Civil Unrest In The 1960s

Explore civil unrest in the 1960s and with eyewitness accounts and commentary, learn about the differing viewpoints surrounding this time.

Law and Order offers a valuable new study of the political and social history of the 1960s. It presents a sophisticated account of how the issues of street crime and civil unrest enhanced the popularity of conservatives, eroded the credibility of liberals, and transformed the landscape of American politics. Ultimately, the legacy of law and order was a political world in which the grand ambitions of the Great Society gave way to grim expectations. In the mid-1960s, amid a pervasive sense that American society was coming apart at the seams, a new issue known as law and order emerged at the forefront of national politics. First introduced by Barry Goldwater in his ill-fated run for president in 1964, it eventually punished Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats and propelled Richard Nixon and the Republicans to the White House in 1968. In this thought-provoking study, Michael Flamm examines how conservatives successfully blamed liberals for the rapid rise in street crime and then skillfully used law and order to link the understandable fears of white voters to growing unease about changing moral values, the civil rights movement, urban disorder, and antiwar protests. Flamm documents how conservatives constructed a persuasive message that argued that the civil rights movement had contributed to racial unrest and the Great Society had rewarded rather than punished the perpetrators of violence. The president should, conservatives also contended, promote respect for law and order and contempt for those who violated it, regardless of cause. Liberals, Flamm argues, were by contrast unable to craft a compelling message for anxious voters. Instead, liberals either ignored the crime crisis, claimed that law and order was a racist ruse, or maintained that social programs would solve the "root causes" of civil disorder, which by 1968 seemed increasingly unlikely and contributed to a loss of faith in the ability of the government to do what it was above all sworn to do-protect personal security and private property.

This fascinating volume explores the historical and cultural events leading up to and following the student movements of the 1960s. Readers will learn about issues surrounding the goals of the activists, black power, feminism, and the role of drugs and music. This book also includes personal narratives from people who experienced the student movements of the 1960s. Essay sources include Lyndon B. Johnson, Kathie Sarachild, Kathryn Jean Lopez, and the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Personal narratives include a girl's experience of feminism in the sixties, and Mario Savio's tense words about the California students who were facing trial.

While many studies of domestic collective violence, especially of the black riots of the 1960s, emphasize the causes of violence, James Button's is a major investigation of the consequences of violence. He not only analyzes how and to what extent the national government responded to the black urban riots, but he also moves toward a theoretical definition of the role of collective violence in a democratic society. In so doing, the author clarifies the utility or disutility of collective violence as a minority group strategy for effecting political change. Using a variety of sources and research techniques, Professor Button evaluates the effects of ghetto violence on public policy from a perspective that ranges from the earliest riots in 1963 to the later riots and their long-term impact through 1972. His use of rigorous empirical evidence to explore policy effects at the federal level fills the gap often left by more impressionistic research limited to case studies at a local level. The author's data indicate that many federal executive officials interpreted the acts of black urban violence in the 1960s as politically purposeful revolts intended to make demands upon those in power. James Button's work poses a serious challenge to those who argue that collective violence is apolitical, counterproductive, and pathological. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Speaking Out : Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970sis a collection of readings profiling 21 different activist movements that came of age in the 60s and 70s. Each book chapter is written by recognized scholars who have studied and written about these movements in depth and is followed by primary source documents that they have chosen to provide additional insight into each movement. The chapters not only offer a comprehensive overview of the most important social and political activist groups of these two decades, but they also locate each group's complex origins, strengths, weaknesses, and legacy. As these authors make clear, the activist groups of this period each had their share of successes and each made their share of mistakes and miscalculations. Thus, together, they left a most complicated legacy for future generations.

Offers a rich description of the impact of the 1960s race riots in the United States whose legacy still haunts the nation.

“Not since Angela Davis’s 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, has a scholar so persuasively challenged our conventional understanding of the criminal legal system.” —Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., Washington Post From one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing and “riots” that shatters our understanding of the post–civil rights era. What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors—and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton’s sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions—explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post–Jim Crow United States no longer holds. Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California. The central lesson from these eruptions—that police violence invariably leads to community violence—continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.

A definitive account of the turbulent 1960s, "America Divided" presents the most sophisticated understanding to date of all sides of the decade's many political, social, and cultural conflicts. 45 photos.