A New Kind of Democracy? Political and Cultural Developments in the 1960s 425integration. And, after 1965, the war in Vietnam replaced Civil Rights as the
dominant national issue, and resources were going to Indochina and young
black men were dying in higher proportions in the war. The liberal coalition
that had so impressively worked on early black struggles fell apart as King and
other “ungrateful” blacks publicly opposed the war. By 1967-1968, as Black
Power emerged and questions of America’s class system began to dominate
the discussion over African American rights, the White backlash was in force.
King’s assassination and the failure of the Poor People’s Campaign signaled
the end of the dream that had been so movingly announced in August 1963.
By the 1970s, as black inmates at Attica Prison in New York were slaughtered
by state troopers and white mobs in Boston attacked black kids who were
desegregating the schools there, Americans felt little sympathy and less out-
rage. As King lamented, “despite feeble protestations to the contrary, the
promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefield of
Vietnam. The pursuit of this widened war has narrowed the promised dimen-
sions of the domestic welfare programs, making the poor white and negro
bear the heaviest burdens, both at the front and at home.” King himself, not
just the promises of racial equality, had been shot down, and the movement,
having peaked in 1965, would never reach that level of success again. Even in
2008, when the U.S. finally elected a black president, Barack Obama went to
great lengths to stress that, though he paid tribute to King and the Civil
Rights generation, he was not one of them.
Women’s Liberation
While Civil Rights and the New Left, especially SNCC and SDS, constituted
the most visible movements of the early to mid-1960s, by the end of the
decade they would be attacked by the power elite and divided from within.
As the general sense of frustration and anger grew, however, another issue
would emerge to challenge and transform American life, namely Women’s
Liberation. “Women’s Lib” had little formal organization, no elected leaders or
membership dues, no group requirements. The 1960s Women’s Movement
mostly consisted of thousands of local groups and individual women, con-
nected by word-of-mouth and newsletters. Declaring that “the personal is
political,” Women’s Lib followers spoke to a large range of issues, both public
and private, such as job and pay discrimination, educational access, health care,