The 60's

The civil rights movement picked up momentum during the 1960's. The movement started in the 1950's to protest segregation. In 1896, the Supreme Court had ruled that there should be "separate but equal" facilities for black and white Americans. The ruling dictated that everything from maternity wards to morgues be segregated. Though separate, segregated facilities, particularly schools, were seldom, if ever, equal. White schools were usually new and well-maintained while black schools were single room shacks. In 1951, the Reverend Oliver Brown tried to enroll his daughter, Linda, in all-white Sumner Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas. Denied, Brown sued the Board of Education, and the case was argued before the Supreme Court in 1953. In an unanimous decision, the Court ruled, "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Brown v. the Board of Education ended segregation in public schools, but school systems in both the North and South fought the decision.

The civil rights movement began in earnest after 43-year-old seamstress Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. The black community of Montgomery selected the minister of her church, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to lead the protest against her arrest. King put his philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience into action by organizing a boycott of Montgomery's buses. For more than a year no black person rode a Montgomery bus. In November 1956, the Supreme Court ordered Montgomery to desegregate its buses. For the next ten years, peaceful protests led the civil rights movement slowly along until it boiled over in the mid-1960's.

In 1963, King led 250,000 people in a peaceful march on Washington, D.C. His televised "I have a dream" speech confronted white America with the justice of the civil rights movement. He said, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.'" In June 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and in October, King won the Nobel Peace Prize.

By 1965, however, the tenor of the movement changed; it's nonviolence was being increasingly met with violence and death. President Kennedy and Mississippi NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) leader Medgar Evars had both been killed in 1963. In 1964, a Birmingham, Alabama church was bombed, killing four little girls, and three civil rights workers were slain in Mississippi. Malcolm X, one-time spokesman for the Nation of Islam and leader of the Organization for Afro-American Unity, was murdered in early 1965. On August 11, 1965, a predominately black section of Los Angeles called Watts erupted in six days of riots. A white policeman had arrested a black motorist for drunk driving, and the gathering crowd's frustration erupted into violence. The summer of 1965 was the first of several summers that left cities smoldering with unrest, the worst rioting happening in Newark and Detroit in 1967. Presidential commissions studying the riots determined the cause was economic. Martin Luther King agreed, "I worked to get these people the right to eat hamburgers, and now I've got to do something to help them get the money to buy them." However, he was killed in March 1968, setting off another wave of riots.

• June 1960

  Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev pledges support for "wars of national liberation" in an address to the United Nations.

• January 1961

  In his inauguration speech, President Kennedy says, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty."

• April 1961

  Soviet Yuri Gagarin is the first man in space.

  Central Intelligence Agency-backed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs fails.

• August 1961

  The Berlin Wall is erected between West and East Berlin.

• September 1961

  As part of a campaign to reduce the United States' vulnerability to nuclear attack, President Kennedy advises Americans to build fallout shelters. President Kennedy's letter in the September issue of Life magazine sets off a wave of "shelter-mania" which lasts for about a year.

• October 1962

  U.S. reconnaissance discovers Soviet missiles in Cuba. The United States blockades Cuba for 13 days until the Soviet Union agrees to remove its missiles. The United States also agrees to remove its missiles from Turkey.

• June 1963

  The United States and Soviet Union set up a hotline (teletype) between the White House and the Kremlin.

• August 1963

  The United States and Soviet Union sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits underwater, atmospheric, and outer space nuclear tests. More than 100 countries have ratified the treaty since 1963.

• March 1965

  First U.S. combat troops are sent to Vietnam.

• 1966-1967

  The large number of utility orders for nuclear power reactors makes nuclear power a commercial reality in the United States.

• July 1968

  Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)--calling for halting the spread of nuclear weapons capabilities--is signed. By 1970, more than 50 countries had ratified the NPT. By 1986, more than 130 countries had ratified it.

• July 1969

  American Neil Armstrong is the first man on the moon.