USA: The civil rights years
Racial segregation of public facilities, which had remained the norm in the South ever since Reconstruction, was in 1954 finally declared illegal by the Supreme Court ruling on Brown vs Topeka Board of Education . Just as a century before, however, the Southern states saw the issue more in terms of states' rights than of human rights, and attempting to implement the law, or even to challenge the failure to implement it, required immense courage. The action of Rosa Parks in refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955 triggered a successful mass boycott, and pushed the 27-year-old Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr to the forefront of the civil rights campaign. Further confrontation took place at the Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, when the reluctant Eisenhower found himself forced to call in federal troops to counter the state's unwillingness to integrate its education system.The election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency in 1960, by the narrowest of margins, marked a sea-change in American politics, even if in retrospect his policies do not seem exactly radical. At 43 the youngest ever president, and the first Catholic, he was prepared literally to reach for the moon, urging the US to victory in the Space Race in which it had thus far lagged humiliatingly behind the Soviet Union. Kennedy had won in part thanks to his spurious allegations concerning the "missile gap," and after years of peace under Eisenhower the Cold War soon began to heat up again. Fortunately, the US military spotted Soviet missile bases in Communist Cuba in 1962 before the missiles themselves had been installed, and Kennedy insisted they be withdrawn. Kennedy had had rather less success the previous year, however, in launching the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and he also managed to embroil America in the ongoing war in Vietnam, by sending "advisers" to Saigon.
Another factor in Kennedy's election success had been a much-publicized telephone call to the wife of Dr King, during one of King's many sojourns in Southern jails, but as president he was rarely keen to identify himself with the civil rights movement. The campaign nonetheless made headway, given added momentum by the global impact of television news programs showing such horrific images as Birmingham police chief "Bull" Connor turning water cannons and dogs on peaceful demonstrators in 1963. The movement's defining moment came when Dr King delivered his eloquent "I Have a Dream" speech during the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom" later that summer. For his unwavering espousal of Gandhian principles of nonviolence, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. Nonetheless, part of the reason that middle America came to accept the need to address racial inequalities was the threat it perceived in the rhetoric of Malcolm X , who argued that black people had the right to defend themselves against aggression.
After Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, his successor Lyndon Johnson ("LBJ," in homage to Roosevelt's "FDR") was responsible for pushing through a body of legislation that enacted most of civil rights campaigners' key demands. Violent white resistance in the South continued, however, and only the long, painstaking and dangerous work of registering Southern black voters en masse eventually forced Southern politicians to mend their ways.
Johnson won a landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater in the election of 1964, but whether his dream of building a "Great Society" could ever have reached fruition is impossible to know. Instead he was soon brought low by the war in Vietnam , where American involvement had escalated beyond all reason or apparent control. Broad-based popular opposition to the conflict grew in proportion to the death toll of American soldiers, and the threat of the draft heightened the mood of youthful rebellion. San Francisco in particular responded to psychedelic prophet Timothy Leary's call to "turn on, tune in, drop out"; 1967's Summer of Love saw the lone beatniks of the Fifties transmogrify into an entire generation of hippies.
From the earliest days of the civil rights struggle, Dr King had argued that social justice could only be achieved through economic equality. That message was given a new urgency by riots in the ghettos of Los Angeles in 1965 and Detroit in 1967, and the emergence of the Black Panthers, an armed defense force in the tradition of the now-dead Malcolm X. King also began to denounce the Vietnam War; meanwhile, after refusing the draft with the words "No Vietcong ever called me nigger," Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title as world heavyweight boxing champion.
In 1968, not long after his plummeting popularity led LBJ to announce that he would not run again for the presidency, Dr King, in Memphis to support a garbage workers' strike, was gunned down in his motel. Shortly after, JFK's brother and former attorney general Robert, who had managed to redefine himself as spokesman for the nation's dispossessed, was fatally shot on the night that he emerged as Democratic front-runner. It didn't take a conspiracy theorist to see that the spate of deaths reflected a malaise in the soul of America
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