APUSH 8.5 - The Fifties

Main Idea: The generalization that this decade was a time of cohesion and prosperity masks the underlying social tensions that permeated society.

RACE

A. Brown v. Board 1954

  • Brown vs the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
  • NAACP was looking for a legal way to fight segregation in the courts
  • Topeka, Kansas schools were segregated based on race, and this because the basis for the NAACP’s suit.
  • Put forth several of the best lawyers to represent the Brown family for free, eventually the case passed on the ruling that segregation was not constitutional under the 14th amendment, and that the “separate but equal” concept was inherently unequal.

B. Backlash

  • Southern states largely don’t want to follow this ruling, so they have lots of angry groups forming the Citizens Council that fought the desegregation movement
  • Argued that segregation would have been a states rights issue
  • Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas was a central opponent to desegregation, which led to some problems in the subsequent years

C. The Struggle

  1. Rosa Parks
       * Secretary of the NWCP office in the Montgomery, Alabama area that planned a public protest in which she would refuse to move to the black section of the bus
       * She was arrested and put in jail, and it became hugely public. Martin Luther King Jr, the de facto spokesman for the movement, was helping
       * Started a bus boycott, almost the entire black population of Montgomery refused to ride the bus, causing them to lose a ton of money until in 1956, the follwoing year, the bus segregation was ruled unconstitutional in a US court
       * This caused integration that ented the boycott
  2. Little Rock
       * 1957, Little Rock, Arkansas
       * Schools are supposed to be desegregated, but the governor refuses, so Eisenhower sends troops to Little Rock to protect the students as they went into Central High School in Little Rock
       * “Little Rock Nine” - nine students were escorted by the National Guard into Central High School
       * The governor was so mad that he shut down the entire public school system in Arkansas

THE BEAT MOVEMENT

A. Ideology

  • Rejection of society: going against all the conformity (identical little houses, familes that all look the same, people who dress the same)
  • Precursor to 1960s hippies
  • Embraces things not culturally embraced by everyone else, ex. jazz, drugs

B. Details

  • Jack Kerouac is largely the figurehead of the movement, wrote a book called On the Road, basically about people who do drugs and drive around??

C. Legacy

  • Counterculture type of movement against the common, conformed society created in the 1950s.

FATHER KNOWS BEST

A. The Problem with No Name

  • Father knows best about how families should be set up, the one with the single income, while the mother takes care of the house
  • The dad is the breadwinner, woman is the homemaker
  • The problem is the conformative societal structure in a time where women are trying to get into the workplace
  • Causes backlash against women trying to work during the 1950s
  • Average age of marriage is 18, so if you’re a woman in her 20s who isn’t married, it’s considered to be “bad”
  • Decrease in women’s education (college) because they’re expected to be wives
  • Eventually begins to be questioned toward the end of the decade, Betty Friedan writes a book called the Feminine Mystique that argues that women should get to choose what they want to do with their lives
  • Establishes women’s rights movements moving into the 60s and 70s, feminism incresases

B. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit

  • Sloan Wilson writes the novel The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit that criticizes the societal structure of the family in this time period
  • Huge number of white collar jobs available over blue collar jobs, so they put on “grey flannel suits” and go to work
      * Blue collar: physical labor
      * White collar: non-labor positions
  • White collar workers don’t have much authority or work, they’re just supposed to sort of be there, earn money, but causes stress at home

C. Rebels Without a Cause

  • Teenagers of the 1950s, rebel against everything
  • Just rebel against random stuff because average American teens have way better standards of living than ever before, so they’re not rebelling against too much, just casually authority
  • People are saying there’s nothing to be that upset about, but teenagers become a key demographic in marketing of products

ROCK N ROLL

A. Origins

  • Comes out of Mississippi Blues mixed in with some fast country and western music causes the development of “rhythm and blues” music
  • Originally seen as just black music as it appeals to Black Southerners
  • Elvis Presley steals songs from black artists without crediting or paying them, then recorded them himself
  • This causes the music to appeal to a much wider and whiter audience
  • DJ Alan Creed plays Elvis on the radio for the first time, refers to it as “Rock and Roll” because it “Rhythm and Blues” refers to the black music
  • Young people fall in love with rock and roll, not caring that it was necessarily black music, and got into R&B music artists like Chuck Berry - the people the music was taken from
  • Blurs racial lines for younger generations