The Cold War as a Cause of the Civil Rights Movement

1. The Cold War as a Cause of the Civil Rights Movement • The Cold War helped shape African American struggles for social justice and the America’s responses to them. • As the Soviet Union pointed out, the United States could hardly pose as the leader of the free world or condemn the denial of human rights in the Soviet Union if it practiced segregation at home. • The United States would also have trouble convincing new African and Asian nations of its dedication to human rights if African Americans were subjected to segregation, discrimination, disfranchisement, and racial violence. • Some African American leaders, in fact, understood their struggle for equal rights in the United States as part of a larger, international movement. • At the same time, many Americans viewed social criticism of any kind as a Soviet-inspired attempt to weaken, the United States in the ongoing Cold War.

2. The Cold War… • The Federal Bureau of Investigation and local law enforcement agencies commonly used such anticommunist fears to justify attacks on civil rights activists. • Americans had seen the Second World War as a struggle for democracy and against hatred. African Americans who had helped win the war were determined that their lives in postwar America would be better because of power their sacrifices. • In addition, politicians, including Harry Truman were beginning to pay attention to black aspirations, especially as black voters in some urban-industrial states began to control the political balance of power.

3. Truman and Civil Rights • In addition to political reasons, Truman also believed it was only fair that every American, regardless of race, should enjoy the full rights of citizenship. • Truman was especially disturbed by a report that police in Aiken, South Carolina, had gouged out the eyes of a black sergeant just three hours after he had been discharged from the army. • Several weeks after this, in December 1946, Truman signed an executive order establishing the President's Committee on Civil Rights. • It called for antilynching and antisegregation legislation and for laws guaranteeing voting rights and equal employment opportunity. • In 1948 he issued two executive orders declaring an end to racial discrimination in the federal government which included a policy of "fair employment throughout the federal establishment" and created the Employment board of the Civil Service Commission to hear charges of discrimination. The other ordered the racial desegregation of the armed forces and appointed the Committeeon Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed services to oversee this process.

4. Early Legislative Landmarks • At the same time, African Americans were successfullychallenging racial discrimination in the courts. In 1939, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) had established its Legal Defense and Education Fund. • Thurgood Marshall (who in 1967 would becomethe first African American Supreme Court justice) and his colleagues were working to destroy the separate-but-equal doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) by insisting on its literal interpretation. • In higher education, the NAACP calculated, the cost of true equality in racially separate would be prohibitive. As a result African American students won admission toprofessional and graduate schools at a number of formerly segregated state universities. • The NAACP also won major victories through the Supreme Court: • Smith v. Allwright (1944), which outlawed the whites-only primaries held by the Democratic Party in some southern states; • Morgan v. Virginia (1946), which struck down segregation in interstate bus transportation, and; • Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), in which the Court held that racially restrictive covenants (private agreements among white homeowners not to sell to blacks) could not legally be enforced.

5. Jackie Robinson • Jackie Robinson cracked the color line in major league baseball when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers for the 1947 season. • Sliding safely into third base, Robinson displays the aggressive style that won him rookie-of-the-year honors. • He was later elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. • Listen to Jackie Robinson audio documentary

6. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka • Segregation was still standard practice in the 1950s, and blacks continued to suffer disfranchisement, job discrimination, and violence • In 1954 the NAACP won a historic victory that stunned the white South and energized African Americans to challenge segregation on several fronts. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, The Supreme Court concluded that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." • Although the ruling overturned Plessy v. Ferguson it did not demand immediate compliance. A year later the Court finally ordered school desegregation, but only "with all deliberate speed." The lack of a timetable encouraged the southern states to resist.

7. Resisting Integration • As a result of the ruling, The Klan experienced another resurgence, and white violence against blacks increased. • In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago, was murdered by white men in Mississippi who took offense at the way he spoke to a white woman. • White Citizens Councils also pushed through state laws that provided private school tuition for white children who left public schools to avoid integration. • FBI director J. Edgar Hoover warned of communist influences among the civil rights activists, and suggested that if the Citizens' Councils did not worsen the racial situation, they might "control the rising tension." • White resistance to civil rights also gained strength in large northern cities although this gave them better jobs, they faced housing segregation. • In 1951 in Cicero, a town adjoining Chicago, several thousand whites who were determined to keep blacks out of their neighborhood provoked a race riot. • For several reasons, new President Dwight W. Eisenhower did not state forthrightly that the federal government would enforce the Brown decision as the nation's law.

8. Little Rock • In September 1957 Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus defied a court-ordered desegregation plan for Little Rock's Central High School. • Faubus went on television the night before school began and told Arkansans that "blood would run in the streets" if black students tried to enter the high school the next day, and he deployed 250 Arkansas National Guard troops to block their entrance. • The "Little Rock Nine" entered Central High for the first time more than two weeks after school began, after a federal judge intervened. Eisenhower dispatched one thousand army paratroopers to Little Rock to guard the students for the rest of the year. • America's struggle over racial equality, confronted the conflict between federal authority and states' rights - state power triumphed the following year when Faubus closed all public high schools in Little Rock rather than desegregate them.

9. Little Rock • In 1957 white teenagers in Little Rock, Arkansas angrily confront African American students who, under federal court order, are attempting to enter, and thus desegregate Central High School. The Supreme Court's Brown decision of 1954 was resisted by whites throughout the South.

10. Montgomery Bus Boycott • By the mid-1950s, a growing number of African Americans were no longer waiting for action from the Supreme Court or the Federal Government. • In 1955 Rosa Parks, a department store seamstress and long-time NAACP activist, was arrested when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her arrest gave local women's organizations and civil rights groups an excuse to organize a boycott of the city's bus system. • They selected Martin Luther King Jr., a recently ordained minister who had just arrived in Montgomery, as their leader. • King launched the boycott with a moving speech in which he declared: "If we are wrong, the Constitution is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a Utopian dreamer. ... If we are wrong, justice is a lie." • Martin Luther King Jr. was a twenty-six-year-old Baptist minister who recently had earned a Ph.D. degree at Boston University. • He was committed to the transforming potential of Christian love, and schooled in the teachings of India's leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, King believed in nonviolent protest and civil disobedience.

11. Southern Christian Leadership Conference • After Thirteen months after the boycott began the Supreme Court declared Alabama's bus segregation laws unconstitutional. • In 1957 King became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), organized to coordinate civil rights activities. • That same year, Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction. It created the United States Commission on Civil Rights to investigate systematic discrimination, such as in voting. • This measure, like a voting rights act passed three years later, proved ineffective.

12. For leading the movement to gain equality for blacks riding city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. and other African Americans, including twenty-three other ministers, were indicted by an all-white jury for violating an old law banning boycotts. In late March 1956 King was convicted and fined $500. A crowd of well-wishers cheered a smiling King [here with his wife, Coretta] outside the courthouse, where King proudly declared, "The protest goes on!" King's arrest and conviction made the bus boycott front-page news across America

13. SNCC • The sit-in at the Woolworth's lunch counter begun by the four freshmen from North Carolina A&T marked a turning point in the African American struggle for civil rights. • In 1960, the movement six years after the Brown decision declared "separate but equal" unconstitutional, little had changed for African Americans in the South. • The young people who created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the spring of 1960 to help orchestrate the growing sit-in movement were committed to nonviolence. • Beginning in 1961, thousands of SNCC volunteers, many of them high school and college students, risked their lives walking the dusty back roads of Mississippi and Georgia, encouraging African Americans to resist segregation and register to vote. They formed Freedom Schools, teaching literacy and constitutional rights.

14. SIT INS NASHVILLE

15. EXERCISING SELF-RESTRAINT

16. Freedom Summer • SNCC efforts achieved national attention during the Freedom Summer of 1964, when over a thousand young people joined the struggle in Mississippi. • Because Mississippi laws made it almost impossible for blacks to participate in the electoral process, the Freedom Summer volunteers created a racially integrated grassroots political party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. • Local black activist James Cheney and two white volunteers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, were murdered by a Klan mob (Mississippi Burning).

17. FREEDOM RIDERS

19. Birmingham and the Children’s Crusade • King and his allies, still committed to principles ofnonviolence, concluded that the only way to move to the next stage of the struggle for civil rights was to provoke a crisis. • Fully aware that their nonviolentprotests would draw violent response, King and the SCLC called their plan "Project C"—for "confrontation." King wanted allAmericans to see the racist hate and violence that marred their nation. • Nonviolent protest marches led to hundreds of arrests. Then, in a controversial action, King and the parents of Birmingham put children on the front lines of protest. • About a thousand black children, some as young as six, marched for civil rights, police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor ordered his police to train "monitor" water guns—powerful enough to strip bark from a tree at 100 feet—on them. • The water guns mowed down the children, and then police loosed attack dogs. It was all captured on television.

20. BIRMINGHAM

21. INJUSTICE ANYWHERE IS A THREAT TO JUSTICE EVERYWHERE

22. Kennedy and Civil Rights • Kennedy was generally sympathetic to - though not terribly committed to - the civil rights movement, and he realized that racial oppression hurt the United States in the Cold War struggle for international opinion. • He also understood that if he alienated conservative southern Democrats in Congress, his legislative programs would flounder so he appointed five die-hard segregationists to the federal court in the Deep South and delayed issuing an executive order forbidding segregation in federally subsidized housing (a pledge made in the 1960 campaign) until late 1962. • He also allowed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to harass Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, using wiretaps and surveillance to gather personal information and circulating rumors of communist connections and of personal improprieties in efforts to discredit their leadership.

23. Ending Legal Discrimination on the Basis of Race • The violence of white mobs forced Kennedy's hand. In September 1962, the president ordered 500 U.S. marshals to protect James Meredith, the first African American student to attend the University of Mississippi. In response, thousands of whites attacked the marshals with guns, gasoline bombs, bricks, and pipes. The mob killed two men and seriously wounded 160 federal marshals. The marshals did not back down, nor did James Meredith. He broke the color line at "Ole Miss." • The Kennedy administration the governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace, who promised to "bar the schoolhouse door" himself to prevent the desegregation of the University of Alabama. With Wallace vowing, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" and with the nation rocked by protests and the violence of white mobs, Kennedy committed the power of the federal government to guarantee racial justice—even over the opposition of individual states. • In a televised address Kennedy told the American people: "Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise." That same night, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered—in front of his children—in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi (Ghosts of Mississippi). • A week later, the president asked Congress to pass a comprehensive civil rights bill that would end legal discrimination on the basis of race in the entire United States.

24. The March on Washington • A historic moment for the civil rights movement was the March on Washington of August 28, 1963. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. joined a quarter of a million black people and white people in their march for racial equality. • They came from all over Americato show Congress their support for Kennedy's civil rights bill; many alsowanted federal action to guarantee work opportunities for oppressed African Americans. • Behind the scenes, organizers from the major civil rightsgroups—SCLC, CORE, SNCC, the NAACP, the Urban League grappled with growing tensions within the movement. • SNCC activists saw Kennedy's proposed legislation as too little, too late, and wanted radical action. King and other older leaders counseled the virtues of moderation. The movement was beginning to splinter.

25. March on Washington • Addressing civil rights supporters, and the nation, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. • The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a moment of triumph, powerfully demonstrating to the nation the determination of its African American citizens to secure equality and justice. • Just days later, white supremacists bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four black girls.

26. March on Washington

27. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 • When Lyndon Johnson became president upon the assassination of JFK he made civil rights his top priority, and in July 1964 signed into law the Civil Rights Act • This ended legaldiscrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, and sex in federal programs, voting, employment, and public accommodation. • Interestingly, the original bill did not include discrimination on the basis of sex; that provision was added by a southern congressman who hoped it would prevent the bill from passing. However, when a group of women members of the House of Representatives from both parties took up the cause the bill was passed—with sex as a protected category. • Significantly, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 created mechanisms for enforcement, giving the government authority to withhold federal funds from public agencies or federal contractors that discriminated and establishing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to investigate and judge claims of job discrimination.

28. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 • Surrounded by an illustrious group of civil rights leaders and members of Congress, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Standing behind the president is the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

29. Race Riots • Angry residents of Harlem took to the streets after a white police officer shot a black teenager in July 1964. • The following summer, in the predominantly black Watts section of Los Angeles, crowds burned, looted, and battled police for five days and nights. The riot, which began when a white police officer attempted to arrest a black resident on suspicion of drunken driving, left thirty-four dead and more than one thousand injured. • In July 1967 twenty-six people were killed in street battles between African Americans and police and army troops in Newark, New Jersey. • A week later, in Detroit, forty-three died as 3 square miles of the city went up in flames. In 1967 alone, there were 167 violent outbreaks in 128 cities. • The "long, hot summers" of urban unrest in the 1960s differed from almost all previous race riots. Typically, in the past, white mobs had begun the violence. Here, black residents exploded in anger and frustration over the lack of opportunity in their lives. They looted and burned stores, most of them white-owned. But in the process they devastated their own neighborhoods.

30. Differences Between North and South • People wondered why African Americans were venting their frustration so destructively just when they were making real progress in the civil rights struggle.The answer stemmed, in part, from regional differences. • The civil rights movement had focused mostly on fighting legal disenfranchisement and discrimination in the South but northern African Americans also suffered racial discrimination. • Concentrated in the deteriorating ghettos of inner cities, most northern African Americans lived in societies as segregated as any in the Deep South. They faced discrimination in housing, in the availability of credit and mortgages, and in employment. • The median income of northern blacks was little more than half that of northern whites, and their unemployment rate was twice as high. Many northern blacks had given up on the civil rights movement.

31. Black Power and Malcolm X • Malcolm X urged blacks to seize their freedom "by any means necessary.” • Members of the Nation of Islam, commonly known as Black Muslims, espoused black pride and separatism from white society. Their faith, combining elements of traditional Islam with a belief that whites were subhuman "devils" whose race would soon be destroyed, also emphasized the importance of sobriety, thrift, and social responsibility. • By the early 1960s Malcolm X had become the Black Muslims' chief spokesperson, and his advice was straightforward: "If someone puts a hand on you, send him to the cemetery."

32. The Death of X and a Split in the Movement • But Malcolm X was murdered in early 1965 by members of the Nation of Islam who believed he had betrayed their cause by breaking with the Black Muslims to start his own, more racially tolerant organization. In death, Malcolm X became a powerful symbol of black defiance and self-respect. • A year after Malcolm X's death, Stokely Carmichael, SNCC chairman, denounced "the betrayal of black dreams by white America." To be truly free from white oppression, Carmichael proclaimed, blacks had to "stand up and take over” - to elect black candidates, to organize their own schools, to control their own institutions. "Black Power," his listeners chanted. • That year, SNCC expelled its white members and repudiated both nonviolence and integration. CORE followed suit in 1967.

33. The Black Panthers • The best known black radicals of the era were the Black Panthers, an organization formed in Oakland, California, in 1966. • Blending black separatism and revolutionary communism, the Panthers dedicated themselves to destroying both capitalism and "the military arm of our oppressors," the police in the ghettos. • In direct contrast to earlier, nonviolent civil rights protesters, who had worn suits and ties or dresses to demonstrate their respectability, male Panthers dressed in commando gear, carried weapons, and talked about killing "pigs"—and did kill eleven officers by 1970. • Police responded in kind; most infamously, Chicago police murdered local Panther leader Fred Hampton in his bed. • The Black Panthers, led by its women members, worked to improve life in their neighborhoods by instituting free breakfast and healthcare programs for ghetto children, offering courses in African American history, and demanding jobs anddecent housing for the poor.

34. Black Power • During award ceremonies at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, American sprinters Tommie Smith (center) and John Carlos (right) extended gloved hands skyward to protest racial inequality and express Black Power. • In retaliation, Olympic officials suspended Smith and Carlos, but other African American athletes emulated them by repeating the clenched-fist salute on the victory stand.

35. Inspiration of Mexican and Native Movements • Mexican Americans and Native Americans, inspired by the civil rights movement to struggle against their own marginalization in American society, had created powerful "Brown Power" and "Red Power" movements by the early 1970s. • By 1970, most African American activists emphasized the distinctiveness of black culture and society. • Many black Americans had been powerfully disillusioned by the racism that out lasted the end of legal segregation. Many had come to believe that integration would mean subordination in a white-dominated society that had no respect for their history and cultural traditions.

36. Mexican American Activism • In 1970, the nation's 9 million Mexican Americans (4.3 percent of America's total population) were heavily concentrated in the Southwest and California. • Discrimination against Mexican Americans in hiring, pay, housing, schools, and the courts was commonplace. In cities, poor Mexican Americans lived in rundown barrios. • In rural areas, poverty was widespread. Almost half of Mexican Americans were functionally illiterate, and even among the young, high school drop-out rates were astronomical. By the 1970s, though growing numbers of Mexican Americans were middle class, almost one-quarter of Mexican American families remained below the poverty level. Especially dire was the plight of migrant farm workers. • national attention to the working conditions of migrant laborers, who were paid as little 10 cents an hour (the minimum wage in 1965 was $1.25) and often housed by their employers in squalid conditions without running water or indoor toilets. • A national consumer boycott of table grapes brought the growers tothe bargaining table, and in 1970 the UFW (United Farm Workers) won their fight for better wages and working conditions.

37. Gains For Mexican Americans • Young Mexican activists calling themselves “Chicanos” called for the liberation of "La Raza" (from "La Raza de Bronze," the brown people) from the oppressive force of American society and culture, not for equal rights through integration. They spoke out against integration saying, it "lacks respect for his culture and ethnic heritage . . . [and] seeks assimilation as a way out of his 'degraded' social status." • They succeeded in introducing Mexican studies into local high school and college curricula and in creating a strong and unifying sense of cultural identity for Mexican American youth. • Some activists made clear political gains, as well, founding La Raza Unida (RUP), a Southwest-based political party that registered tens of thousands of voters and won several local elections.

38. Native American Activism • Between 1968 and 1975, Native American activists forced American society to hear their demands and to reform U.S. government policies towardnative peoples. • In November 1969 a small group of activists, calling themselves "Indians of All Tribes," occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and demanded that the land be returned to native peoples for an Indian cultural center. • The protest, which lasted nineteen months and eventually involved more than four hundred people from fifty different tribes, marked the consolidation of a "pan-Indian" approach to activism. • At the same time, more moderate activists, working through pan-tribal organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians and the Native American Rights Fund, lobbied Congress for greater rights and resources to govern themselves and to strengthen their tribal cultures. • In response to those demands, Congress and the federal courts returned millions of acres of land to tribal ownership, and in 1975 Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. • Despite these successes, conditions for most Native Americans remained grim during the 1970s and 1980s: American Indians had a higher rate of tuberculosis, alcoholism, and suicide than any other group. Nine of ten lived in substandard housing, and unemployment rates for Indians were almost 40 percent.

39. Alcatraz • Calling their movement "Red Power," these Native American activists dance in 1969 while "reclaiming" Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. • They argued that an 1868 Sioux treaty entitled them to possession of unused federal lands, the group occupied the island until mid-1971.

40. The American Indian Movement • Drawing inspiration from the Black Panthers, and youth counterculture/anti-war movements, as well as traditional indigenous beliefs, a new militant group called AIM (American Indian Movement) was founded in 1968. • AIM’s founders believed that the existing political structures and lobbying had been ineffective in meeting the needs of Native Americans. • AIM’s most well-known actions include: -occupying Mount Rushmore in 1971 -occupying the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, DC in 1972 after their Trail of Broken Treaties march -occupying the hamlet of Wounded Knee on the PineRidge Reservation in South Dakota in 1973

41. Wounded Knee • There was a horrible massacre at Wounded Knee when the U.S. 7th cavalry attacked and killed 300 Lakotas (mostly women and children) in December 1890. • In the 1970s there was significant corruption on the Pine Ridge Reservation and the tribal government of Richard “Dickie” Wilson was unresponsive to the demands of traditionalists wanting better use of funds. • Wilson’s GOONs (Guardians of the Oglala Nation) terrorized and killed opponents of his administration with impunity. • Pine Ridge traditionalists requested that AIM come to the reserve and help defend the opponents of Wilson. • From 1973 – 76 Pine Ridge had the highest murder rate of any county in the entire USA. (more than 8 times that of Detroit!) • AIM decided to occupy Wounded Knee in order to show that Native Americans had not been defeated 100 years before. Their goal was to bring international attention to their demands for justice, self-determination & honouring of the treaties. • The standoff lasted for 71 days

42. AIM and COINTELPRO • One response of the federal government was the FBI campaign to “neutralize” political movements it deemed subversive. These Counter Intelligence Programs (COINTELPRO) were targeted against AIM. • The FBI spied on, infiltrated, created splits and armed the GOONs. • They also refused to investigate or prosecute when 61 AIM members or supporters were killed. • In one case, AIM member Anna Mae Aquash (a Mi’kmaq from Nova Scotia) was killed execution style. Her killers have never been identified but the FBI did cut offer her hands for “identification” purposes. • A 1975 raid on the Pine Ridge Reservation by the FBI and BIA police resulted in the death of one AIM member and 2 FBI agents. Despite coercive interrogation techniques and faulty ballistic evidence, AIM member Leonard Peltier was extradited from Canada and sentenced to 2 consecutive life sentences. • Peltier remains in prison to this day and is believed to a political prisoner and hero to most indigenous peoples.

43. Affirmative Action • President Johnson said in 1964 regarding the issue that, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." In this speech, Johnson called for "not just legal equality . . . But equality as a fact and equality as a result.” • In 1969, the Nixon administration implemented the first major government affirmative-action program to promote "equality of results." Nixon said, "affirmative action [was] to meet the goals of increasing minority employment" and set specific numerical "goals, or quotas, for employers.”

44. Affirmative Action • Affirmative action for woman and members of racial and ethnic minorities was soon required by all major government contracts, and some large corporations and educational institutions began their own programs. • Supporters saw affirmative action as a way to address the lasting effects of past discrimination. Critics (some of whom were supporters of racial and sexual equality) argued that attempts to create proportional representation for women and minorities meant discrimination against other individuals who had not created past discrimination, and that group-based remedies violated the principle that individuals should be judged on their own merits.

45. Women’s Movement • During the 1970s, the diverse groups that made up the women's movement claimed significant achievements. • On March 22, 1972, after massive lobbying by women's organizations,Congress approved the Equal Rights movement Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. • The amendment stated that "equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." • At the state and local level, women challenged understandings of rape such as the one voiced by a psychiatrist at the University of Kansas student health center in 1970: "A woman sometimes plays a big part in provoking her attacker by ... her overall attitude and appearance." • By the end of the decade, activists working on the state and local level had established rape crisis centers, educated local police and hospital officials about procedures to protect survivors of rape, and even succeeded in changing laws.

46. Women’s Movement • Feminists also questioned the ways women were treated by the medical establishment. Our Bodies, Ourselves was created by the Boston Women's Health Collective in 1971 to help women understand—and take control over—their own sexual and reproductive health. • Women who sought the right to safe and legal abortions won a major victory in 1973 when the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision on Roe v. Wade, ruled that privacy rights protected a woman's choice to end a pregnancy. • Many religious denominations accepted the ordination of women • In 1970, only 8.4 percent of medical school graduates and 5.4 percent of law school graduates were women. In 1979, those percentages had climbed to 23 percent and 28.5 percent, respectively; they would continue to grow. • Colleges and universities also established women's studies departments, and by 1980 more than thirty thousand college courses focused on the study of women or gender relations.

47. The End of ERA • The STOP-ERA movement was led by Phyllis Schlafly, a lawyer and prominent conservative political activist. • Schlafly argued that ERA supporters “werebunch of bitter women seeking a constitutional cure for their personal problems." • She attacked the women’s movement as "a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as basic unit of society." • Schlafly and her supporters arguedthat the ERA would decriminalize rape, force Americans to use unisex toilets, and make women subject to the military draft. • Many women saw feminism as an attack on the choices they had made and felt that by opposing the ERA they were defending their traditional roles. • In the fight against the ERA, tens of thousands of women became politically experienced and by the mid-1970s, the STOP-ERA movement had stalled the Equal Rights Amendment. • Despair a congressional extension of the ratification deadline, the amendment would fall three states short of ratification and expire in 1982.

48. Gay Liberation • At the beginning of the 1970s, gay men and lesbians faced widespread discrimination. Consensual sexual intercourse between people of the same sex was illegal in almost every state, and until 1973 homosexuality was labeled a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. • Homosexual couples did not receive partnership benefits such as health insurance; they could not marry or adopt children. • The issue of gay and lesbian rights divided even progressive organizations: in 1970 the New York City chapter of NOW (National Organization for Women) expelled its lesbian officers. • As open racism declined, gay men and women remained targets of discrimination in hiring and endured public ridicule, harassment, and physical attacks. • Gay men and lesbians, unlike most members of racial minorities, could conceal the identity that made them vulnerable to discrimination and harassment. Remaining "in the closet" offered individuals some protection, but that option also made it very difficult to organize a political movement.

49. Beginning of the Movement • The symbolic beginning of the gay liberation movement came on June 28, 1969, when New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. (New York City law made it illegal for more than three homosexual patrons to occupy a bar at the same time.) • That night, for the first time, patrons stood up to the police. As word spread through New York's gay community, hundreds more joined the confrontation. The next morning, New Yorkers found a new slogan spray-painted on neighborhood walls: Gay Power. • Inspired by the Stonewall riot, some men and women decided the time had come to work openly and militantly for gay rights. • They focused on a dual agenda: legal equality and the promotion of Gay Pride. In a version of the identity politics adopted by racial and ethnic communities, some rejected the notion of fitting into straight heterosexual culture and helped create distinctive gay communities and lifestyles. • "Look out, straights," wrote gay liberation activist Martha Shelley in 1970. "We're gonna make our own revolution.” • By 1973, there were about eight hundred gay organizations in the United States. Centered in big cities and on college campuses,most organizations tried to create supportive environments for gay men and lesbians to come "out of the closet."

50. Youth and Politics • By the mid-1960’s, 41% of the American population was under twenty years old. • These Baby Boomers consisted of a large peer-orientated age cohort heavily exposed to mass media. • High school graduation rates as well as participation in college and university also expanded dramatically during this time. • These young people committed themselves to providing democratic leadership in the USA. • For example, the college/university was viewed a place where youth should have more control over their lives through relevant course choices and a greater voice in running the universities. • Students also opposed the parietals (rules that only applied to female students) that specified curfews and other “parental roles” for the university.