Jim Crow segregation—the practice of confining African-Americans to inferior schools, hotels, even bathrooms—ended in the South during the 1950s and 1960s thanks to a grassroots civil rights movement led by a Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968). King organized many of the most effective political protests against segregation and became the most visible and eloquent explainer of the movement’s goals. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964; at age thirty-five, he was the youngest person ever to receive the award.
After World War II (1939–1945), segregation came under increasingly harsh national scrutiny, despite efforts by white Southern politicians to preserve it. President Harry Truman (1884–1972) desegregated the military shortly after the war, and major league baseball began fielding black players in 1947.
Still, segregation remained deeply entrenched in the daily lives of both blacks and whites in cities and small towns across the South. King’s first major campaign, to desegregate public buses, began in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. The Montgomery bus boycott catapulted the twenty-six-year-old King to fame. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1957 and later chronicled his successful protest in his 1958 book, Stride Toward Freedom.
Influenced by the philosophy of the great independence leader Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) of India and the American writer Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), King adopted a nonviolent approach to political protest, in contrast to the frequent violence of his Southern white opponents. Aware of the dangers he faced, King said, “If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.”
As the civil rights movement began to defeat segregation in the mid-1960s, King expanded his political agenda beyond civil rights to include support for antipoverty programs and opposition to the war in Vietnam. However, on April 4, 1968, King was murdered at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. After an international manhunt, James Earl Ray (1928–1998) was arrested in London, where he had fled after the shooting. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) signed legislation creating a federal holiday in honor of King’s birthday. It has been observed annually since 1986, on the third Monday in January, near King’s birthday of January 15. The only other American to be so honored was George Washington (1732–1799).
1. In 1948, King graduated with a sociology degree from Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the nation’s most prestigious black colleges. He had entered at age fifteen.
2. Among his other accolades, King won a posthumous Grammy Award in 1970 for his spoken-word recording Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam.
3. King’s assassin, James Earl Ray, died in prison in 1998.
The Vietnam War (1957–1975) provoked the largest and most successful antiwar movement in American history. Huge demonstrations in Washington, DC, combined with nationwide resistance to the military draft, helped turn public opinion against the war in Indochina. With popular support evaporating, United States combat troops left Vietnam in 1973.
No American war, of course, has been fought without vocal public opposition. New England states protested the War of 1812 to no avail. The writer Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) went to jail rather than pay his taxes in protest of the Mexican War (1846–1848), and in the midst of the Civil War (1861–1865), massive draft riots broke out in New York City.
But those efforts pale in comparison with the protests mounted in the late 1960s. Regular protests on college campuses and symbolic gestures like the burning of draft cards reflected the popular opposition. In essence, opponents of the war argued that it was an unnecessary and immoral intrusion into the affairs of another country.
Sensing the popular mood, Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon (1913–1994) ran in 1968 promising to bring American troops home from Vietnam. He narrowly defeated the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey (1911–1978), who was hurt by his association with the war’s chief architect, President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973).
It took Nixon five years to deliver on his pledge, and during that time antiwar protests continued unabated. One of the most famous incidents of the period occurred in 1970 at Kent State University in northeastern Ohio, where National Guard troops shot and killed four unarmed demonstrators. The incident inflamed opposition still further.
However, the protests also created a lasting backlash. Some Americans regarded the demonstrators as overprivileged, long-haired brats unwilling to make the sacrifices for their country that previous generations had. The end of the war left the electorate deeply polarized. Indeed, a central legacy of the protest movement has been a yawning cultural divide.
1. The famous circular peace sign used by Vietnam-era protestors is believed to derive from a symbol first used by the antinuclear movement in England in the early 1960s.
2. Several Guardsmen accused of the shootings at Kent State were indicted in 1974, but the charges were later dismissed.
3. Amid criticism that young men were being forced to fight and die for their country but not allowed to vote, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1971, lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen.
A major achievement in the struggle for racial equality, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation and discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or gender. The law, which the US Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) signed over the strident opposition of powerful Southern senators, abolished Jim Crow and led to profound social and political reforms across the nation.
By 1964, the civil rights movement had scored a string of victories in local campaigns across the South, such as the Montgomery bus boycott and the successful protests against segregated lunch counters in Birmingham, Alabama. To build on these successes, President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) proposed a major civil rights bill in the summer of 1963 to ban segregation nationwide. After Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson continued to push for the bill despite the opposition of many his fellow Southern Democrats.
In the spring of 1964, Southern lawmakers mounted an eighty-three-day filibuster in the US Senate in a last-ditch effort to prevent passage of the bill. The filibuster eventually failed, but every Southern senator except one, Ralph Webster Yarborough (1903–1996) from Texas, along with a handful of Northern senators, voted against the bill. President Johnson invited civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) to the White House to watch him sign the bill into law.
Politically, the passage of the Civil Rights Act ended a century of Democratic domination of the South. Enraged by Johnson’s backing of the bill, Southern whites turned against the Democratic Party in droves. In the 1964 presidential election, the Deep South backed a Republican candidate—Senator Barry Goldwater (1909–1998) of Arizona—for the first time since the Civil War (1861–1865). But Johnson was reelected anyway.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented the biggest expansion of civil rights since the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. Along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the law spelled the end of legally sanctioned segregation.
1. As of 2007, only one opponents of the 1964 act—West Virginia Democrat Robert C. Byrd (1917–)—remained in the US Senate.
2. The filibuster was broken on June 10, 1964—the only time the Senate successfully broke a filibuster of civil rights legislation.
3. Johnson was aware of the political damage the bill would do to the Democrats, and he ruefully remarked after signing the legislation that “we have lost the South for a generation.”
Arguably the most important invention of the twentieth century, computers have no single creator. The technology was developed by hundreds of scientists across the globe over several decades. However, the firm most closely associated with bringing computer technology into the mainstream during the 1950s was IBM, which remains one of the world’s biggest makers of information technology.
IBM—which stands for International Business Machines—was a behemoth of mid-twentieth-century American business. Founded in 1911 and originally a manufacturer of adding machines and punch card equipment, the company made its first computer in 1944. The computer, called the Harvard Mark I, weighed five tons and took about six seconds to complete a multiplication problem. By the end of the decade, after significant refinements to the design, the company began manufacturing computers for business use.
The growing use of computers in the postwar era laid the groundwork for major shifts in the military and business worlds. Computers allowed for the organization of massive amounts of information, greatly improved productivity, and helped create the giant white-collar corporations of the late twentieth century. For the military, computer technology allowed development of far more sophisticated weaponry like “smart bombs.”
IBM played the leading role in this transition and was the company most often associated with the computer age by the public. A national icon, it was nicknamed “Big Blue” for the conservative dress code imposed on its employees. IBM’s image was not altogether positive. To some Americans, computers were an ominous invention that threatened to depersonalize society by empowering faceless machines. The killer computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance, was named HAL—H-A-L immediately preceding the letters I-B-M in the alphabet.
Despite its success in the 1950s and 1960s, IBM made two major miscalculations that hurt the company. First, IBM assumed that the biggest profits were to be made in computer hardware, not software, and allowed a West Coast start-up called Microsoft to grab the market for business applications. Second, Big Blue was caught off guard by the development of the personal computer in the 1980s. Although IBM began marketing its PC in 1981, cheaper “IBM clones” that used the same microprocessors and software soon flooded the market. IBM’s losses mounted, and many observers questioned the company’s viability until a turnaround in the 1990s.
1. IBM “unbundled” hardware and software in 1969, a momentous decision that gave rise to the software industry.
2. One of IBM’s innovations was the floppy disk, which it invented in 1971.
3. In 1997, an experimental supercomputer designed by IBM called Deep Blue defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov (1963–) in a famed six-game match in New York City.
In 1968, a century after the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, massive oil reserves were discovered off the state’s northern coast. Following the discovery, President Richard M. Nixon (1913–1994) authorized the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline through the frigid northern reaches of Alaska to connect the new oil wells with the port of Valdez on the Pacific coast. The 800-mile pipeline was a boon for Alaska’s economy and also one of the most challenging engineering projects of the twentieth century.
Most of Alaska’s oil is located on icy Prudhoe Bay, an extremely remote area on the Arctic Ocean with few inhabitants. At the time oil was discovered, no roads linked the pristine region with the outside world.
Initially, some environmental and Native Alaskan groups lobbied against the pipeline, claiming construction would damage the fragile arctic ecosystem. The political climate, however, was not in their favor. In 1973, oil prices spiked as a result of instability in the Middle East, causing an energy crisis in the United States. Nixon, hoping the estimated ten billion barrels of crude oil in Alaska would help end the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, signed legislation in 1973 fast-tracking the project in the name of national security.
The pipeline, which was completed in less than three years at a cost of $8 billion, required workers to battle subzero weather conditions in an earthquake-prone part of the Arctic. When it opened in 1977, the pipe wound across thirty-four rivers and three mountain ranges.
The discovery of oil in Alaska has been a huge plus for the forty-ninth state’s economy and its residents (a share of the state’s oil revenues are distributed every year to each Alaskan). Initial estimates of 10 billion barrels proved too low, and the region continues to pump about a million barrels a day. Still, Alaska’s oil fell far short of fulfilling Nixon’s dream of “energy independence” for the United States.
1. Designed to resist earthquakes, the pipeline survived a 2002 earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale without major damage.
2. A barrel of oil cost roughly $3 in 1973, before the energy crisis; the price now frequently tops $60.
3. As of 2007, the United States imported roughly 63 percent of its oil, according to the Department of Energy; Alaska provides about 5 percent of the country’s overall oil.
Among the leading nonfiction writers of the 1970s, Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) wrote one of his generation’s most famous books, the hallucinogenic odyssey Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). An inspiration to many writers for his wild, inventive prose, Thompson published several more books before committing suicide in 2005 at his secluded mountain compound near Aspen, Colorado.
Thompson was born in Kentucky and served briefly in the Air Force, where he dabbled in sportswriting for a base newspaper. After leaving the military, he moved to New York City, where he was fired from a variety of journalism jobs in quick succession. Thompson’s big break came in 1966, when he published his first book, Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, which was based on hundreds of interviews with gang members and produced rave reviews and respectable sales.
Hell’s Angels was written in relatively conventional journalistic form. Not until 1970 did Thompson debut the unorthodox “gonzo” style for which he became legendary. Although difficult to define, gonzo journalism involved Thompson inserting himself fully into the story, often while under the influence of illegal drugs, and writing about the ensuing mayhem in the first person. The most famous example is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a lightly fictionalized account of a drug-fueled trip that Thompson took to Las Vegas with a friend in 1970, which was first published in two parts in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971 and quickly released as a book.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas won instant acclaim and was followed in 1972 by Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, an account of the 1972 presidential contest between Republican Richard Nixon (1913–1994), whom Thompson openly despised, and Democrat George McGovern (1922–).
Thompson became increasingly reclusive in the 1980s. He published Better Than Sex in 1994 and Kingdom of Fear, a searing attack on the administration of George W. Bush (1946–), in 2003. Disillusioned by the state of American politics and in increasingly bad health, Thompson killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. In accordance with the author’s wishes, Thompson’s funeral ended when his cremated remains were fired from a cannon into the Colorado mountains.
1. Thompson was the inspiration for the beloved Doonesbury comic strip character Uncle Duke.
2. Johnny Depp (1963–) played Thompson in the 1998 movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Bill Murray also played the gonzo journalist in Where the Buffalo Roam (1980).
3. Although he rarely contributed to the magazine after the 1970s, Thompson was listed as chief of the National Affairs Desk on the Rolling Stone masthead until his death.
Painter Andy Warhol (c. 1928–1987) shot to prominence in the 1960s for his glitzy pop art portraits of giant soup cans, world-famous celebrities like Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) and Mao Zedong (1893–1976), and bottles of Coca-Cola. A shrewd self-promoter, Warhol quickly turned himself into a celebrity in his own right and was the godfather of New York’s bohemian artistic community during the 1960s.
The son of a Pennsylvania coal miner and construction worker, Warhol moved to New York in 1949 and began working as an illustrator for magazines and advertisers. Although highly successful as a commercial artist, Warhol craved to make a name for himself on the art scene.
Warhol’s breakthrough came in 1962, when he exhibited his famous portraits of Campbell’s soup cans at a Los Angeles gallery. The gigantic paintings of the ubiquitous red-andwhite cans typified both Warhol’s work and the emerging pop art genre. Pop art, a vividly colorful style heavily influenced by comic books and advertisements, celebrated the iconic and the famous even while mocking the superficiality of American popular culture.
By 1965, Warhol was a major sensation in the art world. Over the next ten years, he made screen prints of celebrities ranging from Elvis Presley (1935–1977) to Jimmy Carter (1924–), as well as dozens of stylized self-portraits. Warhol was infatuated with fame—both his own and that of others—and worked assiduously to craft his own sensational reputation.
Warhol’s New York studio, nicknamed the Factory, soon became a notorious hangout for Warhol groupies, avant-garde musicians, and artistic wannabes. This world of glamour and glitz, however, had a dark and violent side. One of Warhol’s deranged fans, Valerie Solanas (1936–1988), shot and nearly killed Warhol at the Factory in 1968. Warhol returned after several years’ recovery but died in 1987 after a hospital bungled the treatment of Warhol’s gall bladder infection.
1. Warhol produced an exhibit for a children’s museum in Rhode Island in 1985 and insisted that the paintings be hung only a few feet above the floor, where only kids could look at them directly.
2. Warhol’s last name was originally Warhola, but he changed the spelling after moving to New York.
3. Warhol’s shooter, who said her murder attempt was a strike against male oppression, served three years in prison.