Expansion on Civil Rights

The counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s:

Offered an alternative to:

Bland homogeneity of American middle-class life
Patriarchal family structures
Self-discipline
Unquestioning patriotism
The acquisition of property

Characteristics of "Hippies":

Rejected traditional society's conventions
Men: Beards and long hair
Men and women: Clothing from non-Western cultures
Defied parents
Rejected social etiquettes and manners
Music as self-expression
Casual sex was acceptable
Drug use was common (marijuana, LSD, peyote)
Advocated peace and freedom

Communes:

Rural areas
Shared desire to live closer to nature
Respect for the earth
Dislike of modern life
Disdain for wealth and material goods
Grew organic food
Abolished private property
Free love was practiced

The Farm (Tennessee, 1971):

Blend of Christian and Asian beliefs
Shared housing
No private property (except tools and clothing)
Advocated nonviolence
Lived as one with nature
Vegetarians
Avoided animal products
Smoked marijuana

Music:

Rock and folk music
Concerts: Celebrated youth, rebellion, and individuality
Woodstock (August 1969):

Rural Bethel, New York
Nearly 400,000 attendees
32 acts performed
Marijuana, LSD, and alcohol use
Symbolized cultural independence and freedom

As politics became more radicalized, a "Red Power" Movement emerged in Native American communities.

1968: American Indian Movement (AIM) formed in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

• Organizers were urban dwellers frustrated by decades of poverty and discrimination.

• 1970 statistics:
  Life expectancy: 46 years (vs. 69 national average)
  Suicide rate: Twice the general population
  Infant mortality rate: Highest in the country

• Half of all Indians lived on reservations, where unemployment reached 50 percent.

• Among those in cities, 20 percent lived below the poverty line.

AIM tactics:

• Attention-grabbing stunts to draw attention to their cause.

• November 20, 1969: Occupation of Alcatraz Island.
  Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868): All retired, abandoned, or out-of-use federal land was to be returned to Native people.
  Alcatraz penitentiary had been closed (1963) and declared surplus federal property (1964).
  Plans to build an American Indian cultural center.

• Federal government negotiated to persuade them to leave.

• Government forces removed the final holdouts on June 11, 1971.

• 1972: "Trail of Broken Treaties" march on Washington, DC, and occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).
  Demands included improved housing, education, and economic opportunities; new treaties; return of Indian lands; and protections for native religions and culture.

• February 1973: Occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
  Site of the 1890 massacre of Lakota tribe members.
  AIM criticized the U.S. government for failing to live up to its treaties.

• Siege lasted 71 days.

• Two AIM leaders, Dennis Banks and Russell Means, were arrested, but charges were later dismissed.

• Outcomes:
  Nixon administration halted the federal policy of termination.
  Restored millions of acres to tribes.
  Increased funding for Indian education, healthcare, legal services, housing, and economic development.
  Hiring of more Indian employees in the BIA.

Although most people have heard of the Red Scare, most people have never heard of what historians term, "The Lavender Scare."

Between the 1940's and the 1960's homosexuals or people suspected of being gay were being forced out of federal jobs and the military.

Senator McCarthy even attempted to make links between homosexuality, communism, and espionage.

Because there was migration to the cities and because of publications like the Kinsey Report, people were becoming aware that homosexuality was more common than they had previously thought.

Rather than leading to acceptance, this growing awareness led to a crackdown and increased oppression of homosexuals.

According to Judith Adkins, archivist at the National Archives,

"In 1947 the U.S. Park Police initiated in the city a 'Sex Perversion Elimination Program,' targeting gay men for arrest and intimidation. A year later, Congress passed an act 'for the treatment of sexual psychopaths' in the nation's capital. That law facilitated the arrest and punishment of people who acted on same-sex desire and also labeled them mentally ill. Homosexuality was perceived as a lurking subversive threat at a time when the country was coping with tremendous social change…"

Combined with this increased threat, the sexual revolution, and the feminist movement of the 1960s, the counterculture helped establish a climate that fostered the struggle for gay and lesbian rights.

Many gay rights groups were founded in Los Angeles and San Francisco, cities that were administrative centers in the network of U.S. military installations and the places where many gay men suffered dishonorable discharges.

The first postwar organization for homosexual civil rights, the Mattachine Society, was launched in Los Angeles in 1950.

The first national organization for lesbians, the Daughters of Bilitis, was founded in San Francisco five years later.

In 1966, the city became home to the world’s first organization for transsexual people, the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, and in 1967, the Sexual Freedom League of San Francisco was born.

Through these organizations and others, gay and lesbian activists fought against the criminalization and discrimination of their sexual identities on a number of occasions throughout the 1960s, employing strategies of both protests and litigation.

However, the most famous event in the gay rights movement took place not in San Francisco but in New York City.

Early in the morning of June 28, 1969, police raided a Greenwich Village gay bar called the Stonewall Inn.

Although such raids were common, the response of the Stonewall patrons was anything but.

As the police prepared to arrest many of the customers, especially transsexuals and cross-dressers, who were particular targets for police harassment, a crowd began to gather.

Angered by the brutal treatment of the prisoners, the crowd attacked.

Beer bottles and bricks were thrown.

The police barricaded themselves inside the bar and waited for reinforcements.

The riot continued for several hours and resumed the following night.

Shortly thereafter, the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists’ Alliance were formed, and began to protest discrimination, homophobia, and violence against gay people, promoting gay liberation and gay pride.

With a call for gay men and women to “come out”—a consciousness-raising campaign that shared many principles with the counterculture, gay and lesbian communities moved from the urban underground into the political sphere.

Gay rights activists protested strongly against the official position of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which categorized homosexuality as a mental illness and often resulted in job loss, loss of custody, and other serious personal consequences.

By 1974, the APA had ceased to classify homosexuality as a form of mental illness but continued to consider it a “sexual orientation disturbance.”

Nevertheless, in 1974, Kathy Kozachenko became the first openly lesbian woman voted into office in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In 1977, Harvey Milk became California’s first openly gay man elected to public office, although his service on San Francisco’s board of supervisors, along with that of San Francisco mayor George Moscone, was cut short by the bullet of disgruntled former city supervisor Dan White.

And while many civil rights like marriage would remain elusive into the 21st century, the march for progress had

The African American bid for full citizenship was surely the most visible of the battles for civil rights taking place in the United States. However, other minority groups that had been legally discriminated against or otherwise denied access to economic and educational opportunities began to increase efforts to secure their rights in the 1960s. Like the African American movement, the Mexican American civil rights movement won its earliest victories in the federal courts. In 1947, in Mendez v. Westminster, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that segregating children of Hispanic descent was unconstitutional. In 1954, the same year as Brown v. Board of Education, Mexican Americans prevailed in Hernandez v. Texas, when the U.S. Supreme Court extended the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to all ethnic groups in the United States.

The equivalent of the Black Power movement among Mexican Americans was the Chicano Movement. Proudly adopting a derogatory term for Mexican Americans, Chicano activists demanded increased political power for Mexican Americans, education that recognized their cultural heritage, and the restoration of lands taken from them at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. One of the founding members, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, launched the Crusade for Justice in Denver in 1965, to provide jobs, legal services, and healthcare for Mexican Americans.

From this movement arose La Raza Unida, a political party that attracted many Mexican American college students. Elsewhere, Reies López Tijerina fought for years to reclaim lost and illegally expropriated ancestral lands in New Mexico; he was one of the co-sponsors of the Poor People’s March on Washington in 1967.The Chicano Movement, or El Movimiento was made up of four separate movements because of the disparity of the issues facing "Chicanos" in the United States. There was a youth movement that fought for equality in the schools and was a constant companion of anti-war protesters, an urban movement that focused on issues of poverty faced in the inner cities, a farm workers movement focused on the rights and treatment of migrant farm workers, and the political efficacy movement that focused on getting Americans of Latino descent elected to political office.

The highest-profile struggle of the Mexican American civil rights movement was the fight that Caesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta waged in the fields of California to organize migrant farm workers. In 1962, Chavez and Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). In 1965, when Filipino grape pickers led by Filipino American Larry Itliong went on strike to call attention to their plight, Chavez lent his support. Workers organized by the NFWA also went on strike, and the two organizations merged to form the United Farm Workers. When Chavez asked American consumers to boycott grapes, politically conscious people around the country heeded his call, and many unionized longshoremen refused to unload grape shipments. In 1966, Chavez led striking workers to the state capitol in Sacramento, further publicizing the cause. Martin Luther King, Jr. telegraphed words of encouragement to Chavez, whom he called a “brother.” The strike ended in 1970 when California farmers recognized the right of farm workers to unionize. However, the farm workers did not gain all they sought, and the larger struggle did not end. Responding to the mistreatment of union membership in the fields, Chavez commenced a three-week hunger strike to receive national attention. When the grape growers recognized his union in 1970, his deeds were vindicated.

A century of full-fledged industrialism in America had taken its toll on the environment. Concerned citizens began to appeal in earnest to protect more of the nation's wilderness areas. Emissions into the atmosphere were creating smoggy haze rings above many metropolitan centers. Trash was piling up. Many Americans felt free to deposit waste from their increasingly disposable society along the sides of the roads. In the climate of social activism, the 1960s also became a decade of earth action.

Rachel Carson sent a wake-up call to America with her 1962 book "Silent Spring" Carson wrote of the horrors of DDT, a popular pesticide used on many American farms. DDT wrought havoc on the nation's bird population. The pesticide, when ingested by birds, proved poisonous. Carson then witnessed a spring where birds did not return to farms.

The book created a firestorm of concern for the environment. Many students involved in the peace and civil rights movements also embraced the call for environmental awareness. President Johnson responded with the Wilderness Protection Act, the Water Quality Act, and the Air Quality Act. An activist organization named Greenpeace formed in 1969. Inspired by Senator Gaylord Nelson and created by students, the nation celebrated its first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. President Nixon, despite his overall lack of sympathy for the earth movement, could not resist supporting popular environmentalist measures.

In 1970, he signed legislation creating the Enviromental Protection Agency, a federal watchdog dedicated to proper care of the planet. He also stiffened standards for emissions and waste with the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. The Endangered Species Act also provided much needed protection to wildlife on the brink of annihilation.For years, the environmentalists had two major factions. Conservationists such as Theodore Roosevelt believed that the nation's natural heritage could be maintained through wise, efficient use of resources.

Preservationists such as John Muir and the Sierra Club celebrated the majesty of the landscape and preferred protection of wilderness areas. The 1960s ushered in the ecologists, who studied the relationships between living organisms and their environments. Pollution was destroying this delicate balance, and the result could be health problems, extinction of species, or even planetary destruction.

Young Americans learned ecology in elementary school as a nationwide awareness campaign attempted to raise consciousness. Woodsy The Owl advised youngsters to "never be a dirty bird." Thousands felt their heartstrings tugged as they viewed television advertisements depicting mountains of trash culminating with a pensive Native American shedding a single, mournful tear.

Although many environmentalists were disappointed that all goals were not reached, substantive changes did improve the quality of American air and

The feminist push for greater rights continued through the 1970s. The media often ridiculed feminists as “women’s libbers” and focused on more radical organizations like W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), a loose association of activist groups. Many reporters stressed the most unusual goals of the most radical women—calls for the abolition of marriage and demands that manholes be renamed “personholes.”
The majority of feminists, however, sought meaningful accomplishments. In the 1970s, they opened battered women’s shelters and successfully fought for protection from employment discrimination for pregnant women, reform of rape laws (such as the abolition of laws requiring a witness to corroborate a woman’s report of rape), criminalization of domestic violence, and funding for schools that sought to counter sexist stereotypes of women. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade affirmed a number of state laws under which abortions obtained during the first three months of pregnancy were legal. This made a nontherapeutic abortion a legal medical procedure nationwide.
Many advances in women’s rights were the result of women’s greater engagement in politics. For example, Patsy Mink, the first Asian American woman elected to Congress, was the co-author of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, Title IX of which prohibits sex discrimination in education. Mink had been interested in fighting discrimination in education since her youth, when she opposed racial segregation in campus housing while a student at the University of Nebraska. She went to law school after being denied admission to medical school because of her gender. Like Mink, many other women sought and won political office, many with the help of the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC). In 1971, the NWPC was formed by Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and other leading feminists to encourage women’s participation in political parties, elect women to office, and raise money for their campaigns.
The ultimate political goal of the National Organization for Women (NOW) was the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The amendment passed Congress in March 1972, and was sent to the states for ratification with a deadline of seven years for passage; if the amendment was not ratified by thirty-eight states by 1979, it would die. Twenty-two states ratified the ERA in 1972, and eight more in 1973. In the next two years, only four states voted for the amendment. In 1979, still four votes short, the amendment received a brief reprieve when Congress agreed to a three-year extension,