1960s'

6 Pages 1407 Words

The 1960’s





The 1960’s was a decade that forever changed the culture and society of America. The 1960’s were widely known as the decade of peace

and love, not because the world had become a utopia but, in my opinion,

because of the heavy use of the popular hallucinogenic drugs by the

American youth. In reality minorities were struggling to gain freedom

from segregation and thousands of American soldiers and Vietnamese

civilians were being killed in the highly disputed war in Vietnam.

On February 20, 1960 four black college freshmen from the Negro

Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina quietly

walked into a restaurant and sat down at the lunch counter. They were

protesting the Jim Crow custom that blacks could be served while

standing up but not while they were sitting at the lunch counter. The

students quietly sat there politely asking for service until closing time.

The next morning they showed up again accompanied by twenty five fellow

students. By the next week their sit down had been repeated in fourteen

cities in five deep south states. In the weeks to follow many new

protests arose. After a black woman was beaten with a baseball bat in

Montgomery, Alabama, 1,000 blacks silently marched into the first capital

of the Confederate states to sing and pray. Six hundred students from two

colleges walked through the streets of Orangeburg, South Carolina with

placards that exhibited phrases like “We Want Liberty” and “Segregation

is Dead.” By late June some kind of public place in over one hundred and

fifty different cities across America had been desegregated.

John F. Kennedy was never able to gain enough support to pass a civil

rights bill during his short time in office, but Lyndon Johnson drawing on

the Kennedy legacy and the support of the nation succeeded in passing the

bill...