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1960s Cultural Attitudes

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The significant and new cultural attitudes that emerged in the 1960s were a reflection of the recognition by the dominant majority that racial and ethnic prejudice had no place in society that drowned itself on equality of opportunity. Martin Luther King Jr., an African American, started the Black Revolution of the 1960s with a nonviolent civil rights movement. In August 1963, some two hundred fifty thousand Americans, black and white, came together on the nation’s capital to achieve racial justice in what was known as the March on Washington. There, King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, one of the most well known events in history. Northern blacks in cities campaigned against segregated public schools, demanding that their kids be accepted …show more content…
President Johnson was the reason for this progression because of his pride in appointing the first black to the cabinet, Robert C. Weaver as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and the first African American to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall. Not only was it Johnson that opened the gates to this progression, but also from the activism by African Americans, especially protests led by King. Unfortunately, the resistance to acceptance of blacks as equals was still alive as there was an upsurge in riots that began in Harlem in 1964. A policeman shot a black teenager, there was a riot in Watts, and a white man named James Earl Ray assassinated King, which ultimately led to outbursts of black rage in 125 cities across the country. Toward the end of the Johnson administration, it was known that equality of opportunity would involve more than removing legal barriers. Sadly, neither most whites nor the Nixon and Ford administrations were ready to take the steps needed for …show more content…
Women had to fight their own battle as well. Although women constituted a majority of the population, they were similar to the racial and ethnic minorities in that their opportunities for jobs and prestige were limited. Betty Freidan’s Feminine Mystique (1963) helped spark the new feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the mid-1970s, women were getting together amongst themselves to assert their opinions – gaining recognition of women’s quest for equality. This even helped older women to come out and voice their want for equal occupational opportunities, as well as equal pay. The spread of this movement helped produce a wide range of organizations, either militant or political. The biggest organization would be the National Organization for Women (NOW), which Betty Freidan founded in 1966. Although the Equal Rights Act (ERA) had been introduced in the 1960s, in 1972, the women’s movement helped push through Congress a women’s equal-rights amendment to the Constitution. The designed helped to ensure that women could not be denied the same rights as men and pass the ratification by the three-fourths of the states. However, conservatives led by social conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly opposed ERA and its ratification. In Schlafly and her followers’ perspective, the ERA would lead to unisex toilets, homosexual marriages, women in combat, and the release of males from

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