of Islam (NOI) minister (Malcom X)

--MLK?

Urban League criticized both Malcolm X and the NOI for what they perceived to be racial demagoguery. King believed Malcolm's speeches were a "great disservice" to black Americans, claiming that X's speeches lamented the problems of African Americans without offering solutions. The differences between Dr. King and Malcolm X represented a core ideological tension that would inhabit black political thought throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

SNCC

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), led by figures such as Stokely Carmichael, had expelled its white members and shunned the interracial effort in the rural South, focusing instead on injustices in northern urban areas.

Black Panthers

The Black Panthers worked in local communities to run "survival programs" that provided food, clothing, medical treatment, and drug rehabilitation. They focused on modes of resistance that empowered black activists on their own terms.

--decolonization

decolonization" in their drive to liberate black communities from white power structures.

--survival

The Black Panthers worked in local communities to run "survival programs" that provided food, clothing, medical treatment, and drug rehabilitation.

Native American civil rights

frustrated Native American university students founded the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) to draw attention to the plight of indigenous Americans.

--Red Power

what was called the Red Power movement, an intertribal movement designed to draw attention to Native issues and protest discrimination

Chicano movement

the Chicano movement in the 1960s emerged out of the broader Mexican American civil rights movement of the post-World War II era. While "Chicano" was initially considered a derogatory term for Mexican immigrants, activists in the 1960s reclaimed the term and used it as a catalyst to campaign for political and social change among Mexican Americans.The Chicano movement confronted discrimination in schools, politics, agriculture, and other formal and informal institutions

--Chavez & Huerta/UFW/Marcha

Cesar Chavez became the most well-known figure of the Chicano movement.Chavez and activist Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association, which eventually merged and became the United Farm Workers of America (UFWA).The UFWA fused the causes of Chicano and Filipino activists protesting subpar working conditions of California farmers on American soil. March Chavez led a 300-mile march in March and April of 1966 from Delano, California to the state capital of Sacramento.

--Corky/Aztlan—Raza Unida

Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales was another activist whose calls for Chicano self-determination resonated long past the 1960s. A former boxer and Denver native, Gonzales founded the Crusade for Justice in 1966, an organization that would establish the first annual Chicano Liberation Day at the National Chicano Youth Conference by decade's end. The conference also yielded the Plan Espiritual de Aztlan, a Chicano nationalist manifesto that reflected Gonzales' vision of Chicano as a unified, historically grounded, all-encompassing group fighting against discrimination in the United States.

Invitation to Action

The Commission's Invitation to Action was released in 1963. Finding discriminatory provisions in the law and practices of industrial, labor, and governmental organizations, the Commission advocated for "changes, many of them long overdue, in the conditions of women's opportunity in the United States."

Betty and her "Mystique"

Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique hit bookshelves the same year the Commission released its report. Friedan had been active in the union movement, and was by this time a mother in the new suburban landscape of post-war America. In her book, Friedan labeled the "problem that has no name," and in doing so helped many white middle-class American women come to see their dissatisfaction as housewives not as something "wrong with [their] marriage, or [themselves]," but instead as a social problem experienced by millions of American women.

NOW

NOW (the National Organization for Women), the 1970 protest focused on employment discrimination, political equality, abortion, free childcare, and equality in marriage.

Challenges to feminism

Not only would feminism face opposition from other women who valued the traditional homemaker role to which feminists objected, the feminist movement would also fracture internally as minority women challenged white feminists' racism and lesbians vied for more prominence within feminist organizations

Environmentalism

American environmentalism's significant gains during the 1960s emerged in part from Americans' recreational use of nature.

--Silent Spring

Rachel Carson published her landmark book, Silent Spring, in 1962, a nascent environmentalism had emerged in America. Silent Spring stood out as an unparalleled argument for the interconnectedness of ecological and human health

--Earth Day

culminating in the largest demonstration in history, Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, and in a decade of lawmaking that significantly restructured American government. Even before the massive gathering for Earth Day, lawmakers from the local to federal level had pushed for and achieved regulations to clean up the air and water.

--EPA

Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law in 1970, requiring environmental impact statements for any project directed or funded by the federal government. He also created the Environmental Protection Agency, the first agency charged with studying, regulating, and disseminating knowledge about the environment.

Vatican II

The Second Vatican Council, called by Pope John XXIII to modernize the church and bring it in closer dialogue with the non-Catholic world, operated from 1962 to 1965, when it proclaimed multiple reforms, including the "vernacular mass" (or, mass in local languages, rather than in Latin) and a greater role for laypeople, and especially women, in the Church. Many Catholic churches adopted more informal, contemporary styles. Many conservative Catholics recoiled at what they perceived as rapid and dangerous changes, but Vatican II's reforms in many ways created the modern Catholic Church.