Free Essays on 1960s

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 â€Å"We Want Liberty† and â€Å"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... Free Essays on 1960s' Free Essays on 1960s' 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 â€Å"We Want Liberty† and â€Å"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...