Chapter Overview

Great movements have smaller, often painfully human dimensions. Six-year-old Ruby displayed one kind of courage; an Atlanta school teacher showed quite another. Both made essential contributions to a dream too long deferred; both illustrated the reality of adjusting to rapid change.

A Liberal Agenda for Reform

The roots of social upheaval in the 1960s lay beneath the calm surface of the 1950s. John F. Kennedy opened the new era with his call for conquering "new frontiers."

Kennedy and his advisors, facing a balky Congress controlled by conservative Democrats, tried to apply the ideas of John Maynard Keynes to increase economic growth without inflation. But they could not overcome the mistrust of the business community. The Supreme Court proved a more influential agency for reform, handing down critical decisions on civil liberties and, most far-reaching, voting rights.

Civil Rights and the New South

When the southern economy began to grow and diversify, it lost many low-wage, low-skill jobs. An outflow of poor workers, especially black, accelerated. For those who remained, the Jim Crow system kept them in second-class status.

Black reformers concentrated on ways to end legal segregation. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's success in getting the Supreme Court to overturn the prevailing "separate but equal" doctrine inspired civil rights leaders to adopt more assertive approaches.

The Civil Rights Crusade

Civil rights proved to be the crucial test of liberalism. Kennedy only reluctantly took up the cause that threatened to split the Democratic Party. Leadership came instead from black political and religious organizations. Sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and other forms of nonviolent protest became the weapons to fight segregation. The sometimes brutal reactions of southern police and white supremacists shocked national television audiences and especially Attorney General Robert Kennedy. On several occasions, the younger Kennedy ordered federal marshals to protect civil rights groups. On August 28, 1963, over 200,000 people gathered in Washington to hear Martin Luther King speak of his dreams for integration.

Kennedy had committed himself to a civil rights bill, but he was assassinated in Dallas. Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner, pushed through a broad Civil Rights Act in 1964 and a Voting Rights Act in 1965. Even those advances could not quiet the increasingly militant and radical demands of black nationalist groups. In the North, civil rights leaders discovered de facto barriers to integration far more difficult to remove than the South's "Jim Crow" laws. Beginning in 1964, a series of race riots tore through the nation's cities.

Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society

Lyndon Johnson was determined to leave an enduring mark on the nation. Not only did he commit himself to civil rights and liberal tax cuts but also to aid to education, health benefits for the elderly and poor, job training, housing, urban renewal, the environment, and more. His "The Great Society" surpassed the New Deal's legislative outpouring.

Johnson's vision proved heady indeed. Many of the initiatives had a higher price tag than he or his supporters imagined. Inefficiency, corruption, soaring costs, and political infighting dogged many Great Society programs.

The Counterculture

Many young Americans were giving up on traditional politics and social conventions. One group of political activists, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), distinguished their brand of politics from the Marxists of the 1930s by describing themselves as the New Left. A battle over free speech at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 brought radical student movements wide national exposure.

Other youth forsook politics and flouted convention in favor of non-materialistic lifestyles, experimenting with sex, drugs, and music in search of altered consciousness. Much of the style of the "counterculture" came from West Coast "hippies." Drugs played a central role. So, too, did the folk music of Bob Dylan and rock music revitalized by the Beatles and other English groups. By the late 1960s, youthful hopes of building a better world, whether through a Great Society, radical politics, or revolution, began to collapse. The era's soaring dreams were brought to earth under the weight of an invasive commercialism, the lack of coherence within the movements, growing violence, and above all the impact of the war in Vietnam.