Introduction

The 1960’s was a decade of considerable change in the United States of America, marking the beginning of a fight for equality that lives on today.  Pivotal occurrences including the unpopular Vietnam War, a successful Civil Rights movement, a frightening Cold War, the shocking assassinations of Dr. King and the Kennedy’s, the breathtaking moon landing, an earthquake in the Women’s Rights movement, and cultural phenomena including Rock ‘n Roll music, the first Earth Day, and the seminal events leading up to Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, proved to be powerful elements in the building-blocks of radical change.  Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin write about this change and its nature in their book America Divided (2021) by underscoring how the events of the 1960’s represented a period of national ‘redemption’ and ‘civic virtue’ that peaks at times in American history, drawing on images of Presidents Lincoln and Obama and the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to “[take] the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,” with the authors adding that “it is in just such eras of discord and conflict that Americans have shown themselves most likely to rediscover and live out the best traditions to be found in our national experience."  This portrayal of America as seeking redemption, or surfacing uncomfortable national dialogues, is as relevant today as in the 1960’s as liberal partisans waged a war of words on authoritarianism and populism here in the United States. To wit, dialogue around the world is necessary. Today, Europe struggles to rein in a regressive warmonger in Russia, the United Kingdom has left the European Union and turned sharply to the political right, and pro-fascist sentiment is on the rise in Italy.

Argument

Prior to the 1960’s African Americans had been organizing and creating support networks since their arrival in America in the early 17th century, during the struggle against virulent racism in the Antebellum Southern United States, through the injustices suffered during the First Great Migration, and most recently, in the Jim Crow South, often with white allies.  Echoes of these struggles can be heard throughout the 1960’s, but most notably in the Civil Rights movement, a clarion call for Black rights.  Many well-known figures from American history answered this call, including John Lewis and Fannie Hamer, a principle in the freedom movement. Some of the rhetoric and the pacifism that were core to the success of the Civil Rights movement were inspired by Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. King. But the movement’s real strength lies in its ability to support a framework that builds structures, “formal and informal organizations, communication networks, local movement centers, social movement organizations and leadership structures,” according to Aldon Morris in his article for the Annual Review of Sociology. These structures allow organizations to subsequently organize people and commit to demonstrating civil disobedience in small, local groups of agitators. Taken together, these factors helped the Civil Rights movement secure a considerable victory in the fight for African American equality culminating in President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

These events became models for organizing principles for many other groups of people that were disaffected in America, having experienced oppression and exclusion before the revolution of the 1960’s.  Music, including Rock ‘n Roll, a newfound sexual freedom differentiating young and old and with less focus on the nuclear family, and a new wave of religious sentiment and options acted as further catalysts in the fight for equal rights in America.  Gay and lesbian activists including Harvey Milk, who moved to San Francisco in 1972 to run for public office and “secured passage of a gay rights ordinance," saw advances.  The Women’s Right’s movement, Disability Right’s, and the United Farm Workers all enjoyed success replicating the model of the Civil Rights movement.  Isserman and Kazan explain that a New Left began to assert itself alongside a new, intellectual Conservative movement.  “The same impulse that led some to volunteer for government-sponsored experiments in social service and community organizing led others to join insurgent movements for civil rights and peace."  On the political right, however, ‘The Conservative Revival’ had been brewing since before the liberal movements of the 1960’s, and were represented by Barry Goldwater’s call “to preserve social and moral order and to practice self-reliance, echo[ing] the sentiments of many a Puritan minister, slave-holding planter, and self-made industrialist,” setting the stage for an acrimonious political and culture atmosphere that would persist in the coming decades.

Conclusion

In the conclusion to America Divided, the authors note William Faulkner’s quote from “A Rose for Emily,” his 1930’s short story about a young girl rooted in her past, and to her disappointment, “’…the past is never dead.  It’s not even past.’”  Events that shaped the 1960’s were a fierce reaction to traditional values that is evident in the United States, and the world, today.  Now the past, as now, it was a second civil war to many, as expressed by Karl. S. Betts, director of the Civil War Centennial Commission to a journalist in 1959, a couple of years before the commemorative event, “There was, he insisted, ‘a bigger thing’…and that was ‘the beginning of a new America’ ushered in by the Civil War,” and continuing that:

‘The story of the devotion and loyalty of Southern Negroes is one of the outstanding things of the Civil War.  A lot of fine negro people loved life as it was in the old South.  There’s a wonderful story there – a story of great devotion that is inspiring to all people, white, black, or yellow.’

Historical revisionism, the debate about Civil War-era monuments, the rise of authoritarian leadership, and the specter of white supremacy are reactions to the cultural shifts and political ideals of the 1960’s.  The behavior of Americans, and indeed people around the world, is reinforcing the notion that surfacing these national dialogues and probing them for truth and reconciliation, a redemption, are desperately needed today in a world full of crises, from climate change to the Russian war in Europe.

Bibliography

Isserman, Maurice and Michael Kazin. America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. 2021.

Morris, Alan D. “A Retrospective on the Civil Rights Movement: Political and Intellectual Landmarks.” Annual Review of Sociology. Vol. 25, ed. 1. 1999.